Been looking through the archives trying to find the answer but couldn’t.
My house is a 2 story colonial + basement in MA. We’ve got force hot water baseboard heat by an oil fired boiler. The chimney is brick attached to the outside of the house. 2 flues -one for the boiler, one for the fireplace. No a/c (meaning no ducts running through the house… yet).
~1700 sqft total.
What’s the best way to add a wood heating system to the house to either supplement or replace the oil heat? We are mid renovation of the whole house and I don’t want to lock myself out of something.
Replies
Wood-fired boiler, inside or outside.
PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
Wood burning fireplace insert for the fireplace - but I am assuming that you have a masonry fireplace.
Other than that, the exterior wood boirer to tie into you existing distributiuon system. The latter is more expensive, but the advantages include keeping the mess of bark, ashes, smoke fumes, etc out of the house and the size of the lumber these monsters can handle saves a lot of cutting and splitting
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Yes its a masonry fireplace. How much can I get out of a woodburning insert - just enough for one room or will it get the whole house warmed up, particularly upstairs? An outdoor boiler might be the ticket in the long run if the technology improves to the point we don't bother the neighbors. But we don't have a huge property and they might not like the smoke. Plus, our current boiler's only 10 years old or so (by previous owner).
Your curreent boiler stays online, and the wood one is installed as supplemental, running the system until it runs out of heat like sunday AM when you sleep in late, then the oil burner calls itself up.A wood insert can produce the btuis to heat your house, but circulation is the variable I can't answer. you will be warmer in that room and cooler in ones that are hard to circulate hot air into.
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I've heard you can really load them up and they'll burn for ages. Any idea how long 'ages' is? that would deal with the distribution issue.
Although I am still not fond of the idea of having to go out in -40F, 2' of snow to put a wheelbarrow's worth of wood in the darn thing. ;)
jt8
"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. " --Theodore N. Vail
Edited 10/20/2005 12:55 pm by JohnT8
I've heard you can really load them up and they'll burn for ages. Any idea how long 'ages' is? "
John,
The 285,000BTU woodburner (forced air) in my workshop will run for about 2 days in minus 15F weather without refilling, assuming good hardwood. It heats a 600 sq/ft, R-30 insulated space, and is fully thermostatically controlled. Just load it up, set the thermostat on the wall, and forget it.
WSJ
Yer choking it down too much. Be sure to clean the flue regularly.
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"Yer choking it down too much. Be sure to clean the flue regularly."
Piff,
There may be some truth to that, but it does have an automatic thermostatically controlled electric damper. The furnace is WAY oversized for my shop so that might have something to do with it, but the fact of the matter is, dry hardwood burns WAY better than any kind of softwood, though cottonwood, willow, and box elder (technically hardwoods) are the worst, and are softer than pine.
When I burn maple, oak, ash, or mahogany it works great.
Oh, and BTW the flue is extremely clean even though I haven't cleaned it (the liner, not the clean out pit) in 10 years.Every now and then I will make a 600F fire (per the flue mounted pyrometer) to burn out any creosote.
Jon
It's the choice of clean dry hardwoods that is keeping you clean, along with the occasionall hot flame up
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If you slow them right down by cutting off the O2 supply, they can smolder for up to three days with a hot coal or two left, but that is not heating your home with sufficient BTUs and it is allowing the chimney to run cool so t6hat you get a lot of creosote buildup. The tars condense at around 425°F so a warm chimney is far less likely to see creosote and chimeny fires.A good efficient burn will need to be replenished every 6-8 hours. When somebody says that they have one that will burn AND heat the house for 24 hours, they have one that is too big for the volumne and the insulation shielding it.Circulating the heat is done with fans and natural convection. Mine is in my basement. I have about 1000 feete on each floor. The heat rises with natural convection cuyrrents and the center chimney radiates heat out. On really cold days, the temps are uneven - feeling colder near windows on the perimeter then near the chimney and stairwell in the center. Fans can help too. The hardest convection heat from a wood burner is in a ranch house with the stove in a living room in the south end and the bedrooms in the north end.
