Friends of mine had their coal fire removed and replaced with an inset boiler stove, linked to their gas central heating, around 10 years ago, they love it
I have a new boiler stove and the instructions specifically give the option of using an open OR closed system . The gas or oil boiler connection is via an injector tee. My system all works by gravity although I also have a pump. Hence as a rural property if there is a power cut it all keeps working.
Thats a fairly handy design. Have you heard of NRG awareness in County Cork? I use them for design and supply now I'm in ireland previously UK. Do a lot of interlink systems, stoves and heatpumps. Just one note, Your stat needs to be on the return and set to 50°c, if you have water returning to the stove below 50°c you'll get condensation and the stove will rust away in 5 years. Seen it happen. I have an henley, it's in the manufacturers instructions. 😊
Just wondering isn’t it bad practice to run the pipe going to the expansion tank with 90 degree angles because of air locks , I’m just learning about these systems as I want to design my own home but where we want the stove, there will not be a loft /attick space directly above it to run the pipe to the tank.
Great video.. I have an old Parkray room heater with a back boiler but no one knows anything about them… can you point me in the right direction? Set up in the house seems very similar to what you just described, an open tank in the loft etc.
I'm no heating engineer but I visualise having a hot water tank with multiple coils in for wood burning boiler and ASHP, and heating if thats how the heating works. So essentially the ASHP and stove keeps the hot water tank upto temperature and the hot water and heating will come off a coil. I think that's how i'd like to do ours when we get to that point of the reno. Great video explaining everything.
That's exactly how we're installing ours. We have a twin coil 200l water tank. The 200l is domestic hot water, 1 coil is from the stove, the second is for a solar water heater on our roof but we'll replace that with an ASHP eventually. We have radiators but we're not sure which coil to add them to. For the winter we'll be adding to the stove coil but in the future I think we'd like to use the ASHP
Great explanation thankyou for this. I moved into a house approx 8 years ago and we have a Hunter herald mf stove. It is our only source of heating. We have always found it struggles to get all of our rads to a decent temperature even though it should be more than capable of doing so. It uses a Navitron TDC3 controller to start the pump but it doesn’t kick in until it reaches 58 degrees. I think that might be the problem as the pump doesn’t stay on for very long before the water begins to cool. I might drop it down to 45 degrees like yours and see if that helps.
Thanks for your comment, I have found that it is a balancing act between pump speed and the temperature that the pump kicks in at. It sounds like possibly your pump might be pumping too fast if it cools the water quickly before turning off, so you might want to try experimenting with this. Wood burners hold a lot more water in their jackets than a gas boiler and therefore the water needs to stay in the stove for longer to get to temperature. You could also try lowering the temperature that it kicks in at and see if you can find an optimum balance of the two. The next obvious things to check are if you are burning well seasoned wood that gives off enough heat, as this will of course affect the performance greatly. Hope that helps and good luck with it.
Brilliant video - I am looking at something like this, but wonder if you can still do it if you I can't directly put big radiator over fire - it can still be above fire, but will need to be 5 meters away.
Could you install this system in a bungalow with a heat soak radiator in the loft space. I did wonder if the expansion tank gets hot where does the evaporated water go? Is it in the air which could potentially condense in the loft space causing issues. Im moving into a bungalow and love the idea of heating my house with the stove alongside gas/oil.
Hi there So I have made a contraption I call a vacuum linkup. It is a wood stove link to any raidiator system without all that fafing,, Is there still a market for it? It is safe if you loos power to control and pumps, but works better with power.
Really interesting video. I was under the impression that boiler stoves were no longer popular following the changes to the regulations concerning efficiency so this is good to see! I have an Arada 12kW boiler stove that I'm looking to integrate with our system here (2 thermal stores with gas boiler and solar thermal). In our case we have a vented 300L thermal store (only used in winter to heat radiators) in the room on the other side of the boiler - unfortunately I don't think we can rely on gravity as the tappings on the store are only marginally higher than the stove (50mm over 2m). Are you familiar with a pumped system? I was looking at using a Laddomat loading valve but am interested to know about the safeguards to protect the system in the event the pump stops... We're getting a lot of conflicting advice on this.
My system has a pumped and gravity side. If you are using a heat store then this is a good solution but you still need to have a heat soak radiator (min 10% of the heat output to water) and an expansion tank. If you have these two things in place then your system should be able to run fine without the pumps ever kicking in. The key is the heat soak radiator and an expansion tank. Hope that helps.
