Sizing a Woodgun

I have been doing a lot of research into wood boilers as I am hoping to make a purchase yet this year for this coming winter. It is quite a daunting task as there are so many on the market and everyone says they have the best. This website has been very educational for me and I appreciate the thoughtful and detailed information everyone takes time to provide.

Anyway, I am leaning towards a Wood Gun, and when I talked to a salesman he mentioned they have a 2009 model E-180 in stock and on sale and I could save a good bit of $. It sounds great, but I am concerned it might not be large enough at a reported 150K BTUs. He has adamant that it is of adequate size, and that you don’t want to oversize a gasification unit as it leads to inefficiencies. I want to believe him, but over the years I’ve learned sometimes salesman tell you what you want to hear.

I have a 3400sf timber frame home. It has really good insulation with the SIPS and high efficiency windows; however the great room has 32ft high ceilings so we are heating a lot of cubic feet. In addition, I plan to run a small heating unit in the garage and I want to make sure I have enough heating capacity in case we ever finish out about 1500sf in the basement. If anyone has experience with the Woodgun units, do you think the E-180 would be sufficient?

Any and all feedback is appreciated!

Thanks,
John

muncybob said:

I would think you need to do a proper heat loss calculation? The one on their website is crude but probably will put you in the ballpark. I'm at work right now but I know I have a decent calculator program at home that has been mentioned here(can't recall the name) and it used to be free download but I'm not sure if it's available anymore. PM me if you want to know what inputs are needed and I'll be sure to run your numbers. It's what I used before I bought our boiler.
I can tell you that in our 1/2 new and 1/2 very old house consisting of apprx. 2200 total square feet and located in a fairly windy setting that my E-100 is more than adequate to this point. We do run programmable thermostats and do keep the normally unused portions(game room, etc) fairly cool(64 or so).

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Thanks for the advice, in all the time I've spent on this I overlooked the obvious! The AHS website looks like a good place to start, it would be hard to provide good guestimate on my window area so i'll have to go home and measure (I'm at work too) to get better calculation, but at first blush from the AHS site and your info, it looks like the E-180 should suffice. I'll take you up on your offer to run my numbers...once i button them down I'll PM them to you.

JMG said:

I did my calculations on AHS website and came up with about 57,00 btu. Paid to have it done and the projected heat loss was 44,384 btu's. This was for 1879 sq ft. E-100 to go on line this winter. Just starting to install the staple up radiant heat panels (Joist Trak)

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Thanks, it sounds like AHS was fairly accurate, missing on the high side. Good luck with the installation. Have you had any surprises with the E-100 yet?

flyingcow said:

What are you heating with now? Oil?Gas? What's the BTU's of the unit you're using now?

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Another good point. I've been heating with propane. I'll have to look up how many gallons I used last year. Ask.com says there is about 92K of btu per gallon?