Pellet stoves and boilers. What’s the state of play

[Timedout]

I have left these things well alone for a couple of reasons. I lived in a barn conversion for a short while on a small a district heating system that was fired by pellets. It was only any good when it was working and only if you could mentally block the hideous noise of the feed auger that occasionally went into self torture mode. The system failed frequently, and I do mean a lot.

 

Things move on though. What is the current experience of pellet fired stoves and pellet boilers? 
 

do they still exhibit unreliability? Do they all have feed augers that go wrong? Is the cleaning as frequent as I used to hear?

 

why do the simple stoves have such small hoppers? If it can only run a few hours what’s the point of programmers etc?

 

 

[Declan52]

They still have augers to get the pellets from the hopper to the burn box. Mine doesn't make any sound when it's feeding them in. They will jam up if the pellets get wet as they will expand and block the feed pipe to the burn box.

They do still need to be cleaned out each week, empty the ash tray etc.

Mine could run from full for approx 8 hrs till it's empty but that is going flat out all 8 hrs. I would get 3 days heating of my Central heating and dhw demands for a full hopper.

You need the programme so you can set it to come on in the morning. Mine will fire up at 6am and run till 9. First 2 hrs is to service the ufh needs. Next 30 mins to give the rads up stairs a blast and the last 30 mins to recharge the tank for the throughout the day. 

[recoveringbuilder]

We also have one however I’m afraid we can’t give it the good write up that @Declan52does. It’s been installed now for two years, we had an awful lot of problems with it to begin with mostly due to the installer not explaining how it worked to us but after we got over that it did start to perform better. In the two years it’s had a new auger fitted and a new igniter. We have never been able to program it and quite frankly the 3 hours that Declan burns his would not heat all our needs. If we let it do it’s own thing and the ufh is calling for heat (usually in the morning) it will burn for around 5 hours before it has heated up the heating and enough dhw in the tank.We tend to only put the radiators upstairs on for an hour or so morning and night. To do all this it is using around 30kg in a 24hour period.

We do get the RHI payment which helps a bit but it uses far more pellets than the installer told us it would. The other problem we have found with it is if you are going away, we had a weeks holiday this time last year and as we have dogs we get a dog sitter in, I had to write a list of instructions for her and even at that she still had to phone me ! So it does it’s job but not without a lot of input from you and I wouldn’t ever consider having another one.

[Declan52]

What power is yours rated to @recoveringbuilder???

Mine is a 22kw rated with around 15kw dedicated to just heating the water. The rest is blown out into the room which can be adjusted to suit your needs. 

They are no where near perfect but no heating system is. If I had to start again though I don't think I would go for this type of system again. At the time I made my choice the main reason was the vast lack of people in NI with any heat pump experience. But this has changed over the last 5 years for the better so would be much more confident in getting an ashp installed and commissioned correctly.

[recoveringbuilder]

Ours is an 18kw @Declan52 which I think may be the problem, the installer should maybe have put in a larger one , I do think that the cathedral ceilings in the main living area might have a lot to do with it as these rooms take a lot longer to heat up than the other rooms with normal ceilings, it’s here now but I think it might get an oil boiler at some point to give it a hand.

[jfb]

Why would you consider a pellet fired boiler over an ASHP?

[PeterW]

24 minutes ago, jfb said:

Why would you consider a pellet fired boiler over an ASHP?

RHI used to be better for pellets from memory. 

[Timedout]

I am also considering ASHP

I do not want to get in in RHI or Green Grants. MCS equals exploitative pricing.

 

I just want to harvest opinion and experience of pellet stoves and boilers

 

 

 

[jfb]

Fair enough. I thought that while it may be true that RHI payments are good for biomass the current wisdom is that burning wood perhaps shouldn't have been viewed so favourably (worse pollutant emissions and the failure to recognize the uses of wood that can actually lock in the carbon capture). Clearly electricity needs to be generated somehow but I'm not sure Drax is the solution.

Comparing ASHP and pellet boilers also does seem to point to much more hands on activity needed for pellet boilers and more space needed. Not that ASHPs can't have their own issues.

[Timedout]

I agree completely about the deleterious nature if burning wood. It’s another factor that should be weighed. Health considerations should have to banned. 
we will probably end up sticking with the old oil boiler until it stops running. I’d go for gas if there was any but the village is not on the grid. Lpg is somewhere between impossible and very expensive due to tank installation limitations.

 

Hesitations over ashp are to do with fabric energy efficiency. The building is in good order but poor insulation levels. It is not due a total refit by a long way.  Floor and cavity wall with no insulation. I think ashp will struggle. We could blow beads into the cavity but that will only make a minor improvement. I am not going to EWI.  Possible room by room IWI. I have done that before and it works much better than the EWI acolytes would have you believe. There is no chance of me breaking the floors out. 
 

hence a brief flirtation with the idea of pellet boilers. I have thought a bit more and read about the cleaning and maintenance. Now dismissed it as too risky.

 

 

 

 

 

[recoveringbuilder]

Just to add , we got up yesterday morning to discover the stove had failed. Both going out to work there was no time to do anything about it but I phoned the installer in the afternoon (it is still under warranty)

He went through a few things (fuses) to see if we could get it going but no luck., he promised to phone back later in the evening to tell us who and when we could expect to visit for repair, of course you know before I tell you that he didn’t do I got onto him first thing this morning before I was going to work, he said they had someone in this area that he would contact but I did say I was going to work and would need to know if they were coming. Came out of work in the afternoon to a text from my neighbor saying she had a card through the door from a heating engineer! Called him and he said he was in Edinburgh and would call us when he finished the job, hubby even said (as it’s the motherboard that appears to be wrong ) that if he hadn’t time to do the job tonight he would fit it himself if he could drop it off to us as we didn’t want to spend a weekend without heat, you guessed it, no call! This oil boiler is getting closer?

[newhome]

@recoveringbuilder that’s one of my concerns about changing to an ASHP TBH. All of the installers who have quoted bar 1 live some distance away. I have an electric boiler currently and when it broke down (was out of warranty) I had to wait 3 weeks in Nov to wait for someone to come out to fix it as not many people know how to service them. 
 

Out of interest why would you not fit an ASHP? 
 

[recoveringbuilder]

Well, he’s been here tonight! Arrived at 7pm and has replaced two different parts but it needs another which he doesn’t have ?

we weren’t convinced that we would get the heat we needed with an ashp, actually spoke to a couple of installers who didn’t think a lot of them!