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A good efficient burn will need to be replenished every 6-8 hours. When somebody says that they have one that will burn AND heat the house for 24 hours, they have one that is too big for the volumne and the insulation shielding it.
That would be a deal breaker for me. With a standard wood stove, I can stock up the wood for multiple days next to the stove, and then have additional supply on a porch or in a garage (ie cool area but not cold), so I probably wouldn't have to make a fridgid run in the cold due to the heating but maybe once or twice a week.
Of course with the trade off that the heat is harder to distribute unless you have an open floor plan.
jt8
"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. " --Theodore N. Vail
It doesn't mean you have to run the fire round the clock to achieve considerable savings. We set our thermostat at about 62° and start a fire in the early PM, and fill it again before gointg to bed. Mornings we arre usually in a hurry to exit unless DW is home that day, so heat energy coasts through the day with the boiler keeping it from getting too cold, then wood takes over again in PM
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Many things to consider and I think that you will get some better answers than this. That being said, I plan on putting a wood burning stove in the basement and cutting vents in the ceiling to let the hot air get to the rooms above. No intentions to use any kind of fans in order to keep costs down.
I was kind of thinking along these lines - I like the idea of having the heat generation in the basement, but the ducting is the issue.Do you know if a woodburning stove can use the same ducting as a central a/c which we'd be putting in sooner or later?
I don't know if a woodstove can utilize the ductwork, not my area of knowledge. My thought is simpley cut a nice hole in the floor above the basement, put a cover like one used for central air over it and let the heat just foat up through it.
ChrisG1 and BobS,
What Chris describes is what I did in an 2 story, 1,300 sq. ft. Victorian remodel a long time ago in Durango, Colorado. I installed an air tight wood stove in the living room and ran pipe up a flue that was already in the corner, living room wall. All the upstairs rooms also aready had ornate, metal air registers, that when you opened them fully, it plenty warm on the second floor areas. Remodel was a total gut, and I insulated the structure and sealed it up tight. I ran a duct under the stairs from the living room to the front "parlor room" and installed a miniature, silent "movie theater" type fan to draw air into that area. Like someone else said, a wood stove or fireplace insert will depend on your floor plan, and if it's closed, unlike mine was, you would need to plan for moving the heat to other areas, whether passively, with efficient, sealed fans or both. I burned both coal and wood in the stove but was single without too much concern for immaculate house cleaning. Some degree of particulate settlement is inevitable with a wood stove. Zbalk
That being said, I plan on putting a wood burning stove in the basement and cutting vents in the ceiling to let the hot air get to the rooms above. No intentions to use any kind of fans in order to keep costs down.
Chris, I don't know your floorplan, but I've been in 3 or 4 houses where they've rigged something similar, and they all tended to suffer from the same thing: The basement would be 85F, the first floor 65F, and the second floor 55F (I'm estimating here). Even the old farmhouse I grew up in, Dad had cut a vent in the floor above the first floor woodstove.. plus the staircase was open... But we'd have to burn that setup for hours before the upstairs gained enough heat to be comfortable.
Maybe you could come up with some type of natural circulation setup (which is what gravity furnaces do) to get the job done. You can look up info on gravity furnaces online, but keep in mind the SIZE of their ducts to get enough of that natural air circulation. The reason that 'modern' furnace ducts are so small is because of the forced air.
jt8
"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. " --Theodore N. Vail
Sounds like some reasonable concerns. I think some well placed, efficient fans will help.
Let us know how it goes. If you're happy with your setup, give us the rundown on how you did it. A bit of electricity for a couple fans is typically MUCH better than burning a pipeline of therms of nat. gas.
jt8
"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. " --Theodore N. Vail
Bob, I'd just make use of the fireplace flue to put a wood stove in. If its just brick, I'd go ahead and run a stainless steel stovepipe down the flue. You then mount a blocker plate/adapter to block off the chimney flue and attach the SS stovepipe to.
And then put the wood stove in and run its pipe to the blocker plate. I attached a pic I'd gotten off a website somewhere (don't rememeber where), and a pic from Jotul's website.
