| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Clara |
Cost of installing woodburning central heating/water?OK so this is probably a "piece of string question" but if anyone has any experience then I´d love you to hazard a guess....The scenario is a 3 storey 4 bed terraced house, with lounge, kitchen/diner and 1 bathroom. At present it has storage heaters in all rooms, so it would be a total installation (e.g. rads and pipes too). Nothing unusual or complicated in the layout of the house. It does not have mains gas anywhere nearby, so that´s not a back up option. There is an outdoor workshop that could be used as housing for the system if needs be. Prefer to use wood, for one thing OH is a tree surgeon. What would you do? And what do you reckon it would cost? TIA Clara. |
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| Lorrainelovesplants |
Weve just installed a Woodwrm stove with backboiler and running 4 rads, with tanks in loft and a hot tank in the cupboard and all associated plumbing, pipes etc - not alot of change out of £3000 and thats cheap because OH installd himself and so no plumber charge.
We will probably claw it back over 4 yrs. We also dont have mains gas and our LPG bill for last year was £1500. We have a near free wood supply and intend using LPG only for extreme cold nights/hot water for bath. Do your homework - its an expensive thing to get wrong. We researched for a whole year. We run the wood burer/boiler as a 2nd system - independent. |
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| Mutton |
Nothing here on costs - just a few design thoughts which may be badly out of date!
Anyway my father installed a coal fired central heating boiler as a gravity feed system in a tall thin terraced house - the boiler was in the cellar, the heating loop covered 4 floors above it. To do gravity feed and not have to have a pump he: Used pipes of roughly 2 inch bore - he bought the lengths of tube and went to a light engineering firm to have the thread machined into them to match the joining nuts. Used old cast iron radiators that were made to take that bore of pipe - bought them second hand. The system went up at the front, across at floor 4 and back down to the boiler down the back of the house. So the pipes went up the stairwell at the front - with as I recall in some places a two radiator spur - as in a spur off the pipe in the hall which did a small loop to the hall radiator then through the wall to the dining room radiator. The radiators at the front of the house got the hotter water - but that was the north side of the house so that worked well. We were always toasty warm - including during the electricity cuts in the 1970s! For hot water he had a completely separate system - a back boiler in the dining room that just fed the hot water tank upstairs. Again a gravity feed system. As I understand it, you can't do gravity feed with modern copper pipes and slimline radiators - the bore is too narrow and there is too much resistance to overcome so the gravity feed doesn't happen, so you always have to have a pump. |
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| Louisdog |
Do you have an LPG heating system too then, and the wood burner radiators are just in key rooms? If so, this is what we are thinking of doing, and I wondered how it was working out for you? Cheers Alex |
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| Lorrainelovesplants |
In a nutshell yes.
We installed a brand new LPG system 5 years ago and it heats 10 rads and give us instant hot water. The woodburner system will give us a third tap at the kitchen sink, and will run 4 rads. Our house is a long bungalow and we have 2 woodburners at one end in the living room and kitchen - so this end of the house is always warm. The other end is where all the bedrooms are and it was always colder. So rather than run the LPG for CH lone, we deided to replacethe woodburnr in the living room with one with a backboiler. We wre burning the wood anyway - so it made sense to get rads heated with it. So it pipes the heat to the other end of the building and keeps the bedrooms cosy evenings and night. If I want hot water to wash a couple of dishes or my hands the woodburner gives me enough for that from the third tap. |
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| Clara |
This all interesting stuff folks - thanks. Is it the norm to have lpg as well? I was wondering how it works when in the summer you need hot water but not heating (though I did sit by a lit wood burner in a pub in wales this summer,so perhaps it's not an issue  )
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| Louisdog |
This is great info, thanks! I don't think it's the norm to have LPG as well Clara; people I know with that type of heating have electrical hot water heating in the summer (immersion in one case and electrical shower and hot water heater in the other). Cheers Alex |
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| Jenna |
What about solar for summer hot water, if you are in a location that suits it? | ||
| Louisdog |
Ah yes that should work well; my father in law gets almost all his hot water from solar in the summer months. | ||
| Clara |
This is for Wales - so probably not. Gonna miss all my lovely solar electricity, water and cooker if we go.
But I guess it makes sense that otherwise it´s electric....is the back boiler then connected to the immersion heater as well (or is there a way the systems can be switched around without having the need to have different hot water outlets etc?). Sorry to be so dumb but I´ve not lived in a conventional house for a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrry long time!! |
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| Louisdog |
FIL is near Brecon so maybe you might be ok... | ||
| Mr O |
I have just installed a Bosky wood burning Range with a back boiler and 9 radiators in my house, the instalation including the chimney and a second hand stove cost about £3000.00 in materials. I installed it myself. We also put in an indirect water heater so we get hot water as well. Of course when the range is going we can cook on it as well. In the summer our water is heated by an oil fired water heater. | ||
| gz |
When I lived in Nantlle-Halfway between Snowdon and the sea
We had a Bosky in the kitchen, and 5 solar panels on the southfacing lean-to roof. heating a backup water cylinder (indirectly). Plus a small woodburner (morso squirrel) in the living room. Radiators were in the bathroom and upstairs |
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| Clara |
More brilliant information thanks, unfortunately I need to balance my ethics with my wallet, so don't think solar is going to be part of the deal.
The property in question already has immersion heater (and night storage rads which I want to recycle), so I guess I could use that in the months when heating was not needed, there must be someway to connect that all up. My other thought was to have a wood burning boiler in an outhouse that could heat either water or water and rads depending on time of year (which would be more ethical option). |
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| Mutton |
If you are any good at DIY look at
www.builditsolar.com Lots of DIY solar panels and tanks - much more reasonable than commercial ones! |
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| Brandon |
It is perfectly possible to use copper pipe for a thermo siphon system, we have a rad in the bathroom, and another on the landing that are purely gravity, the one on the landing being plumbed off the main run in 15mm. The layout needs to be well planned, and it needs to be laid to a fall to allow the hot to rise, and the cool to fall. It is amazing how little rise will make it go. |
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| Mutton |
Really glad to hear that. On our long to-do list is fitting a radiator system to our bungalow.
Could you possibly expand a bit on what you said, didn't quite understand how you did it. I want to work out if we can have a not pumped system here (all four rooms needing radiators are of course on the same floor level). |
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| Brandon |
PM me, as I suspect we could bore the rest of the audience...
I was admiring the gravity system in the church hall yesterday afternoon, done in 3" steel, pulled into and out of the alcoves! Now that is a big bender!! |