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Autumn’s here … no, wait … as you were …
Amish Fireplace by Heat Surge Roll-n-Glow
March 12, 2010Counting the cost
September 14, 2010Autumn’s here … no, wait … as you were …
I love Septembers in Scotland. You can sit and look out of your window for an entire day and see things shifting and changing before your eyes. One minute it’s blowing a gale, the next it’s pouring with rain. A few minutes after that it’s doing both. Then the sun comes out and the hikers on the trail across the road are all stripping off their layers.
During early autumn, however, the sun poses a slight problem for me here in my home office (I say office … it used to be a small kitchen, these days it’s more of a corridor). The office is where my wood pellet stove lives. It sits right behind my desk on a large stone hearth once occupied by a Rayburn solid fuel range. Our stove is rated at 22 kilowatts (that’s about 75,000 BTU in old money). It distributes 17KW to our radiators and dumps the other five right behind me. It’s very snug in the winter (we call this room ‘the snug’ rather than ‘the office’, for that reason) but on a cold yet sunny autumn or spring day it can be like sitting in an oven.
Thankfully today was more sunny than rainy so the house, a former forestry worker’s cottage with thermally hopeless wooden walls, has stayed reasonably warm. The stove is sitting behind me, brooding with the word OFF in harsh, red letters on its LED screen. Tomorrow, however, could be a different matter.
- In case you hadn’t guessed, this is my first ever blog entry at woodpelletreviews.com. In future entries I’ll talk a bit more about my stove, the fuel we put in it and the challenges of running a biomass heating system in the UK, which lags some way behind continental Europe and the USA.
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3 Comments
Hi Andy
I have to admit I’ve never got that deep into the technicalities of litres per minute … however we are a family of five, with (I believe) typical water consumption and I have never had to switch on the electric immersion heater since the day the stove was installed, even in the dead of winter (yes, even the famously cold winter of 2009-2010).
The unit is an Extraflame Lucrezia Idro and has a water-heating capacity of about 17KW. It’s the largest they manufacture for placement inside your home – you can get far larger pellet boilers but you would tend to put them in an outbuilding due to size and noise.
As with gas boilers, I think it’s fair to say that whatever your home’s heat load, there is a pellet boiler rated to match.
The Energy Saving Trust (www.energysavingtrust.org.uk) has been compiling case studies for some time now and may be able to help you with any specific queries about capacities and ratings.
Chris hi, i was interested in your thread and am busy at the moment exploring the wood pellet scene. i dont have a boiler but am looking at having one fitted in the near future, (currently on oil) a constant issue that i am finding in my research is the cost of the pellets, as usual like anything in a small captive market prices can be exploited. I am seriously thinking about buying the machinery needed and setting up in the production of these pellets, i have access to oak shavings which are very old(200 yr) and so are therefore low in moisture content, also normal sawdust is available, a small fee to be paid to the mill, my motivation would not be huge profit, instead just a case of covering overheads initially with a view to helping others vget into this market, can i ask the following, do you run a domestic heating and hot water system from your boiler and if so does the boiler keep up with demand?? what if you were to for example run two baths and a sink all at the same time, what sort of litres/minute are you able to get, Thanks for your time, Andy c.
welcome!!! look forward to hearing about you and yours