Good info got momentary a hybrid pellet stove so wood/pellets that a good stove but it only heats a living space .. but this looks like a great option... 👍 👌
Fascinating video. The most daunting aspect would be the fitting of the piping to your existing system. Does your Company have a Showroom with other kilowatt ratio wood burners with boilers on display? Also, the four pipes connected for flow and return, presumably a hole is cut at the side of the existing Chimney breast, can you advise on the dimensions of the hole and shape, eg can the hole be round, or does it need to be oblong? Regards Robert
Hi mate great video. And the install looks very neat! I could be wrong as havnt done one of these systems for a long time now. But I think your F+E tank should be copper not plastic. If it ever does boil over. You’ve got red hot water going into a plastic tank.
My plate heat exchanger is 30kw, so a bit above the 23kw output of the stove. I haven’t experimented with too many other sizes to be honest but this works well for me.
I should have pointed out in the video that a metal expansion is always recommended, mine has a high melting point, well above boiling water but I am probably going to change it.
Hi, Great video. We have a three bed bungalow with a 13 yr old Mitsubushi Ecodan air source heat pump. Although it heats our home and water well I think it's actually quite expensive to run and it leaks in the winter and creates a pool of ice. So it's probably not working as efficiently as it should and trying to find a plumber in Cumbria for this is next to impossible! I'm looking to remove this system. I have purchased a second hand Herald Hunter with a boiler and want to fit it and also want to have an off grid gas boiler set alongside it so they can back each other up when necessary. Would the gravity rad be ok in the bathroom about 15/20ft away and obviously on the same level as the stove and an insulated copper water storage cylinder in the loft above the stove and would I still need a metal expansion tank in the loft? We are kinda looking to eventually go off grid including harvesting the rain water because we get more than our fair share of free water!! Do you know if 12v pumps work on a system like this? Thank you in advance. Regards, Mike
Great video, i live in bungalow, how far away should the stat be from the boiler stove? Ive been told as close as possibe is this true? Ive the same stove 4 pipes and the diagram shows the stat on the return?
Such a great video! I have a very small house that im looking to install a boiler stove in. It's 4 rooms over 3 levels, with the boiler at the very bottom. It would be 3 or 4 radiators. Would it be possible to run this completely on a gravity system? Thankyou
Thank you! Yes, if you are only using the boiler stove for heating then a gravity system should work well and with only 3-4 radiators, you should easily be able to find a boiler stove that would heat the house.
My system has been in over twenty years now, a Parkway multifuel room heater with boiler, it feeds 10 rads, and a 36x18 cylinder for the hot water, this includes a heat loss rad, and towel rail in the bathroom, it was very efficient with household coal (which is now banned), heats the cylinder by gravity, pipe stat fitted to the primary flow expansion when the heat travels up the expansion at a given temp it brings in the pump, I have a gas boiler which is crudely stabbed in the rad circuit, which if used, runs through the roomheater and cylinder, I probably need to get one of those heat exchange thingy's
Gas boilers are easier to mix with boiler stoves and if you have a working system then it probably isn’t worth adding in a heat exchanger. There is a cost to a heat exchanger and that is a smaller loss of heat, thought they are pretty efficient you do loose some heat in the transfer process, so probably, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
This is a very informative video. I could really do with some impartial advice as we have just moved into a 1920s 3-bed bungalow off the gas grid (LPG), its really cold. The existing Worcester Greenstar Ri conventional boiler system just doesnt seem to cope for some reason? It wont work at a gentle steady 21' heat like the combi in our old house (its either on max or off) and the pathetic network of tacked-on radiators don't flow too well it seems - some hot some cold. Id like to live in the house for a full 12 months before embarking on a new install just to see where the hot and cold spots are, but my wife is pushing for a wood burning stove in the living room ASAP, in fact she says if she is cold one more winter she's leaving! (I think she's not exaggerating?). My brain says to consider the house as a whole not blow a wad on one room.......ideally I'd like to have a hybrid system that could take advantage of both fuel sources, wood and LPG for heating and hot water for bathing/showers (I would use instant heaters for sinks). I would also like at least part of the system to work in the event of power failures, so not totally dependant upon pumps and use gravity where possible. Does such a system exist? Could we potentially install a boiler stove and link up to the existing rads for now, and then link to a more integrated system later?
Hi Richard , I Francesco I m a qualified gas engineer, I got a customer that want to install a log burner on the existing heating system and also keep the boiler. The fire is a 30 kw , and i m thinking to use a plate to plate heat exchanger. How do can I calculate the size of the plate and where can I buy it ? Thanks
great vid. do you have any problems with flow across the horizontal pipe work? the only heat sink radiator is above my boiler stove in the bedroom, and boy, it don't half get hot. we have a gas boiler (50kw) in our cellar and when the boiler stove is lit the gas boiler never comes on until the fire dies down. is it worth trying to keep the fire going at night to stop the gas boiler coming on?