A good sized wood stove can put out enough heat to heat up a 1700sqft home. Just a matter of if you can get the heat to where you want it (if you're floorplan is all closed up, it will be harder to distrubute the heat).
jt8
"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. " --Theodore N. Vail
John, how would you suggest someone seeking a wood-stove like in the pictures you posted with use with a drop-in gas/wood fireplace? Other than the brick-looking inside of the drop-in combination gas/wood fireplace unit, there is no brick for this fireplace. The flue, I am almost positive, is all metal and climbs 20' or more into the sky.
The room that I would love to retrofit with a wood stove is 16'W by 18' long and one side of its length has a flat ceiling going up 18' and the other half is tapered but begins at about 13'6"-14' going up to the 18' level. I've never used the drop-in gas/wood fireplace that came with the (new construction) house, but I am curious about the tie-in between the wood stove's metal flue and the existing metal flue of the fireplace.
I was wondering if a person used a wood-burning stove or fireplace and an oil fired boiler if they could run some of the return piping for the boiler near the wood stove and pick up heat that way? May be more trouble than it's worth? You could almost have a sort of heat exchanger (like a car radiator) behind the wood burner with the boiler water going through that.
Several wood stoves could once be purchased with water jackets for that
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One of my many projects is to rip out the fireplace installed by my wife's ex-. I have little faith in it (wonder if he installed it correctly so house doesn't burn down, etc.). The older it gets, the more worried I get. Chimney sweep said someone rolled the ice and water shield over the chimney edge and down into the chimney, so that's not good, plus the chimney is not centered in its housing and may be too close to the frame at the top.
Already have animals living in the walls where he installed it and apparently left holes that I can't find, but the squirrels, birds and bats seem to find easily! So this got me thinking again about tying our FHW heat into an efficient wood burning stove. I am also going to do something to insulate the north wall (which contains the fireplace) better. Can't totally dismantle it because it had asbestos in the siding and that's been covered with vinyl.
If you get a clean burning, EPA certified wood stove, 'most' of what goes up the pipe is water vapor (carbon monoxide, dioxide, etc). As some of the wood stove threads hereabouts show ya, there is no shortage of companies out there that make good quality stoves that can put out a lot of heat.
how would you suggest someone seeking a wood-stove like in the pictures you posted with use with a drop-in gas/wood fireplace? Other than the brick-looking inside of the drop-in combination gas/wood fireplace unit, there is no brick for this fireplace. The flue, I am almost positive, is all metal and climbs 20' or more into the sky.
If its currently a gas fireplace, I'd go ahead and pull the gas lines out of the area if you're thinking of sticking in a wood burning stove. There are also gas burning stoves, so if all you're after is ambiance, you could hook it up to that gas line. But I'm usually looking for heat that isn't going to raise my nat.gas bill, so I like the more-labor-required wood stove.
There are a lot of 'funny' drop-in fireplaces nowadays. I don't think they all have the same venting requirements that a wood stove would...shoot, some are even ventless. So on the venting, I'd probably go ahead and bring a sweep in just to make sure that it will work for a wood stove. That is money well spent. I call it, "peace of mind" money. But if that vent pipe is double-walled and it meets the firecodes, it could very well be that your sweep will OK a wood stove using the same pipe. He may also be able to put the blocker plate in for you (depending on the fireplace... you might not even need a blocker plate, you might just be able to connect to the vent pipe directly.
After you've decided the venting is good, try to figure out what the wall is composed of. If the brickwork is only 'skin' deep, you might end up wanting to put the wood stove a bit further into the room (instead of sitting within the fireplace).
The wood stove in that Jotul pic is hooked up to a heavy masonry chimney, so they have no problem sticking it right in the fireplace. But if your brickwork is basically a veneer with drywall/wood underneath, then I'd respect the manufacturer's clearance requirements and put the stove in front of the fireplace.
They also sell shields that can be mounted on the back which would reduce the clearances.
The customer service folks at the soapstone stove company are usually pretty good to talk with. You can give them a call too.
http://www.woodstove.com/
1-800-866-4344
jt8
"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. " --Theodore N. Vail
John, being that it is a combination drop-in fireplace, is it really necessary to remove the gas line and burner? Not trying to play stupid, but I really am use to the good ole monolithic mason-style fireplace in homes older than myself (40). I am not use to these modern drop-in fireplaces, let alone know what they mean by combination.
