Sustainable heating??

[Recyclist]

messagenews: [e-mail]...

Pellet boilers are not suitable for living areas - they are too noisy!

Thermal stores are a waste of time unless you are rich and can put a huge one in an outbuilding along with your log/pellet boiler.

If you want to install a solar thermal system, that actually works, is reliable, and will require a minimum of maintenance, then add 5k to whatever water storage system you decide upon. People will claim they DIY'd their own for less and that it works, but plenty also paid more for poor systems.

My heating is all wood, though my boiler/stove can take coal if necessary, and my dry stove/cooker could also (though it is not certified for coal). It is a faff, but I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy lighting fires, sharpening my axe and chainsaw, lugging large pieces of wood around, and splitting logs with my maul. This is just as well as wood is significantly more expensive than gas if you buy it.

A gas boiler is a no-brainer! If you have space for a hot water tank somewhere, and have decent water pressure in your area, then you will be amazed at the performance on an unvented cylinder. Otherwise go for a combi. Personally, I'd fit a tank if it is at all feasible.

If you have a flue (lining cost ~ 1.5k) or can fit a double walled stainless steel one (cost ~ quite a bit more) and a place for a dry stove (cost ~1k), and can afford delivered logs (cost ~ more per kWh than gas), then you can have a useful extra source of heating, which will also help keep your gas bill down!

T

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, it does not.:-(

If space heating a large area is what you want.

We use wood and it is cost effective in our open fires only because it means we can drop the whole house temp down, and heat as and when needed for comfort.

And we like the smell and the look.

Wood burning STOVES are very nice as room heaters, but I would never ever use a sold fuel CH boiler of any description. I grew up with them, and the last experience in the 70's of a coal burning blast furnace of a boiler, left me dirty, tired and irritable every time I wanted to be clean, relaxed and happy. You cannot ever expect to go away a day and come back to a warm house..

If I were to do it all again, I'd go for a heat pump for CH with appropriately sized pipes and radiators or UFH, Immersion heated water, bloody big tank mains pressure so could use off peak electricity and have enough for the day, preheated by the heat pump as we don't use much anyway, plus Id keep the oil aga we have as general 'living area' heating, and use wood stoves or open fires in more places., for 'occasional' rooms that are not in constant use.

Where we are, if the electric goes, so does the CH cos its pumped, but we can still cook on the aga and stay warm, and light fires in the bedroom..

Its not ideal, but we dont freeze..

The aga spits out 600-800W which is perfect from spring/autumn almost whole house heating.Its the winter months where peak requirements of ten times that are needed that cripples the bank account..

Cheers

[oldhenwife]

I would encourage you to do it. The'payback' is irrelevant, whatever replacement system you use will have a capital as well as a running cost. If you're concerned about more important issues go for solar and wood burning, especially if you have some access to 'free' timbers.

We installed a solar water heating system some years ago - Solartwin - we did it ourselves in January of that year, it cost about =A32,000 including piping and new cylinder. On the first day the mains water temperature rose from 4C to 30C. Before then we'd had a multi point water heater. Our gas bills dropped unbelievably - the meter reader's computer centre wouldn't accept the readings. We didn't do it on economical grounds but I reckon that it will indeed pay its capital costs in our lifetime - which could be short. Even when the sun isn't shining the mains water temperature is raised so that if we need water hotter than that in the tank (rarely) the gas boiler doesn't have to raise the temperature by as much.

A few months ago we replaced a gas fire (old and irreplaceablet Gas Miser for which there are no spares) in the dining room with a 'Yorkshire' wood burning stove. It cost about =A31,000 and we had to line and insulate the chimney. It's the only one allowed to be used in a smoke control area (we're in inner city Leeds, Yorkshire). So far we haven't lit it but we have at least two years' worth of logs which we've harvested from our own garden and those of friends and what we pick up from other locations. I reckon that the comfort of the new stove will far outweigh the ugly gas fire and that we shall save on the fuel. I hope to do the same in the sitting room ...

There are always know-alls who are antagonistic towards new systems and claim to prove their opinions by figures but those of us who have installed solar water heating and wood burning are happy. We have the experience. others don't.