Thank you, no I don’t have any issues with horizontal runs in the system, although I don’t have many in the system, most of the longer horizontal runs are on the pumped side of the system, not the gravity side, which only has relatively small horizontal runs. Heat soak radiators do get hot, sometimes very hot, that is their job, often best not to have them in a bedroom for that reason and locate them somewhere like a bathroom if you can. You could try keeping the stove in overnight, you really need to use some smokeless fuel to do this, load it up and turn the air controls down so it simmers all night. You will need to experiment with the fuel (both quantity and type) and the air control settings to perfect this and you may well find that it blackens the glass overnight as it slumbers. It is not the best way to run a stove from an emissions point of view but it does keep the stove warm overnight ready for re-fuelling and firing up again in the morning.
Yes, a thermal store is a great way of doing this too, it does mean it takes longer to warm up and you need to have a large tank in your loft but generally is a good installation choice.
Yes, I would recommend it, it is a solid stove and works really well. There aren’t too many large boiler stoves on the market at the moment, since the new eco design regs but a few more are coming through.
Great video. Looking into boiler stoves but unfortunately we’ve not long move to combi system and seems as though it wouldn’t be easily do able. Probably would be able to as there would be a lot of infrastructure already in place for a tank etc but information and people actually doing this seems to be impossible to find!
This would certainly be do-able. Installing a boiler stove with a standard gas boiler is much easier than installing with an air source heat pump, you wouldn’t need to worry about pipe stats shutting off the flow to gas boiler, it would just turn off once the boiler stove is lit and the boiler would take over. When the boiler wasn’t lit the gas would take up the slack, it could be a nice system.
@@glowing-embersUK very interesting! I’m in a large farm house so heating is always on the brain. Would I be able to contact yourself? Or do you know of anyone I could contact to look into this further? I’m not sure my local log burner fitter is quite up to speed on this sort of thing but really interested!
Hi, we have a gas boiler that runs in conjunction with an open fire and back boiler, it works pretty well but, in a week or so we are replacing the open fire with a boiler stove, which will work much better, so yes you can do that if you want to.
A boiler stove can be hooked up to heat radiators and or a hot water tank, it depends on what you want it for, how many radiators you have and the heat output of the stove. It is much easier to add a gas boiler into this system than an air source pump, so yes, a gas boiler, or an oil boiler can be added in and can automatically take the strain of heating the home once the boiler stove is out or under temperature. The set up would be very similar to mine but a little less complicated.
Would any body know if running pipes from the ceiling to the rads or from the floor up to the rads would make a difference with back boiler stove. I can’t get my rads to heat properly but I was told it might be because my pipes drop from the ceiling to the rads and any system he seen like this always has issues
@@glowing-embersUK thanks for the reply, my stove is a 4 pipe system, 2 diagonal pipes gravity feed to The cylinder upstairs and 2 to the radiators and there pump fed
@@Thedar561 It’s difficult to diagnose but, we recommend the following areas to check: 1. There is no sludge in the system 2. The pipes are correctly sized 3. The pump is correctly located and sized 4. There is no air in radiators/system 5. The radiator valves are balanced correctly. If so, it should circulate.
It takes up to an hour for the rest of the house to start to heat up, with the exception of the gravity radiator which is pretty quick. It depends upon how big the fire is of course but from totally cold, you have to get the firebox warm, then the metal of the stove (and there is a lot of metal to warm) then the water in the system and this all takes a bit of time before the heat moves to the rest of the house. Once warm, it heats up the hosue pretty quickly.
With my system the pumps would stop and the radiators attached to that pump would cool. Of course, I would still have the heat from the stove downstairs and the gravity radiator upstairs, so the house would retain a lot of heat for quite a while. It depends how off grid you want to be, to be completely off grid you can go for a pure gravity system, with no pumped element to it. This is how systems used to be before the advent of gas boilers that meant that water had to pass through the boiler very quickly. A gravity system just uses the gravity side of the boiler stove and the heat expansion passes the heat round all the radiators. This is a great set up for just a boiler stove but if you want to add in another heat source this is where you need to add a pumped system to the mix. Another alternative of course is to wire your pumps to run off a generator in the event of a power failure. Hope that helps.
I am not sure if they are readily available to be honest. We can potentially ship overseas, if this is something that you were interested in then get in touch for a price.
