The boiler is almost here! We ordered it from the builders merchant a couple of days ago and it's just arrived in their local depot ready for delivery to the house next week.
We decided very early on in the project that we wanted to use renewables to heat the house, and as a ground source heat pump was ruled out due to problems with the slope (and cost!) a biomass boiler was the obvious choice.
Biomass boilers burn wood or other 'energy crops' (see http://www.nef.org.uk/aboutus/energycrops.htm) instead of oil, gas or coal, using a renewable product (after all it grows on trees!) instead of a hydrocarbon that has taken thousands of years to produce. This makes them a great low-carbon heat source.
There are a range of boilers available including some very hitech ones from Scandanavia, with suitably big price tags to go with all the whistles and bells. At the bottom of the price range are UK made boilers that look like they've been made by a few well meaning bearded men in oily boilersuits in a shed somewhere.
As for the wood fuel, some biomass boilers will burn everything from logs down to woodchip. As a result these are manually fed, making them fairly labour intensive. To automate the wood fuel the simplest solution is to use wood pellets, uniform pellets made from compressed woodchip. This allows the fuel to be stored in a hopper and then transferred to the boiler from a bulk storage hopper via a screw-conveyor or blower.
To make life relatively simple we've gone for a mid-range NuWay Ecoflex boiler with a small 400kg hopper. This 'should' provide us with enough fuel for a week mid-winter so we won't be making too many trips to the boilerhouse to refill it - I hope! With a high level of control the boiler will run much the same as a conventional gas or oil boiler - so there's no need for us to manually light it.
It will be very interesting to see how the boiler performs, especially as the nature of using a solid fuel means you can't switch the fuel supply off in the same way you can gas or oil, so controllability of the heating could be fun!
4 comments:
Hi, I found your blog after searching for reviews of the ecoflex pellet boilers. We've just had one suggested to us after much the same hunt as you (Austrian, British etc.) I hope you don't mind if I ask: Have you got yours running yet? How do you feel about it? Strangely we'll probably be getting our pellets from Monmouth as well, being based near Aberystwyth. Best of luck with your build, I'm sure it'll be lovely once finished. We're soon beginning work on a 1930s house.
Cheers!
Ben
Hi Ben. We've not quite got the boiler running yet but plumbing second fix is due very soon so hope to fire it up by the end of August. Also got the first lot of pellets on order from Treenergy. Rest assured I'll post news on how we got on with the boiler on the blog. All the best with your project!
I'm thinking of buying an ECOflex boiler, how are you getting on with yours ?
Cheers
Simon.
Simon
We're really pleased with the Ecoflex. It's now got us through two very cold winters and the only issues we had (for the first few months) were with pellet delivery. This was due to the feed tube from the auger sagging slightly resulting in pellets backing up. This hasn't been a problem for ages.
The standard hopper than comes with the boiler is okay if you're really short of space but we've had enough of filling it with 15kg bags of pellets every week or two so are about to invest in a larger silo.
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