Wood burning stoves with back boiler

[Jilly]

Hi, just musing, but we have a lot of free wood, so I have to look into this, even though I've got asthma....

 

Any experience of wood burning stoves with back boilers (and even an oven too) that are up to the modern regs?

 

I have a feeling we are going to have sufficient solar gain to hardly need anything except winter heat. I'm not sure how I could prove that on SAP calculations and satisfy Building Control. 

[the_r_sole]

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Edited September 26, 2019 by the_r_sole

[bassanclan]

If you are in a smoke free area then there are not many available that meet the regs.

The stoves that meet the regs are £1800+ and there is the cost of integrating with your hot water system to consider as well which will be expensive- I would say it doubles the cost of the job vs a dry stove, so you've got to have a good supply of wood and be planning to live there for a while to male it worth while.

You can add a boiler to many stoves, but then the stove in 99% of cases will no longer meet the regulations.

 

I have a Dunsley Yorkshire with back boiler linked to open vented hot water cylinder via an H2 panel. I've fitted the same in another house to a thermal store.

[recoveringbuilder]

We were originally going to have a wood burner with back boiler and connected to a thermal store however just around the time we were due to make the decision the government announced they wanted to do away with wood burners so we decided against it and went with the insert pellet stove .

[Jeremy Harris]

Also worth noting that a wood burning stove has harmful emissions (mainly toxic fine particulates) that are around 1000 times higher than the exhaust from a small petrol car, or roughly 100 times higher than those from a small diesel car. 

 

In terms of the proportion of harmful pollutants emitted into the air in the UK, burning wood is slightly less than all UK road transport and the second highest  contributor to air pollution (17% from wood burning, 18% from all UK road vehicles, apparently)

[PeterW]

Few options :

 

At the top end of the market is this sort of thing 

 

https://www.ecorangecooker.co.uk/wood-fired-2-oven-boiler-cooker/wood-fired-2-oven-boiler-cooker-technical-summary/

 

Medium range is this sort 

 

http://www.pipinghotstoves.com/index.php/wood-cookers-boiler/lincar-ilaria-wood-burning-cooker.html

 

Other options are ones such as this

 

https://www.modernstoves.co.uk/condor-multi-fuel-range-cooker-with-back-boiler.html

 

As @JSHarris says, they aren’t the best environmentally but stoves are much better than open fires..!

 

 

 

 

[bassanclan]

The RHI on gasification boilers makes them worth looking at. Unfortunately we didn't have room for one.

[Carrerahill]

1 hour ago, Christine Walker said:

We were originally going to have a wood burner with back boiler and connected to a thermal store however just around the time we were due to make the decision the government announced they wanted to do away with wood burners so we decided against it and went with the insert pellet stove .

The government aren't doing away with them, they are just tightening controls, eventually, as with gas boilers, diesels etc. these things will all be phased out in most areas - provisions for remote areas may allow for a relaxation of controls. 

 

Even if they ceased to sell such appliances they would almost certainly allow the reduction in wood burning appliances simply to reduce over time through appliances reaching the end of there life and not being replaced etc. It would also be very difficult to police.

 

I think that they should simply control the sale of wood fuel. If you cannot run your wood stove on locally gathered wood that you arrange and process yourself then having a stove is not really worthwhile in my opinion. Limiting what people can buy from B&Q or the petrol station would essentially control WBS use. Also an outright ban on the sale of any unseasoned timber would help vastly. Asda had bags of green pine for sale, I had a look at it out of interest and wondered how many stove novices would buy it and chuck it on their stove that night. It said in small print on the bag that this wood was unseasoned and it would require to be seasoned.

 

If only well seasoned hardwoods and smokeless fuel was available that would solve a lot of issues. I think there are many many stoves that were bought as a piece of furniture for the living room and get used on a Sunday night or Christmas day - yet the ONS decided to use the number of stoves that have been sold and multiply that by "average" burning hours which were frankly ridiculous and came up with these preposterous emissions figures. 

 

I know a lot of people with WBS's which just don't use them - they wouldn't even know which end of an axe to hold and have no clue how to, or indeed incentive to, sort themselves out with firewood - I think they buy some wood for special occasions and that is it. Fine, leave them to it, that is a nice thing.

 

What about BBQ's/Firepits in the summer? It is probably fair to say a lot of BBQ's and fire-pits smoke away during the summer - more people BBQ and use fire-pits than run WBS's and the burn time is probably comparable for the majority of WBS owners as many do not have access to unlimited amounts of firewood therefor it is just an evening event and probably only weekends at that. 

 

Ban all the plastic tat they sell for parties, or stupid little solar rechargeable garden lights that last a season and end up in the bin, what an environmental disaster these things are, think of all these little cells now rotting away in landfills. People jump onto the things that are easy to jump at, like WBS and diesels, but look at the utter rubbish people buy for an event and bin the next day. I saw a car air-freshener the other day that resembled a small Pringles type tin with a grille on the top that the fragrance emanated from - I looked at this tray full of them and thought what a total waste of resources, time and money. Ban crap like that. I bet people exist who buy this tat yet lambaste those of us with a diesel or a WBS as being environmental disasters. 

 

I might write a book!

 

 

[Carrerahill]

3 hours ago, Jilly said:

Hi, just musing, but we have a lot of free wood, so I have to look into this, even though I've got asthma....

 

Any experience of wood burning stoves with back boilers (and even an oven too) that are up to the modern regs?

 

I have a feeling we are going to have sufficient solar gain to hardly need anything except winter heat. I'm not sure how I could prove that on SAP calculations and satisfy Building Control. 

If you have endless seasoned wood and or a means to produce it and want to use it as a source of additional or maybe primary heat go for it.

 

Personally I would not use it as my sole means of heating, as when I go on holiday in the winter I can setup my gas boiler to take care of background heating and personally I did not go for a back boiler because it was going in my living room - I wanted all the heat in that room and didn't want the issues that back boiler stoves can cause (getting firebox up to good temp etc. due to water jacket cooing it things like this) I would consider a Bosky or Aga woodfired backboiler/oven but we have the means to heat the living space with a WBS and that suffices for us. My friend heats his house with a Bosky - he did have the oven version but eventually it was replaced with the heater/hob top version only. He lives on a farm so it was a no-brainer. Downside, however, is that it does his DHW too so he needs about a 45min burn in the morning to top up his 240litres of DHW - can make his kitchen a bit toasty in the summer, he does have 6Kw of electric plate heaters in the tanks too but he tended to chuck an arm-full of logs in and do it for free. Mind you - he also has a waste oil fuelled diesel generator that feeds directly into the tank heaters - also free.

 

So many pro's and con's that this really becomes a full conversation. 

[A_L]

4 hours ago, Jilly said:

I have a feeling we are going to have sufficient solar gain to hardly need anything except winter heat. I'm not sure how I could prove that on SAP calculations and satisfy Building Control. 

 

You do not have to. Just make sure you have a heating system capable of providing the design heat loss plus about 3kW for water heating.