Hi great to see the video, Thanks. I'm building my own log cabin and I'm thinking about putting in a boiler stove, now my question is, because it is one level where the stove is going to be can I put the first radiator on the same level as the stove to get ride of its heat before it is going to the expansion tank? the bathroom will be in the basement with sauna where I would like to have also a radiator but that is 1 level down! would I need to install a pump to get it down? The expansion tank since I don't have an attic can it be anywhere else? or I might have to put it in view. Thanks in advance for your advice, Kind regards< Jack
Yes, that’s a tricky set up. I think that you will have to end up pumping to your radiators as to work efficienctly gravity systems rely on the heat source being at the bottom. You will also want your heat soak radiator and expansion tank above the stove. I understand that this could be difficult in your case, especially without an attic but you need to ensure that the system is properly vented. If you have plans, you can send them over to our team to help further.
We sell a range of boiler stoves/systems. Please send any enquires to the following email - enquiries@glowing-embers.co.uk or alternatively you can call our sales team on 01376555182 and they will be happy to help.
That’s interesting, I haven’t heard of one that can get to this temperature before, what is the model? That could make installing a boiler with one of these a bit easier.
Go green with an air source heat pump then get realistic with a fire. ( did you know when you bought the air source they need nice insulated airtight buildings to work efficiently?)
The air source was already in when I moved into this house and yes - they work well for top spec insulated houses with triple glazing, and underfloor heating but for an older housed like mine with single glazed windows and radiators it is a non-starter, really expensive and really cold!
Why not use a motorised valve to direct the heat to the heat bleed radiator when the stove gets too hot. Thatthe system I use. You can manually overide them but better still have a battery back up system or generate for the whole house to keep things running in case of a power cut.The amount of timber required to heat a house is huge and you need a massive wood storage facilty. Unless you get your timber virtually free it just makes no sense. An oil fired boiler is the cheapest form of heating. It might not be all that green but the modern boilers are 96% efficient and the output is condensation unlike a wood burner that polluts the atmosphere.
It is really hard to find knowledgeable and qualified people to do these nowadays, that is why I made the video. I had to get a plumber and stove installer to work together. You can search the HETAS site for installers of wet systems in your area but you may not have much luck, as many have stopped doing these systems. It is just persistence and ringing round and using the ideas here to design a system with a heating engineer. Good luck and do contact us if you need any help designing the system etc.
The problem is if you don’t have outside air directly into the stove you will actually cool your home!! It’s a leagal requirement in most states in the USA because of this!!
No. In our damp climate in the UK, we need to extract damp air full of pollutants from the room, and up the chimney / flue. This draws in dry, fresh air from the outside through a vent. A much healthier system than having the air ducted directly to your stove from the outside.
@ have you been outside in the uk!!?? Unless it’s-0c it’s damp?? That’s the most unprofessional retort I could ever imagine!! You and your company have lost all credibility with this one simpleton response.
wow its James Blunt 🙂
Thanks for the video - very informative
Friends of mine had their coal fire removed and replaced with an inset boiler stove, linked to their gas central heating, around 10 years ago, they love it
Great to hear that your friends love it! There's nothing like the atmosphere of a burning stove while being able to heat your whole home too.
I have a new boiler stove and the instructions specifically give the option of using an open OR closed system . The gas or oil boiler connection is via an injector tee. My system all works by gravity although I also have a pump. Hence as a rural property if there is a power cut it all keeps working.
This is perfect very well broken down and informative , massive help thank you sir 👍
Thats a fairly handy design. Have you heard of NRG awareness in County Cork? I use them for design and supply now I'm in ireland previously UK. Do a lot of interlink systems, stoves and heatpumps. Just one note, Your stat needs to be on the return and set to 50°c, if you have water returning to the stove below 50°c you'll get condensation and the stove will rust away in 5 years. Seen it happen. I have an henley, it's in the manufacturers instructions. 😊
Great video, very informative, thanks
Just wondering isn’t it bad practice to run the pipe going to the expansion tank with 90 degree angles because of air locks , I’m just learning about these systems as I want to design my own home but where we want the stove, there will not be a loft /attick space directly above it to run the pipe to the tank.
Just wondered why you didn't go down the thermal store alternative.
Thanks very informative and timely for me, as I am in contract for a house in Ireland. Regards from North Carolina
Great video thanks ☺️ I have 21 kw multi burner stove but not got the boiler connected but will now get this sorted given me motivation thanks
Great video.. I have an old Parkray room heater with a back boiler but no one knows anything about them… can you point me in the right direction? Set up in the house seems very similar to what you just described, an open tank in the loft etc.
