Where do I start?

[waterflea]

I have a house, a barn and a cabinet shop all on the same property, each with it's own heating system. My thought is to install an indoor boiler in a separate building to heat all three places. The house is about 15 years old, well built and well insulated. I heat it with oil; radiant floors on the first floor and radiant baseboard on all other floors. The barn is oil fired hot air. The shop is propane; slab on grade with radiant floor heat. It cost me about $5000 to heat the house and barn last year and $3000 to heat the shop. This year my prebuy price for oil for the house and barn will be close to $10,000. Time to make a change. I have a 80 acre wood lot.
How do I begin to size a system for these three buildings?

 

[Eric Johnson]

Welcome to the Boiler Room, waterflea. Sounds to me like you're on the right track, considering the woodlot and your heating load.

You can download a free heatloss calculator here: http://www.heatinghelp.com

Sounds like your heating setup will be easy to adapt to a wood gasification boiler. The infloor radiant is especially suited to wood gasification. In addition to the boiler, you should consider adding hot water storage, if you decide to go with gasification. You'll really see some advantages with the radiant and a tank.

There are more than 1,500 threads here discussing all aspects of wood-fired boiler speccing, installing and operating, including a few stickies on some interesting topics.