Had an interesting afternoon trip to see some boilers on Friday. Not just any old boilers though. We went to see Solar Thermal in Chippenham, where they sell, along with solar thermal hot water systems, wood pellet boilers and stoves.
We're not in the market for a pellet stove as the Riva Cube woodburner is working a treat, especially during chilly May evenings now the mini-heatwave is over. But we are looking for a pellet fired boiler to allow us to heat the house using renewables. There are boilers available that can burn logs but these have to be loaded every day, making it labour intensive, and therefore less appealing. Pellets allow weekly filling if a small storage hopper is built in, and even less frequent filling where a bulk hopper is used.
So it was good to see a couple of boilers 'in the flesh' and talk through technical details with the guys at Solar Thermal. They sell Windhager boilers, very good Austrian bits of engineering which would be great to be able to use. However, with an installed cost in the range of a brand new small car I think they'll fall outside the budget, even with a £1500 grant. So we'll probably have to source a slightly lower spec' model, such as Janfire, but I don't want to go for something really basic that requires a load of maintenance. As with lots of things on the project, watch this space for more info on what we finally select - and details of whether it was worth it!
With fuel costs (Oil & gas) racing skyward at the moment it'll also be interesting to see if the relatively small market for domestic solid fuel (biomass) boilers takes off in the UK in the coming months/years.
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