Great video mate! I was under the impression that you had to have a metallic expansion tank because of the potential heat from the stove ?
I'm no heating engineer but I visualise having a hot water tank with multiple coils in for wood burning boiler and ASHP, and heating if thats how the heating works. So essentially the ASHP and stove keeps the hot water tank upto temperature and the hot water and heating will come off a coil. I think that's how i'd like to do ours when we get to that point of the reno. Great video explaining everything.
That's exactly how we're installing ours.
We have a twin coil 200l water tank.
The 200l is domestic hot water, 1 coil is from the stove, the second is for a solar water heater on our roof but we'll replace that with an ASHP eventually.
We have radiators but we're not sure which coil to add them to. For the winter we'll be adding to the stove coil but in the future I think we'd like to use the ASHP
Great explanation thankyou for this. I moved into a house approx 8 years ago and we have a Hunter herald mf stove. It is our only source of heating. We have always found it struggles to get all of our rads to a decent temperature even though it should be more than capable of doing so. It uses a Navitron TDC3 controller to start the pump but it doesn’t kick in until it reaches 58 degrees. I think that might be the problem as the pump doesn’t stay on for very long before the water begins to cool. I might drop it down to 45 degrees like yours and see if that helps.
Thanks for your comment, I have found that it is a balancing act between pump speed and the temperature that the pump kicks in at. It sounds like possibly your pump might be pumping too fast if it cools the water quickly before turning off, so you might want to try experimenting with this. Wood burners hold a lot more water in their jackets than a gas boiler and therefore the water needs to stay in the stove for longer to get to temperature. You could also try lowering the temperature that it kicks in at and see if you can find an optimum balance of the two. The next obvious things to check are if you are burning well seasoned wood that gives off enough heat, as this will of course affect the performance greatly. Hope that helps and good luck with it.
Brilliant video - I am looking at something like this, but wonder if you can still do it if you I can't directly put big radiator over fire - it can still be above fire, but will need to be 5 meters away.
Could you install this system in a bungalow with a heat soak radiator in the loft space. I did wonder if the expansion tank gets hot where does the evaporated water go? Is it in the air which could potentially condense in the loft space causing issues.
Im moving into a bungalow and love the idea of heating my house with the stove alongside gas/oil.
Hi there
So I have made a contraption I call a vacuum linkup.
It is a wood stove link to any raidiator system without all that fafing,,
Is there still a market for it?
It is safe if you loos power to control and pumps, but works better with power.
Hi was just wondering if youd be able to help? My stove is dripping water on the inside? Any information is appreciated.
Really interesting video. I was under the impression that boiler stoves were no longer popular following the changes to the regulations concerning efficiency so this is good to see! I have an Arada 12kW boiler stove that I'm looking to integrate with our system here (2 thermal stores with gas boiler and solar thermal). In our case we have a vented 300L thermal store (only used in winter to heat radiators) in the room on the other side of the boiler - unfortunately I don't think we can rely on gravity as the tappings on the store are only marginally higher than the stove (50mm over 2m). Are you familiar with a pumped system? I was looking at using a Laddomat loading valve but am interested to know about the safeguards to protect the system in the event the pump stops... We're getting a lot of conflicting advice on this.
My system has a pumped and gravity side. If you are using a heat store then this is a good solution but you still need to have a heat soak radiator (min 10% of the heat output to water) and an expansion tank. If you have these two things in place then your system should be able to run fine without the pumps ever kicking in. The key is the heat soak radiator and an expansion tank. Hope that helps.
How would incorporate this into hot water for taps in downstairs kitchen and upstairs bath room please
Good info got momentary a hybrid pellet stove so wood/pellets that a good stove but it only heats a living space .. but this looks like a great option... 👍 👌
Fascinating video.
The most daunting aspect would be the fitting of the piping to your existing system.
Does your Company have a Showroom with other kilowatt ratio wood burners with boilers on display?
Also, the four pipes connected for flow and return, presumably a hole is cut at the side of the existing Chimney breast, can you advise on the dimensions of the hole and shape, eg can the hole be round, or does it need to be oblong?
Regards
Robert
Hi mate great video. And the install looks very neat! I could be wrong as havnt done one of these systems for a long time now. But I think your F+E tank should be copper not plastic. If it ever does boil over. You’ve got red hot water going into a plastic tank.
Yes, whilst my tank has a very high melting point, metal is always recommended and I may change mine.
Thank you.
How do you size the plate heat exchanger please?
