$5000 year Justification?

[Cold-N-Dark]

Between My house, the farm House (dad's), shop, and a storage building we consume+leak= billed for 2905ccf natural gas/year for heat, hot water and cook stove @ $1.63/ccf= $4735 a year. $5000 to round it up.

3000ccf*102500btu/ccf=307,500,000btu

At 15 million btu/cord for hemlock (what I want to burn) that would take 20 full cords to make the 300mil btu

That is a stack of wood 8' high 16foot wide and 20foot deep and weighing in at What? 50,000pounds+ wet (just a guess on #'s).

I would need 300-400'of underground plumbing to hook 3of the 4 buildings together (I do have a backhoe) and cross one road, two phone lines (one mine, one the MaBell), at least one gas line if not three and one water line of mine (no public water).

I live in the snowbelt south of Buffalo New York and am a Vol.Firefighter. We get wide demands for heat and see a few chimney fires...not really more like 3am house in a pile melting the sideing off the house next door. I have lived with a wood stove in the past.

Rat I have to go.

Question IS IT WORTH IT? TO GO CENTRAL BOILER AND HEAT EVERY THING?

 

[Eric Johnson]

Welcome to the Boiler Room, Cold-N-Dark. Hopefully you'll be changing your screen name after hanging around here for awhile.

It's worth it over the long haul, for sure, especially considering that fossil fuel prices are going nowhere but up. If you go with a gasification boiler, you can cut your wood consumption in half, and do it without smoke (you get more heat by efficiently burning the smoke). A friend of mine from Arcade sells Blue Forge outdoor gasification boilers. Let me know if you want his phone number.

 

[Nofossil]

Pretty good summary. I'd make a few comments:

First of all, you'd have to evaluate the willingness of the various parties to share in the work of handling the wood and keeping the boiler fed. For an outdoor boiler, not so much fun in bad weather.

Second, the 15 million BTU/cord figure for hemlock represents about 70% system efficiency with well seasoned wood. That's a bit optimistic, even if the boiler you're looking at is a gasification unit. I'm not familiar with Central Boiler offerings, so I don't know how efficient they are. Typical outdoor wood boilers (non-gasification type) have system efficiencies more in the 20% range. Losses from buried lines can be a big factor as well.

You might want to look at a Garn - they're large boilers with integral storage, probably well suited to the scale of installation that you have. Not cheap, but efficient and self-contained.

 

[slowzuki]

5000$ a year, that is a serious cost, I can't imagine if you were on electric! If you are buying seasoned split wood though, I'm not sure you will save much money given the cost of the system. Is there any opportunity for insulation / heat loss reductions in the buildings? Replacment of an old boiler with a mod-con modern high efficiency?

You would still be consuming some gas and paying a service charge if you go to wood which really eats into the payback.

I'm a big fan of high efficiency wood heat but unless the wood supply is cheap and plentyful it can be hard to justify a switchover from natural gas on a $ basis.

 

[leaddog]

The chimmey fire isn't a problem with a gasification boiler, The running water lines of 300 to 400 ft is very doable. The work of gathering the wood and feeding the fire would I see to be the big factor. I can see a pay back of 5 to 6 years
Go to this site (broken link removed) and watch the movie. It shows what can be done and just one of the gasification boilers out there. There are other makes but the movie shows how you can heat out buildings very easy and with out a lot of work.
What you are asking is done alot over seas
Also You wouldn't even need to keep the natual gas as your heat, DHW, could be satified with wood year round. With other people being able to tend the fire you wouldn't need to keep a back up possiby.
leaddog

 

[MarcM]

The chimmey fire isn't a problem with a gasification boiler, The running water lines of 300 to 400 ft is very doable. The work of gathering the wood and feeding the fire would I see to be the big factor. I can see a pay back of 5 to 6 years
Go to this site (broken link removed) and watch the movie. It shows what can be done and just one of the gasification boilers out there. There are other makes but the movie shows how you can heat out buildings very easy and with out a lot of work.
What you are asking is done alot over seas
Also You wouldn't even need to keep the natual gas as your heat, DHW, could be satified with wood year round. With other people being able to tend the fire you wouldn't need to keep a back up possiby.
leaddog

I'd only add that chimney fires aren't a problem no matter what appliance you're using, as long as it is used correctly and the chimney is kept clean. Almost every chimney fire I've been to that extended into the house was an inexperienced, ill informed, or lazy wood burner and most of the time using unlined chimneys.

 

[Eric Johnson]

Some woodburning appliances (conventional indoor wood-fired boilers in particular) are creosote factories, regardless of how well you operate them or what fuel you use. Others, such as many gasifiers, don't produce any creosote at all. So it's not all down to the operator, though I agree that it's the operator's responsibility to find out what his equipment's characteristics are and deal with them.

