Gasification Boiler Annual Wood Consumption

sootsucka said:

Piker, was the energy-mate a boiler or warm air furnace. I have a energy-mate boiler and wondering on how much wood consumption would go down with a gasser. Did you switch anything else when you went from one to the other

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As noted above, the Energy Mate was a forced air wood furnace that was tied into the old ductwork in the house. The system was by no means "proper," so it's only fair to say that part of our reduction in wood usage was due to the difference in delivery systems. I am not familiar with the Energy Mate boiler that you have, but it's probably fair to assume your usage would go down somewhere between 30 and 40% depending on what gasser you are looking at. That's just an educated guess based on what i have seen in other similar situations.

cheers

2600 well insulated square foot house in Alaska

Radiant heat, and DHW for a family of four took 9.5 cord of white birch

I would say about 10 cords is what we use , we fill a 20x10 carport full to the top and that gets us through one season October-march. We have a 3500 sqft home with a 3500 sq ft basement ( 7000 ) total.

I used to burn a lopi "fireplace extrodinare" with the same amount of wood waking up every 3-4 hours to feed it. It made a small ( very small) dent in our propane bill. The EKO 60 with 1500 gal stopped our propane bill ( except for hot water). We used to have 68 in the day and 62 at night. We are 70 all the time now. ( Oh, and I don't feed it until 6pm-10pm ) That first year I sat in the shop staring at the thing not believing that it was heating the whole house.

I'm much happier that my effort in fetching , cutting, spitting now saves me money 3500-4500 per year in propane. The lopi can go back to doing what it was meant to do. " Look pretty once in a while" Nothing against the lopi, I love that furnace but it was never intended to heat the home, the insanely growing price of propane made that happen.

We are insulating to cut down the load, 2 years ago we added 2 feet more blown-in insulation to get me above R50 ( probably way above in some places )

This year we finish insulation over the basement walls ( started last year). I'm hoping that will save quite a bit 20% would be nice.

All the math on converting firebox size to cord usage doesn't add up for me. I almost never stuff my firebox full. And even if I did, with the rounds and splits, there is lots of air spaces between the wood pieces. Maybe I'll try an actual calculation, but I bet the average wood load is not much over 50% of firebox cubic capacity. And this works really well.

I have weighed wood in the past to get some reasonably accurate data on wood used to btuh output. I also can get a pretty good MC read on the wood, should be close to 20%. This year I will do the same and the data will be much better, as my boiler only feeds storage, I can shut down system draw from storage, and the storage is well insulated (R-30). Heat loss from the boiler on its way to storage will be quite minimal I have 8 sensors on the storage tank and can data log tank btu gain over time compared to wood burned. Will do soon, as temps are starting to fall in northern MN.

The math works for me, and I almost always load my firebox full. My splits are fairly constant in size too. With only 500 gallons of storage, my tarm doesn't idle hardly at all. I do bring my tank up to aprox. 195*.
I try like heck to burn only one load per 24 hrs. When it gets real cold, I have to either burn two loads or use the Lopi woodstove too.

Installed an Econoburn 150 last fall. Burnt from Nov. thru March. 4000 sf well insulated house. Used 6.5 cords with no storage. I think I can do alot better this year. Learned alot last year about wood btu's, burn times, etc.

Apprx. 2000 sq ft, temps normally at 68 degrees in daytime, 70+ at night. Used around 4.5 cords for heat and dhw, 2 person household.
This was our first year so we had the learning curve to get through along with being unprepared with good dry wood(another learning curve! )...I would guess that 1/3 of the wood we burned was in the 25 to 30% on the MM. We also use a programmable thermostat and the recent addition(900 sq ft) to our old farm house is kept at 66 unless it's being used.
Hope to do better this year if the winter temps are the same as I now have good seasoned wood. I don't think we really had any severe cold snaps that we normally get so I would consider last years temps a bit on the mild side and of course this makes a huge difference!