My plate heat exchanger is 30kw, so a bit above the 23kw output of the stove. I haven’t experimented with too many other sizes to be honest but this works well for me.
Always thought you needed a galvanised steel expansion tank ?
I should have pointed out in the video that a metal expansion is always recommended, mine has a high melting point, well above boiling water but I am probably going to change it.
Hi, Great video. We have a three bed bungalow with a 13 yr old Mitsubushi Ecodan air source heat pump. Although it heats our home and water well I think it's actually quite expensive to run and it leaks in the winter and creates a pool of ice. So it's probably not working as efficiently as it should and trying to find a plumber in Cumbria for this is next to impossible! I'm looking to remove this system. I have purchased a second hand Herald Hunter with a boiler and want to fit it and also want to have an off grid gas boiler set alongside it so they can back each other up when necessary. Would the gravity rad be ok in the bathroom about 15/20ft away and obviously on the same level as the stove and an insulated copper water storage cylinder in the loft above the stove and would I still need a metal expansion tank in the loft? We are kinda looking to eventually go off grid including harvesting the rain water because we get more than our fair share of free water!! Do you know if 12v pumps work on a system like this? Thank you in advance.
Regards, Mike
Fantastic video
Great video, i live in bungalow, how far away should the stat be from the boiler stove? Ive been told as close as possibe is this true? Ive the same stove 4 pipes and the diagram shows the stat on the return?
We’ve put the stat on the pipe just after the heat soak radiator and before the expansion tank, this works well for us.
Such a great video! I have a very small house that im looking to install a boiler stove in. It's 4 rooms over 3 levels, with the boiler at the very bottom. It would be 3 or 4 radiators. Would it be possible to run this completely on a gravity system? Thankyou
Thank you! Yes, if you are only using the boiler stove for heating then a gravity system should work well and with only 3-4 radiators, you should easily be able to find a boiler stove that would heat the house.
What is the name of this wood stove and model? I live in Northern California and I'm looking for a stove like this but maybe a little smaller
My system has been in over twenty years now, a Parkway multifuel room heater with boiler, it feeds 10 rads, and a 36x18 cylinder for the hot water, this includes a heat loss rad, and towel rail in the bathroom, it was very efficient with household coal (which is now banned), heats the cylinder by gravity, pipe stat fitted to the primary flow expansion when the heat travels up the expansion at a given temp it brings in the pump, I have a gas boiler which is crudely stabbed in the rad circuit, which if used, runs through the roomheater and cylinder, I probably need to get one of those heat exchange thingy's
Gas boilers are easier to mix with boiler stoves and if you have a working system then it probably isn’t worth adding in a heat exchanger. There is a cost to a heat exchanger and that is a smaller loss of heat, thought they are pretty efficient you do loose some heat in the transfer process, so probably, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
This is a very informative video. I could really do with some impartial advice as we have just moved into a 1920s 3-bed bungalow off the gas grid (LPG), its really cold. The existing Worcester Greenstar Ri conventional boiler system just doesnt seem to cope for some reason? It wont work at a gentle steady 21' heat like the combi in our old house (its either on max or off) and the pathetic network of tacked-on radiators don't flow too well it seems - some hot some cold. Id like to live in the house for a full 12 months before embarking on a new install just to see where the hot and cold spots are, but my wife is pushing for a wood burning stove in the living room ASAP, in fact she says if she is cold one more winter she's leaving! (I think she's not exaggerating?). My brain says to consider the house as a whole not blow a wad on one room.......ideally I'd like to have a hybrid system that could take advantage of both fuel sources, wood and LPG for heating and hot water for bathing/showers (I would use instant heaters for sinks). I would also like at least part of the system to work in the event of power failures, so not totally dependant upon pumps and use gravity where possible. Does such a system exist? Could we potentially install a boiler stove and link up to the existing rads for now, and then link to a more integrated system later?
You definitely need to balance the radiators at the very minimum SkillBuilder does a really good video on it
Hi Richard , I Francesco I m a qualified gas engineer, I got a customer that want to install a log burner on the existing heating system and also keep the boiler.
The fire is a 30 kw , and i m thinking to use a plate to plate heat exchanger. How do can I calculate the size of the plate and where can I buy it ?
Thanks
great vid. do you have any problems with flow across the horizontal pipe work? the only heat sink radiator is above my boiler stove in the bedroom, and boy, it don't half get hot. we have a gas boiler (50kw) in our cellar and when the boiler stove is lit the gas boiler never comes on until the fire dies down. is it worth trying to keep the fire going at night to stop the gas boiler coming on?