 

[MarcM]

Some woodburning appliances (conventional indoor wood-fired boilers in particular) are creosote factories, regardless of how well you operate them or what fuel you use.

That's why I include this stipulation to my statement:

as long as it is used correctly and the chimney is kept clean.

 

[slowzuki]

I'll admit to being lazy, for whatever reason my new to me woodstove is a creosote monster compared to my oldie. It develops a 1/8-1/4" skim inside the chimney within days under some condition. Burning the same wood the previous unit would go all winter and the chimney wasn't bad at all. Anyways, this is just to show equipment matters too.

 

[Cold-N-Dark]

Good response guys. Part of the thing is that I know I will not cut gas to $0 as we cook and will use some for hot water from time to time as well as that fourth building I have no plans of intergrateing in the system.

Opertunity cost is a biggie. Being married to a burner is almost tabloid.
Every time I bring up the subject I see a passion that borders on all consumeing. I talked to the fellow ath the New York Farm Show selling WOOD GUN and he has tried almost every boiler you can think. I had a gas boiler for 20 years. Taylor owners I know have only kept them for a max of 7. I do not want my life to always be focused on the next thing with firewood as my grandfather was. Splitter then truck then new stove, wood shed constructon was a never ending project as was chimney cleaning, ash spreading, kindling, never mind saw sharpening and the whole dulling process.

I am intrested in Gassification except that it takes a waste wood out of use as nails and dirt will clog the refractory opening.

I have chewed on the idea for years of building a system. I think one of the more frequent posters has a Quote about control, and I would like to add creativity. I know I will need to get creative on storage. (Cells of oiled sand?) As I do not think that 1" line will move the Btu for peak demands. I have built and used, used engine oil burners for melting metal. I think with one change Corn/pellets/cheery pits/sprouted wheat/ wood chips/ Hemlock needles exc. could be burned. I am looking at a plan from deb-design.com as it would burn pallets (I have em) and space for dropping in and out one of my oil burners even if I can not get it to work with solid fuels. We have lots of lime (8.3 ph) water and an open system would end up useless in a few years. Pressureised systems and Gassification systems even in the smaller sizes I got prices in the $7-9K FOB Add a day with the FL70, install (need 3 zone pumps) three hot water heat exchangers for domestic, two air to air and a water to water for my baseboard hot water, lots of pipe in the ground and all that before useing any of all that wood. Yes I have seen Utilization #'s for hemlock of 11mil btu/ cord and that makes for 28 cord more or less for the three buildings. Thinking of a hoop building anyway should add space for a log truck to load logs once every few years and have a feller buncher come to the farm and stock pile the thinnings let dry and repeat every few years.

 

[slowzuki]

It sounds like you have access to wood and some tractors around? You may wish to look at a chip burner. They are a boiler that just feeds chips from a big hopper and burns em. Quite a few can be left alone for a long time. You burn green or dry chips in them. The fellow I talked to burned 11 cord a year in his using green aspen/poplar chips. It took him 3 hours to chip and blow the chips in from his neighbours chipper, using a pulp loader to feed it. He said he could just buy a truckload of chips if he didn't have so much poplar thinnings to get rid of.

This is an attractive system when handling large quantities of wood. A tractor loader or skidsteer can be handy or you just build a room for chips onto your boiler building/room.

 

[Mainewood]

Some woodburning appliances (conventional indoor wood-fired boilers in particular) are creosote factories, regardless of how well you operate them or what fuel you use. Others, such as many gasifiers, don't produce any creosote at all. So it's not all down to the operator, though I agree that it's the operator's responsibility to find out what his equipment's characteristics are and deal with them.

Gassifiers do produce creosote, however they will not deposit cresote into the chimney. Conventional wood boilers, when burned at hotter temps. will minimize creosote problems. I have 4 yrs. of experience heating with a conventional wood boiler and have no problems with excess creosote in the chimney. I clean my chimney once a year in the spring. More about creosote on this thread. https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/16002/

 

[Mainewood]

Some woodburning appliances (conventional indoor wood-fired boilers in particular) are creosote factories, regardless of how well you operate them or what fuel you use.

That's why I include this stipulation to my statement:

as long as it is used correctly and the chimney is kept clean.

check out this thread. https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/16002/

 

[chrisfallis]

Cold-N-Dark wrote: "I am interested in Gassification except that it takes a waste wood out of use as nails and dirt will clog the refractory opening."

I had a Tarm downdraft gassifier in my last house and burned all kinds of wood with embedded and cut off nails. The nails would drop down onto the firebox outlet but hardly ever stayed there long. They would quickly get red hot, soften, fold over and drop into the ash clean-out. I live in pine and aspen country, so I would have to cut up oak pallets if I wanted any hardwoods.