Heat exchange systems are wonderful if you're starting from scratch - as a new-build - but inconvenient, disruptive, expensive et cetera in an established property.

It's up to you, I suggest that you ask suppliers for addresses of others who have used the systems you're thinking about and go to see them, ask for hard evidence of economy and opinion of comfort and satisfaction. We did.

Mary

[Dave Liquorice]

Small boiler, ours is 38kW and that can struggle to keep this place warm when the wind is up and the temperature down.

I'm surprised a 12kW boiler can burn that much oil. B-) We get through 4000l/year, so depending on the price anything from =A32000 down to =A31200 a year. And yes it is space heating that gobbles the oil up; more or less 25l/day in the winter and 25/lweek in the summer.

A bigger tank in the form a heat store/bank is on the cards to go with the wood burner and once that is in solar panels may as well be added.

I had toyed with the idea of a windmill and dumping any excess into the heatbank before selling to the grid. That was before I plotted estimated power generation v useage the other day. A fairly windy day with the 6kW unit producing full output for several hours did produce a significant surplus (>50kWHrs, about 2 1/2 days consumption) but since then (the 8th) it's been calm... The 2.5kW unit would struggle to meet our base load most of the time let alone generate a surplus to be dumped into the heat bank or sold.

[David]

messagenews: [e-mail]...

Agree, our school has a huge 250kw one, makes a racket, the caretaker was telling me he can't hear his phone, radio or anything when he's in the plant room, hopefully I'll be going to the plant room again so I'll get to hear it. Apart from that the boiler needs to be cleaned every week and the poor caretaker has to practically go inside the boiler, after that he get's breathing difficulties for the next two nights despite wearing proper masks etc, this cleaning task takes the best part of a day. Then the boiler creates a lot of dust in the room which gets into the pumps causing them to become very noisy and unreliable, there are cyclonic separators and various dust extraction equipment. A slight reduction in quality of fuel will result in huge clumps of ash sticking to the burner. Luckily there a 6 Hamworthy Wessex 200kw gas boilers to compliment the biomass boiler and these are sufficient to heat the school on their own, when the biomass boiler is working there are usually about 2-3 gas boilers on.

[The Natural Philosopher]

in really cold weather, it stays on continuously. The rated heatloss at

20c interior and -5C exterior is 10Kw. the mass of the flooring screed means that that carries us through the peaks BUT when its that cold, it is not possible to e.g. switch it off at night and expect it to be warm in the mornings.

Taking oil at around 5p/kilowatt hour, and maybe 7.5p in terms of useable output, that mens we are probably using an average of 8KW over the winter, day in and day out.

Actually I think exaggerated..at todays oil prices its more like 700 over the winter 3, and 700 for the rest of the year combined ..

So about 4.5 KW average. Thats sounds more like it, as teh duty cycle varies from 'that boiler has been on continously for two hoursm, and its just cut off for 25 minutes and now its on;' to 'the boiler seems to be on for 20 minutes and then off for 20 minutes'

We get

exactly. I think I worked out my average total power consumption was

3Kw. Varying from about 300-400W in summer, to 12Kw in winter.

The overwhelming cost is winter space heating.

Currently the cheapest way is oil (no gas) , and whatever free wood I can acquire. Wood is not a lot different to oil at the moment! But if I were doing it again, its fractionally cheaper to use a heatpump. More so as oil rises over $55 a barrel, which is the sort of breakeven point.

The lowest carbon way of heating it is definitely a heatpump and a nuclear power station. Fortunately there is one down the road ..

As I have said many times and oft, there are only two techniologies that really deliver a lower carbon foot[rint - nuclear power and heat pumps. Everything else is impractical expensive and unreliable.

[andrew]

I think you overstate this slightly but agree it's not the sort of noise you'd want in a living room and watch the telly. The fans aren't much different from a condensing boiler, the irritating bit is the auger motor. I have had one of the first we imported in the living room (temporarily) for 12 years now but only run it daytime if anyone in home, we expected the uptake to be by things like church halls and scout huts but had no success.