Thank you, no I don’t have any issues with horizontal runs in the system, although I don’t have many in the system, most of the longer horizontal runs are on the pumped side of the system, not the gravity side, which only has relatively small horizontal runs. Heat soak radiators do get hot, sometimes very hot, that is their job, often best not to have them in a bedroom for that reason and locate them somewhere like a bathroom if you can. You could try keeping the stove in overnight, you really need to use some smokeless fuel to do this, load it up and turn the air controls down so it simmers all night. You will need to experiment with the fuel (both quantity and type) and the air control settings to perfect this and you may well find that it blackens the glass overnight as it slumbers. It is not the best way to run a stove from an emissions point of view but it does keep the stove warm overnight ready for re-fuelling and firing up again in the morning.
I have my oil boiler and mulitfuel stove linked to a thermal store cylinder
Yes, a thermal store is a great way of doing this too, it does mean it takes longer to warm up and you need to have a large tank in your loft but generally is a good installation choice.
Would you recommend the Druid 30? Would it be an efficient unit if this size? Tks
Yes, I would recommend it, it is a solid stove and works really well. There aren’t too many large boiler stoves on the market at the moment, since the new eco design regs but a few more are coming through.
Great video. Looking into boiler stoves but unfortunately we’ve not long move to combi system and seems as though it wouldn’t be easily do able. Probably would be able to as there would be a lot of infrastructure already in place for a tank etc but information and people actually doing this seems to be impossible to find!
This would certainly be do-able. Installing a boiler stove with a standard gas boiler is much easier than installing with an air source heat pump, you wouldn’t need to worry about pipe stats shutting off the flow to gas boiler, it would just turn off once the boiler stove is lit and the boiler would take over. When the boiler wasn’t lit the gas would take up the slack, it could be a nice system.
@@glowing-embersUK very interesting! I’m in a large farm house so heating is always on the brain. Would I be able to contact yourself? Or do you know of anyone I could contact to look into this further? I’m not sure my local log burner fitter is quite up to speed on this sort of thing but really interested!
Its leaking or is a stain under woodstove?
I've been looking for a temperature switch that saddles a pipe to turn on my pump here in Canada without much luck ,anybody who can help me?
My systems over 50 years old still working great but I need a new boiler stove mine's a bit dusty now
So does this only do heating and can you have a gas boiler on the system for emergency
Hi, we have a gas boiler that runs in conjunction with an open fire and back boiler, it works pretty well but, in a week or so we are replacing the open fire with a boiler stove, which will work much better, so yes you can do that if you want to.
A boiler stove can be hooked up to heat radiators and or a hot water tank, it depends on what you want it for, how many radiators you have and the heat output of the stove. It is much easier to add a gas boiler into this system than an air source pump, so yes, a gas boiler, or an oil boiler can be added in and can automatically take the strain of heating the home once the boiler stove is out or under temperature. The set up would be very similar to mine but a little less complicated.
Would any body know if running pipes from the ceiling to the rads or from the floor up to the rads would make a difference with back boiler stove.
I can’t get my rads to heat properly but I was told it might be because my pipes drop from the ceiling to the rads and any system he seen like this always has issues
I haven’t had direct experience of this but it could well be. Is it a gravity system or a pumped system you are running?
@@glowing-embersUK thanks for the reply, my stove is a 4 pipe system,
2 diagonal pipes gravity feed to
The cylinder upstairs and 2 to the radiators and there pump fed
@@Thedar561 It’s difficult to diagnose but, we recommend the following areas to check:
1. There is no sludge in the system
2. The pipes are correctly sized
3. The pump is correctly located and sized
4. There is no air in radiators/system
5. The radiator valves are balanced correctly.
If so, it should circulate.
How long does it take to heat the water and feel the heat in other rooms with this boiler stove?
It takes up to an hour for the rest of the house to start to heat up, with the exception of the gravity radiator which is pretty quick. It depends upon how big the fire is of course but from totally cold, you have to get the firebox warm, then the metal of the stove (and there is a lot of metal to warm) then the water in the system and this all takes a bit of time before the heat moves to the rest of the house. Once warm, it heats up the hosue pretty quickly.
Hi am in Essex do you know any installers who would do an install where I live??
Yes, potentially, if you get in touch with us at enquiries@glowing-embers.co.uk with some details we can help you further.
Single glazing with a heat pump??
What happens to your heating system in the event of a power cut?