I had thought about buying some gas logs. Why this drop-in unit came with a log-holder and burner is beyond me without the fake logs. And the installed burner covers 2/3 the fireplace width starting from the right-side. Its so cheesy looking that its not worth using.
I agree about doing anything to raise the NG bill. Last season NG usage in my home for humble use was $250-300 for a single month, and is expected to go up by 56.2%, probably on wholesale value (meaning even more on retail pricing).
I just put in a outdoor wood fired boiler with a forced air hot water system.. These systems can be adapted to any type of heating system though including hot water baseboard. I also hooked it up to my hot water heater. I have had it runnig for about a week and can tell you it is great. The boiler sits about 60 feet from the house and I trenched in the pex lines about 36 inches below. They run into a bypass heater for the hot water and then into a duct coil for the furnace. I also have my a/c coil in the same duct. The nice thing about this system is that even if you don't have a central heating system you can hook it up to a seperate blower that could sit in any room in the house and would basically blow hot air out. You would also have it wired to your thermostat. If you wanted to hook it up to your basboard heat you would plumb it in where it ties into your current boiler and just bypass it. In the future if you add forced air, you could slap in a duct coil and be good to go with they same system.
It would be real simple as this point if you have a basement to but a new heat pump furnace in, run ducts in the basement and another to the attic for the upstairs heat. Although not the best set up you could have the ducts for the second floor in the ceiling with the returns in wall by the floor. The heat pump will take care of your cooling as well as your mid season heating. Early fall and late spring when you may not want to fire up the furnace. I am planning on running my year round for the hot water.
chuck
Chuck,What brand of boiler did you buy? I just bought a used unit, 2 years old, from a guy that moved south. It's a Central Boiler, and pretty basic. I've heard mixed reviews about them but know a couple people with them that have had good luck.Bish
It from a company called freeheatmachine.com
Just type that in as the URL and it will come up. As you will see in many of the threads these are not EPA certified and many people complain about the smoke etc that these put off. I have noticed that they do put out some smoke but mostly when the blower first comes on or when I overload the furnace when adding wood. Just a side note on my system. I am using it with a forced air furnace. I have two zones in my house, upstairs and down. Even without the blower running the house will stay about 70 down and 75-80 up. This is just from the convection of the air moving through the duct work and over the coil. I don't think the upstairs damper has even opened since I put the unit in. Free heat, gotta love it.
chuck
Bob, depending on where you live you might have problems getting anything approved - if you are close to Boston check with your building deparment before you plan much further
Bob, I installed a wood-fired boiler several years ago. Mine was from Central Boiler. It works fine and you can tie in to your existing system but I have major objections with it. First it's very inefficient - no matter what the manufacturer says and it smokes like a WWII cruiser trying to hide from a U-boat. I've been screwing around with a secondary burn scheme and have had mixed results. For wood-fired boiler, if I were doing it again, I'd look seriously at H.S.Tarm. Their boilers are VERY efficient and burn all the smoke. Another simpler solution to your problem would be to but in a certified insert - like a Lopi. Very efficient and clean burning - or a Pellet stove. Then run a single small duct to the far end of the house and put a very small blower on it. That'll move the air around enough to heat your house - and yes a Lopi can heat your whole house. Good luck.
A lot of good options here. I think the wood boiler might not go over so well at this point in the neighborhood with all the spinsters here and certainly isn't in the budget. But I'll be careful not to do anything to lock myself out.THe fireplace insert or stove in the basement sounds like my speed for now and I can look at the boiler down the road. I have a goal that I'm not so sure is feasible, but I'd like energy independence by retirement. By that I mean no oil,gas and to a lesser extent no grid. Then again I'm still young so maybe it'll happen.Thanks for the advice, BTers.
Any idea how much these wood boilers go for, especially a Tarm?
I think I paid about $5K for the central boiler model. Seems to me the Tarm was about $8k but my memory ain't what it used to be - least I don't think it is.....don't remember. I'm pretty sure you could find the US dealer from a search engine.