I stillservice a 500kW(t) wood chip boiler and rodding the 60 tubes once a fortnight takes about an hour, though I do about 10 and then move onto a lighter task for a bit, the other peripherals bring the total severvice up to 4 hours if I'm quick. As a precaution I do wear a mask but because the cleaning cycle sets the id fan running very little gets into the room, most gets caught in the extraction system cyclone.

Dust can be a problem but it's not something I have found with big installations, far worse is with my Jotul in this room and that's ash dust created when I load or de ash it, commercial systems are generally sealed ash extraction.

Dust from a comminuting machine at a large retail store where they ground up returns and incinerated them in a small ancillary boiler was far worse it filled the whole room and settled on all the equipment. I made a little demo of a candle with a puffer in a whisky bottle container to show the danger of a dust-air deflagration but they didn't believe me enough to even allow the demonstration.

Yes this is a perennial problem with poor wood fuel in general, contaminants like chalk will lower the fusing temperature of the ash and cause this slagging (clinker) not a problem with pellets made mechanically with pure sawdust but a big problem with these new mini pellet mills where some sort of ligno-sulphite ( a by product of paper making) is used as a binder.

Biomass boilers tend to be configured to run base load as they don't like being switched on and off and they have limited modulation, so in the absence of massive thermal inertia, they often run with gas or oil boilers. Mind I do think councils foisted woodburners on schools because it was an easy target for their green policies.

There have been a few changes recently in how the EA view wood burning and virgin wood has been removed from the waste incineration directive but they've become more restrictive on other wood, such as demolition waste, so treated (not creosoted) wood can now only go to recycling as particle board, land fill or a permitted incinerator ( think gate fee of GBP60/tonne). This is because of the risk from flue discharges of lead (from old paint) and other heavy metals from things like cca treated building timbers. OTOH there is no restriction of burning these at home.

AJH

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Gordon Henderson saying something like:

It's no use trying to talk sense to him about diy solar - I would 't be at all suprised if he's in the pay of BNFL to promote nuke power and he certainly has a severe wasp up his arse every time someone mentions solar. Funny, last time I pointed out this was a diy group and I was diy-ing solar, he shut up. Glad to see someone else doing it and putting the nay-sayers' gas at a peep.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember NT saying something like:

Christ, but that's pathetic. Where's your fire, man? Get in there and promote nukes, or coal-burners or some other manky old technology that will make you money on your shares.

[Gordon Henderson]

Heh... Intersting to read the other comments while shutting up for the past few days... I find it intersting that no-one actually asked me what I think about it all, nor why I was doing it, but rather assumed I'd been conned by the greenies, or hype surrounding it all. Ah well.

All I'll say is that I'm a Geek, Engineer and Scientist in that order, and leave it at that.

Now, anyone replaced central heating system with a home-made controller based round e.g. Arduino? I've only recently realised how crude central heating systems really are regarding their controllers and choices made in them. Must have been a genious of a madman that invented the 3-port valve! MOMO valves would appear to be the way forward, but I guess 30 years ago were quite expensive...

And now to have a free hot bath, heated by the sun and by-product of the cooker. Spent the day with the chainsaw filling the wood store (we have

2 wood stoves, thinking of a 3rd)

Gordon

[The Natural Philosopher]

Someone asked on Any Questions 'what are you doing about climate change, personally'?

For anyones information, THIS is what I am doing about climate change, personally, telling the facts.

If solar hot water made the slightest sense economically in this country, or saved any significant fraction of CO2 emissions, I'd be for it, even if it was not completely and utterly misleadingly missold.

I am PISSED as hell because some smart talking salesman sold my father in law 2 grands worth of kit, on the promise it would save 'up to half his heating costs' (which run about £2500 a year) when the brochure itself and the figures it quoted showed it would save at most £150 a year, and moreiussu overhauling either.

I am PISSED as hell because it does NOT have an energy meter on it. Just a temperature gauge. He still thinks that because he is 'getting 70C' on the roof, it actually means something. It is a carefully crafted CON trick and he has been ripped off of savings that he really cannot afford to lose.