With my system the pumps would stop and the radiators attached to that pump would cool. Of course, I would still have the heat from the stove downstairs and the gravity radiator upstairs, so the house would retain a lot of heat for quite a while. It depends how off grid you want to be, to be completely off grid you can go for a pure gravity system, with no pumped element to it. This is how systems used to be before the advent of gas boilers that meant that water had to pass through the boiler very quickly. A gravity system just uses the gravity side of the boiler stove and the heat expansion passes the heat round all the radiators. This is a great set up for just a boiler stove but if you want to add in another heat source this is where you need to add a pumped system to the mix. Another alternative of course is to wire your pumps to run off a generator in the event of a power failure. Hope that helps.
is this stove available in the US market ? and how can i get it ?
I am not sure if they are readily available to be honest. We can potentially ship overseas, if this is something that you were interested in then get in touch for a price.
My question too. Haven't found many indoor boiler stoves that meet Asme standards, so good luck with home insurance
@robertdavidson4004 it works as long as it's not your main source of heat. Plus, I am off the grid
Hi great to see the video, Thanks.
I'm building my own log cabin and I'm thinking about putting in a boiler stove, now my question is, because it is one level where the stove is going to be can I put the first radiator on the same level as the stove to get ride of its heat before it is going to the expansion tank? the bathroom will be in the basement with sauna where I would like to have also a radiator but that is 1 level down! would I need to install a pump to get it down?
The expansion tank since I don't have an attic can it be anywhere else? or I might have to put it in view.
Thanks in advance for your advice, Kind regards< Jack
Yes, that’s a tricky set up. I think that you will have to end up pumping to your radiators as to work efficienctly gravity systems rely on the heat source being at the bottom. You will also want your heat soak radiator and expansion tank above the stove. I understand that this could be difficult in your case, especially without an attic but you need to ensure that the system is properly vented. If you have plans, you can send them over to our team to help further.
Are you involved in selling these stoves/systems. I’m interested in getting a system designed and quoted for my house
We sell a range of boiler stoves/systems. Please send any enquires to the following email - enquiries@glowing-embers.co.uk or alternatively you can call our sales team on 01376555182 and they will be happy to help.
That's what should of been done in our 1950s bungalow the fire that actually heats something rather than just 1 room
Yes, boiler stoves are a great way of making the most out of your stove.
Air source heat pumps will now heat water to 70 degrees
That’s interesting, I haven’t heard of one that can get to this temperature before, what is the model? That could make installing a boiler with one of these a bit easier.
Go green with an air source heat pump then get realistic with a fire. ( did you know when you bought the air source they need nice insulated airtight buildings to work efficiently?)
The air source was already in when I moved into this house and yes - they work well for top spec insulated houses with triple glazing, and underfloor heating but for an older housed like mine with single glazed windows and radiators it is a non-starter, really expensive and really cold!
Everything works better with good insulation. Heat pumps, boilers, stoves. You have less heat loses.
Should have galvanized expansion tank and copper float
Yes, whilst my tank has a very high melting point, metal is always recommended and I may change mine.
Why not use a motorised valve to direct the heat to the heat bleed radiator when the stove gets too hot. Thatthe system I use. You can manually overide them but better still have a battery back up system or generate for the whole house to keep things running in case of a power cut.The amount of timber required to heat a house is huge and you need a massive wood storage facilty. Unless you get your timber virtually free it just makes no sense. An oil fired boiler is the cheapest form of heating. It might not be all that green but the modern boilers are 96% efficient and the output is condensation unlike a wood burner that polluts the atmosphere.
Hi Everyone. Who can comission this system in West Sussex? Anyone knows a reliable, knowledgeable man with the proper certificate? Thanks 👍
It is really hard to find knowledgeable and qualified people to do these nowadays, that is why I made the video. I had to get a plumber and stove installer to work together. You can search the HETAS site for installers of wet systems in your area but you may not have much luck, as many have stopped doing these systems. It is just persistence and ringing round and using the ideas here to design a system with a heating engineer. Good luck and do contact us if you need any help designing the system etc.
I will be ringing you
Funny , a Heat pump only works in Florida!
The problem is if you don’t have outside air directly into the stove you will actually cool your home!! It’s a leagal requirement in most states in the USA because of this!!
No. In our damp climate in the UK, we need to extract damp air full of pollutants from the room, and up the chimney / flue. This draws in dry, fresh air from the outside through a vent. A much healthier system than having the air ducted directly to your stove from the outside.
@ have you been outside in the uk!!?? Unless it’s-0c it’s damp?? That’s the most unprofessional retort I could ever imagine!! You and your company have lost all credibility with this one simpleton response.
Complicated because no one is sure how to plumb it in anymore, lost the art of it?