Outdoor wood boiler

[Jerry D]

I am looking into building a custom home on the farm and I am considering a wood boiler... two story house... probably 2000 sq ft per level and a shop about 3000 sq ft but only kept above freezing. The house will also have a propane furnace.

My questions are what brands would you recommend and what is the best methods to get the heat into the house?

My parents house is a large bungalow about 3000 sq ft on the main floor and dad uses a wood stove in the basement furnace room which is under the kitchen to help radiate the heat through the floor as well. The furnace room is accessible from the garage so getting multiple cords of wood in isn't hard and there's a nice area to pile the wood.
Pictures attached.

I like the conveince of the wood in the basement and being warm and dry and not needing shoes or winter clothing to load the fire every morning and night however I am also looking at getting more heat out of the wood. Dad's stove is smaller than I would like so the propane furnace does kick in often.

What would you do?

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[fordtruckin]

Not sure if this is something your talking about but I lived in a house with one of these central boilers. Did a wonderful job of warming the house and heating hot water. Could throw 4’ lengths in the burner and even had an auto start feature where it would start the fire using fuel oil.

https://centralboiler.com/?src=googl...SAAEgI_jPD_BwE

[CaberTosser]

I've been fascinated with some of the Austrian & German boilers I've been checking out on YouTube. The firewood ones are nice but would be best paired with some large storage tanks as thermal mass buffers so you don't have to stoke the thing constantly. The largely automatic operation of the wood chip boilers seems very cool. I love the concept of heating my place with wood chip that arborists are basically giving away for free, the shorter the drive to a dump point for them the better.


In Europe such boilers often have tax rebates and are considered 'carbon neutral' as the fuel is from a renewable source. All of the manufacturers linked below make chip, pellet and cordwood boilers. The first one is particularly neat as their blower system for moving the wood chip seems a bit more versatile if the location might not be ideal for other auger feed options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvRK0lC1UKk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ViG...0&index=2&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZn_tiVGQos

[Arty]

I'm sure there's lots of reasons where you are to use wood. But for mainline residential heating here I'd go with NG first if lines have already been placed relatively close by, or a big propane tank second if the price is within reason. Otherwise I'd go with coal due to price, availabililty and available handling automation. Everything trucked in. Definitely hydronic heating in the floor. Probably would have a heater-house and hopper some distance from the main residence to keep dust and smoke away, with heat carried underground in pipes.

I'd also build the face of a wood masonry stove/oven into an inside wall of the house, with a hallway between it and an outside wall. Rest of the heater more inside the main part of the house. The device is fed and ashed out from the hallway which has an outside door. Keep all the mess, bugs, and smell 'outside' in the hallway, but still weather-protected.

The efficiency and type of warming of the wood masonry heater is very attractive, no smoldering or constant stoking. That's a big deal for wood because it can be a lot of work and mess, as you know. http://www.mha-net.org/

Common basement wood heaters have a bad reputation for drawing air poorly, so I'd avoid putting one down there.

[2011laramie]

I wonder if insurance companies would still gouge a homeowner if they had a gasification wood boiler like they do for wood stoves.

15% insurance premium from my insurance company for a wood stove.

[Arty]

I believe a lot of municipalities in NAmerica, particularly the US, have banned the wood-fed outside heating furnaces as it was all causing too much smoke; through incomplete & slow burning. So a lot of people have gone to a slow controlled-burn wood 'gasification' system; which Germany actually had on the roofs of large vehicles like busses for internal combustion engines after the war due to shortage of liquid fuels.

The problem is that you now have to have a chipper, and fuel and maintenace for it, or buy wood pellets from somewhere, negating the cost savings of your own woodlot. And have to handle bags or truckloads of stuff using hoppers. So we're back to coal which is the same deal but with lots more heat per volume. Which is why everywhere went from wood to coal for energy in the 18th century.

[fred1]

You can do a search on Portage & Main outdoor boilers. I believe the company is out of Prince Albert. I saw a set up many years ago that had hot water piped to a heat exchange radiator attached to a forced air furnace. Boiler was built out of 1/4" steel plate. Underground hot water pipes were insulated.

[NCC]

I stoked my neighbor's boiler for a week while he was on vacation. I wouldn't do that much work for $10/day, and that's just loading the wood, not getting it out of the bush and bucking it up, and I've never had a $300/month gas bill.

[CaberTosser]

Originally Posted by NCC

I stoked my neighbor's boiler for a week while he was on vacation. I wouldn't do that much work for $10/day, and that's just loading the wood, not getting it out of the bush and bucking it up, and I've never had a $300/month gas bill.

A lot of work can be avoided by using better engineered boilers that burn hotter and cleaner while having more efficient heat exchangers. Some people will bubba up a system and not pay much attention to keeping it efficient because the fuel is 'free'. When the fuel is wood or perhaps an oil burner set up for used motor oil people might not think as much about efficiency but its still smart to consider optimizing things so that you don't have to collect, transport and store as much of the 'free' fuel. I inspected a system yesterday with a used oil burner going into a boiler, the Bubba factor was at a Jedi level but it can be sorted out. One glaring waste was that the boiler was a bare cast iron assembly with no insulation jacket whatsoever, lots of fuel was being burned unnecessarily just making the boiler room unnecessarily hot.

This falls into the theoretical daydream end of things, but given official permission from the City I'd like to build a boiler room using a bank of some of the Austrian wood chip boilers that I linked earlier. I'd install a bank of a few of them manifolded together because I'd like to build a small district energy plant and heat all of my neighbors places through insulated heating mains buried a few feet underground to provide both space heating and domestic hot water. If I could collect a monthly rate from 6-10 neighbors that would be a reasonable income supplement, of course granted that the up-front equipment costs would be significant, but the fuel would be free....... over time that would work out. Of course that would all depend on what kind of emissions numbers the things generate, but being approved throughout Europe one would think they're pretty stringent.

[huntinggr81]

I have been heating with a Portage & Main outdoor water furnace for 8 years now. I heat my house which is 4200 square feet main floor & basement, my wifes garage that is 750 square feet & my 2400 square foot shop. House is always toasty - something about that radiant heat. Keep shop & garage at 8-10 C all winter. You had better be prepared for the work involved if you decide to go this way. Last few winters have been spoiled burning ~ 13-14 cord, but this winter I will have burnt about 20 when it's all said & done. I usually burn dry tamarack mixed with green poplar, or straight unseasoned tamarack. Took me 3 winters to get my boiler running at the efficiency that I'm now happy with. It's a learning process. Have it down pretty well now & even when it's -30 to -40 only fill it twice in 24 hrs. Until this year I had no backup, but finally incorporated two suitcase size natural gas boilers into system - one in shop & one in house. Have to switch over manually, although pretty simple to do. My wife looks after it whenever I'm gone working, but she is an exceptional woman. I put it in & will continue using it as long as I physically can, but in hindsight I would have went with gas boilers right from the start. I wouldn't say I'm saving a bunch of money either, as I buy the tamarack by multiple log loads & cut the green poplar off my own place. 5 log truck loads of tamarack will have lasted me 7 years & it doesn't rot much at all left in piles.

[Big Grey Wolf]

Hunting has given a good overview of hydronic wood heater. If you have large shop along with large home the work to financial reward is worth it. Much like if you feed 2 horses might as well feed 10 almost same effort.
If natural gas goes above $10 a gig like in past worth it, at $3.00 just turn up the thermostat.