UKC

Hi Folks,

I know this is a dreadful sign of creeping middle-age syndrome, but Mrs Janus and me are thinking about changing our oil fuelled central heating boiler for a wood / coal fuelled range cooker with back boiler, but have little idea about what is involved.

We're a bit apprehensive and have a few questions, so if anyone has any experience or knowledge it would be appreciated. We have a two storey house with two large rads and one small one on the ground floor, three medium rads and 2 heated towel rails on the upper floor.

Firstly, do we need a "check-up from the neck-up"? If not, then:

What are peoples experiences with this kind of system?

How well do they work for a central heating system?

What kind of energy / thermal power output is required (over all and for water heating)? Have checked some out on the net - over all seems to be around the 20-25kW mark, whilst power for the water around the 9 to 15kW mark.

Will we need a seperate pump to power the flow around the system?

Or just anything else we need to be aware of.

Many thanks in advance - Hugh.

In reply to Hugh J: I have a Rayburn Supreme running 6 cast iron school rads in a singe story cabin. Quite a bit of head scratching to get that working well but it does. My problem is lack of height for water tanks. It is a pumped heating system with a thermostat switching the pump on above 35c.
Hot water is OK although I do have the immersion heater running for an hour morning and night as I am not always feeding the fire.
Mostly burning seasoned ash but supplementing with coal if I know I will be away for a day. Always warm inside and the nice thing with the cast iron rads is they hold heat well.

Previous place I was in had a Rayburn Multifuel and that didn't stay in overnight nearly so well as the Supreme on wood

Wouldn't swap my Rayburn for anything!

In reply to Hugh J: Some things to add, how are you fixed for running a flue up from where your range would go? Where are the range and hot water cylinder in relation to each other? The hot water heats in a gravity feed loop so a nice easy pipe run means that will work well.
The solid fuel option is great if there is someone there to feed it, it can be a bit hit and miss if you are both out all day but choice of wood and supplementing with a bit of coal reduces the number of times you get back to an empty firebox.
House coal smokes *a lot* so I've been using Taybrite which makes plenty of gritty ash but is smokeless. Taybrite won't give you mini gas explosions either which a fresh bed of house coal can sometimes.
You need to be careful not to burn too much moisture laden wood, well seasoned logs will reduce the amount of creosote that you end up with in your flue and firebox. Running some coal through helps keep that down.
Flue needs regular sweeping to get best burn. I have a set of rods and a brush set aside for this. This needn't be too messy a job with the right setup.

Hope this helps

In reply to woolsack: Thanks for the info Woolsack. We're not gonna heat our hot water supply via the range, we have a seperate emersion tank for that, it's just for our central heating system. We have a flue from the oil fuelled burner that goes directly behind the wall where we want to place the range, so no problems there. Basically, what I need to know is what kind of "umph" I need to effectively run a central heating system and will I need a seperate pump to get the water around what is probably 30 or 40 metres of pipework.

In reply to Hugh J: Is your hot water an open vented type setup with an expansion tank in the loft or a closed pressurised system? If it is an open vented system you might as well get some 'free' heat from the range into the hot water tank if it isn't (geographically) loads of hassle to mate the two.
If you have an oil fired boiler you probably already have a suitable pumped system there already.
I'm not a plumber or a heating engineer but have installed my own system now twice so since no-one else has offered an info I thought I would.
You should be able to calculate how many BTU you need from the boiler, I think there are online calculators for this sort of thing

In reply to Hugh J:

Oil / fuel / gas burners run with much lower flue temperatures and do not put out so much corrosive stuff as wood or multifuel burners.

Do not assume that the flue that is in pace is suitable. If you don't know what to look for yourself then get a professional to check it.

Just so you know - a single skin alloy flue liner looks very similar to a double skin stainless steel liner, but whereas the former will be fine for a gas burner a woodburner could corrode its way though in less than a season.