So yes I DO have a wasp up my ass.

Ad far as nuclear power goes, I am for it because my training as an engineer, my ability to actually do sums and also my time managing financial affairs for businesses show that it is actually the ONLY power generation technology of sufficiently low carbon cost, low actual cost, scalability and energy density to actually SOLVE the problem of the countries energsy needs without wrecking the planet completely.

All other technologies, apart from heat pumps, are simply incapable of supplyinmg more than a very small fraction, and in most cases, at vastly higher costs, and in the case of the so called renewables, at such low energy density that literally MILLIONS of square miles of the country would be needed to be completely covered with them in order to get anywhere near the output thats few nuclear sets could give.

I didn't write it, but I was instrumental in getting it published, because it is the first book that actuality tells the facts:-

Do yourself a favour, in your smug self righteous selfishness, that you have stuck two radiators on your roof and saved yourself £50 a year, and actually start taking an interest in the real issue: whether or not you or your descendants will be alive in 50 years time.

The FACTS say that without massive nuclear power, you or they will *not* be.

[David]

What does the auger motor do?

All I've heard from outside so far is a noise that starts of really loud and goes quieter and quieter and more low pitched then it goes away.

What model is the one you service?

The one my school has is a Herz Austrian made one.

This is a 1.45MW heating plant, I believe the installation is a total c*ck-up and there are many companies involved which is why there is a big dust problem. Apparently the design of the hopper (4 tonnes I think) causes the dust, normally fuel would be in another room but in this installation the hopper is directly above the boiler

Yes this one provides the heating base load and and hot water in summer. All the new schools here seem to be getting a Biomass system.

All very interesting.

[Dave Liquorice]

And I see the author is just about to take up a government post as an advisor in the Department of Energy. I just hope he has the guts and strength of will to kick the politicians into actually doing something that will produce real results instead of just pandering to the media and lining their own nests.

And I suspect Miliband may well regret making this statement "There's no danger of power cuts in the next decade."

[David Hansen]

On Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:56:30 +0000 (UTC) someone who may be Gordon Henderson wrote this:-

It is the nay-sayers' loss, you have the hot water no matter how loudly they shout. The sad thing is that the nay-sayers might influence some people.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well if you hadn't spent the money on it, you would still have the money, no matter what the greenycons shout.

The dangerous thing is that the greenycons DO influence a LOT of people.

It wouldn't be so bad if

(a) the world could afford it (b) it actually solved the CO2 problem

Not only does it do neither, it also prevents attention being directed at real solutions.

Greenpeace are, by and large, traitors to the human race.

[andrew]

It delivers the pellets to the fire pot by screwing them up a ramp from which they drop into the fire. On mine it rotsates the screw 1/4 turn and stops, the mark space ratio is what modulates the rate of feed. So it makes an annoying regular on off hum.

This sounds more like the id fan being started flat out and then slowing down as the feedback mechanisms come into play.

Kob which is also Austrian

I'm amazed that a boiler this large would have such an arrangement, the

1MW(t) one I used to service and snag was 2.5m tall freestanding with a 40 tonne store adjacent.

I would have expected two boilers in this situation and wouldn't have thought the DHW load was sufficient to justify keeping such a large boiler online for. Mind I do also help out with a solar heated system with a

25kW(t) pellet boiler where the pellet boiler runs flat out year round because the cut in thermostat for the boiler has been placed too far down the thermal store so the system wakes up in the morning at a higher temperature than the sun can deliver with little demand till evening when the sun goes down. I think my mate must be on commission for the pellets ;-) AJH

[Doctor Drivel]

Look at current thread: Recommendations for a decent boiler with external temperature control?

And look at this, A DIYer did a SS pressurised heat bank. Worth looking....piccies too.

was guided through on the forum. His comments on its performance is worth noting. Some aspects I would have done differently, but an excellent job from his angle.

Get back to me for Qs.

[David]

Perhaps I might be wrong, I'll ask the caretaker next time I get to see talk to him.

The plant room is smaller than most and everything is crammed in and not so easy to access.

;-) Interesting.