Indoor Wood boiler questions

[mystang89]

I'm in the market for a home. The home will probably be older (70's or older) and may not have a fireplace, tradition or other. I have however heated my current home with a buck stove for the past 10 years and have grown to love the heat from a fire.

So this brings me to my current dilemma. I may be forced into buying a house that doesn't have a fireplace and if that's the case I know I'm going to need to buy one. I could always buy a regular fireplace and put a stove pipe up and call it good but I was thinking also about a boiler system indoors. I like the prospect of not having to stock it as often, heating my water with it throughout the winter month and not loosing as much heat as I would with a conventional fireplace.

I don't know how much these cost in order to buy the whole system and have it installed in a preexisting home. Does anyone have a ball park figure. I really wasn't wanting to hit more than 10k as I have a difficult time seeing the payoff there vs a convention fireplace which I'm fairly certain, though not positive, that I could get for much cheaper.

I was also curious about the amount of maintenance required for the boilers. With the conventional I know to clean the chimney and the fireplace box and I'm good to go. With a boiler I know it has many more parts than a regular fireplace which means more places for something to go wrong.

Does the boiler actually heat the water up for the house and does the boiler heat up an entire house, upstairs and downstairs? If so, hows that's work? I know for my current set up that I need a fireplace for both the upstairs and the downstairs in order for the entire house to be comfortable during the winter months.

If the electricity goes out and I don't have a back up will the water still be heated and the house still be heated or does it need some sort of electricity. Again, with mine, even if the power goes out I will still have a decent amount of heat due to a heat powered stove fan that sits on top of it.

Thanks for reading and helping.

 

[maple1]

You should do a bunch of reading. Your questions are kinda too broad & general to give decent answers too.

Most of what you asked will depend on exactly what is in the house now for an existing heating system, and the layouts of that system & chimney situation & space where a boiler could go.

Conventional fireplace would likely be the last thing I would consider - those things are almost negative efficiency.

 

[NateB]

From everything you are asking, I would say an indoor wood boiler is not for you. 10 k as the upper limit and having someone install it for you is not possible. Yes there would be more maintenance. After you have more information on the house bring it back here and you will get better answers. Wood boilers are great, if your only options are oil, propane, or wood, you but if you can get NG... narrow down the house search and come back.

 

[Highbeam]

Install a freestanding stove with a class A chimney for heat and a water heater to heat water. You mention wanting longer times between reloads and I agree that that is a huge factor for people who actually heat 100% with wood, so I replaced my noncat stove with a catalytic model that runs 30 hours between reloads, so once per day. Easy.

You use the word fireplace a lot and I am not sure if you understand that fireplace is a masonry, open, wasteful firepit type thing without sealed doors or reburn technology. You know, the big brick thing from a hundred years ago. Don't build a masonry fireplace at all. There is no benefit. Just go with a class A pipe system and decorate the interior wall around the stove with whatever stone veneer you like the look of.

Boiler systems are extremely expensive. Retrofitting the boiler and the required large storage tanks into an existing home is really expensive. Adding a distribution system for hot water heat can be every expensive too. If you already have hot water heat in the house it gets cheaper, if you already have ducts it can be cheaper too.

My shop has a full hot water radiant tube system installed underslab that sits unused because it is SO cheap to simply burn wood in a stove.

 

[muncybob]

As mentioned, your needs will be dictated by the home you decide upon. For us we replaced an old inefficient oil boiler with a wood/oil boiler. The plumbing was already there so with some changes made(slight re-plumb, install SS chimney liner and added electric water heater for off season) we replaced boilers. It seems your maintenance will depend on what boiler you get. For us, we clean out the ash pan and tubes weekly(about 15 min. job) and I clean the chimney(1 hour job) twice per heating season just to be safe. Other than that there is the annual cleaning of the heat exchanger area(about 1.5 hours).

We don't use storage tanks but if I had the room it would be something to have done. I doubt you could do boiler install and tanks for $10k unless you went used.