wood furnace for a new house

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I won't go into too much detail, but I have a few pics from when I was installing (poor cell phone quality).

Here's the boiler:




Here's the tanks before the boiler was set in place:



With a quick temporary insulating job:



These setups are good for basements - heat rises so can make use of natural convection for things like a power outage situation. If I didn't have a basement & still wanted a boiler, I would put it all in an outbuilding along with my entire winters wood. (Also makes for a cozy shop or man cave if built big enough). That would eliminate dealing with steps/stairways. (I have a walk out to get the wood in). With a house the size of what you're planning, you could likely burn every couple of days & keep warm. Gasifiers + storage are batch burning setups, meaning you start a fire when storage is depleted, and stop burning when it is charged - so you need to make a new fire every day (or every second day maybe in your case). But I only have a fire actually burning about 6 hours a day in the middle of winter. Also, mine is natural draft - it's the only natural draft gasifier I have seen so far. There are no draft controls at all on it - it simply burns until it runs out of fuel. Fits right in with my KISS hankerings. Not exactly cheap - I did it all myself, except for wiring in the backup electric boiler & new water heater, and think I am in the $15k CAN range. That's all in & covers wood boiler, electric boiler, water heater, tanks & welding on them & insulating them, all pumps & piping & fittings (that stuff adds up), DHW exchangers, taxes, and customs/freight/$ exchange due to living on the wrong side of a border.

Thanks for the reply. Those look like pretty big tanks, how many gallons? Without a basement, such a system would have to be installed with either a pre-planned and buried tanks under the house before it is built, or somewhere outside the house. It would be possible to install them in the planned garage, but would take up to much space I am thinking. You mentioned welding. To my mind, this sort of throws a red flag. I cut and welded on a 40 hotwater heater once to install a copper heating coil. The tanks are glass lined. It was installed in the attic of a house and connected to a solar water heater. It worked well for a while, but the tank started rusting and leaking around the welds after just a couple of years.

I have found that solar heating water works very well, but there are so many ways to use solar, and different corners of the world, that results vary greatly. The system I help install was all home made. Copper tubing was used in the collectors. At first there was 4 2x4ft panels connected together on the roof of the house. The copper tube was connected to the tank that I had cut and welded on. The tube inside the tank was the heat exchanger and connect to the house propane tankless water heater. The water for the solar collectors was isolated so as to not contaminate the portable water supply.The gas was turned off the tankless heater for testing of the system. It was late Dec, early Jan when the system was installed and tested. 20*f-30*f temps outside. What we found was that the hot water became way to hot, especially with small children in the house. I forget the high temps, but just say it would scald you if you werent really careful. We took two of the solar collectors off line and where able to get the temps down to 130*f. He is still running that system and it been several years since we installed it. He did have to replace the storage tank because of leaks. I dont know what he replaced it with.

I have seen 4x8 solar panels that would generate 180*f temps, right out of the collector. Way to hot for a direct connection to my sinks or bathtub. One would have to have a pretty large storage tank to keep the water temps down, but with a large storage tank, it should insure a almost endless supply of hot water, even with several days of cloudy weather. I would think that with a large enough collector and adequate hot water storage, a person should be able to get a lot of heat for heating the home. No ideal what such a system would cost or how to go about installing such a system. I am thinking a radiant floor heating system, and am actually considering it. Any heat I can get without running the electric meter or burning wood would be a bonus.
 
Tanks are 330 gallons each. I would have gone with 500's if I had more room.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't bury them - makes servicing practically an impossibility, and you would lose heat to the ground no matter how good you insulated (spray foam would help). And also your tanks should at least be on the same level as the boiler - even better if elevated. For operational reasons. Lots of people put their boiler/storage/wood in an outbuilding. I have all that in my basement, I had the total footprint figured out once but I forget it now. Maybe 12x24 in all? If you have the headroom, standing the tanks on end would save floor space & lead to better operational performance from better stratification. And if you just used a lean-too on the end for wood storage, the footprint isn't very big at all - my tanks take up about 3.5' x 10', including insulation/enclosure. And outbuilding would require good underground piping also, another expense.

It's all pressurized & closed, so corrosion shouldn't be an issue - whereas a DHW or solar setup would be open. So always lots of oxygen in the water.

Such a system would work very well for you, with smaller house & radiant heat - but since the house isn't very big & wouldn't use much heat to start with, it kind of puts the up front cost into question. And it wouldn't do squat to cool you in the summer. Pluses & minuses to everything.
 
Heating water with solar or wood isnt that big a deal. Connecting both methods to work together might take a little head scratching. For cooling, I plan on using creek water. I will have a hydro generator inside a water box. The water that passes thru the turbine will fill the water box before going on down stream. Probably use a concrete septic tank for the box. I plan on putting a couple of large coil heat exchangers in the box and a low voltage pump to circulate the water thru those heat exchangers and to another set of exchangers located in my duct work. I have been saving old heat pump units and removing the heat exchangers out of them. The big problem is controlling condensation. Air duct has to be mounted on a slope so any condensation drips and runs away from the fan so it doesnt get blown into the rest of the duct and into the house. Get this part wrong and you endup with a house full of mold.
 
NSMaple1, I was looking back at your storage tanks. I believe you said they where used propane tanks. Did you do any kind of rust treatment inside those tanks. I have a used 1000gal tank I have thought about using for a storage tank, but was wondering how long they would last before rusting thru.
 
they are about 1/4 inch thick, itd take quite a while. if your owb water is treated it would probably last longer than the water jacket or firebox due to more even and slow temp changes
 
Not much different than any other closed pressurized hot water system - be it heated by oil, electric boiler, LP or NG. They are pretty well all closed & pressurized. The OWB guys need to use a heat exchanger to make the connection from their open boilers to their existing closed house system.

It's very capable, but with your smallish efficient house plan, it would be a gun to pea shooter fight kind of thing. If you had plans of heating more than one building though, that would change up the aspects.
 
A heat exchanger was in my plans already. I guess I am just not understanding how your closed system works. In past solar projects, I have had a closed system inside a closed system. I had to isolate the water going into the house from the water going thru the storage tanks and solar collectors. In a solar water heater, you just about have to have some sort of antifreeze in the lines going to the solar collector. This of course cant be allowed to mix with your drinking water. The way this was accomplished was by running my fresh water thru a heat exchanger with copper tubing. The water in the storage tank circulated thru the collectors, most used low voltage pumps to circulate the water from the tank to the collectors. In a sense that is the first closed loop. Since the freshwater heat exchanger was placed inside the storage tanks and my fresh water was pumped from the fresh water source, usually a home well, thru the exchanger and into a normal hot water heater. This keeps the fresh water separated from the solar collector water.

If I am reading this right, and I dont really have all the information I need, it seems your fresh water is being stored in the boiler tanks. This has me confused somewhat, I know I have to be missing something I cant see or hasnt been said.
 
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