Helen, £35 ph!!! plus whatever he makes on materials - 20% to 40%? He might have got away with that a year (or two) ago but not now, I'd suspect he's got no work on and is trying to get a weeks wages out of half a weeks work, either way I suspect you're not a charity. Try shopping around, if you don't have to re-mortgage now is a really good time to the (good) builders in...

Hi Garry/Redifon

A little over two weeks on and the system is running well. With the colder days coming in, log consumption is around 1 full (standard builder's) wheelbarrow of wood per day . This translates to one full loading of the boiler plus a couple of logs chucked in once the gasifiaction is in ful flow. Burn time in Turbo mode is around 5-6 hours and this gives me hot water and heating for the vast majority of the day.

If I run the burn cycle early evening, this gives me very hot radiators during the evening until the heating goes off at 22:00hrs. When the heating comes back on at 5:30hrs water in the buffer is still hot and this gives a good start to the day. As the day goes on, obviously the temparature drops as the system runs and if the heating runs all day, the radiators have cooled significantly by 16:00hrs when I'm thinking about relighting.

As the much colder winter days come in, I'm guessing I'll be doing two loads per day (maybe one full and one half load).

Hope this helps.

Ed,

hi robert,
Try continental suppliers Kotly.com for instance. They are usually cheaper than UK sources in my experience,and most of them are made abroad anyway. A big Italian manufacturer called Varem have a UK outlet for comparison.

regards, mike

David, at the moment I'm running 6 radiators ~(out of a total of 12 installed in the house) on the circuit as well as the 300l Megaflow DHW cylender mentioned elswhere in this thread. The radiators probably have an average output of 5000 btu/hr (@65C). The house is a 4500sq ft stone built house (completed 1904) so it's not exactly thermally efficient, having said that though, the CH system is very modern and all radiatos have been replaced in the past few years, (almost) all windows have been replaced and we have a LOT of loft insultion.

As it''s getting colder, I am using a little more wood though. Yesterday for instance I added several more logs (total was maybe 70-80kg) which brought the burn duration to a little over 6 hours. The boiler burned out early evening and the Laddomat was telling me that the water at the top of the tank was at 80C and that at the bottom was at 66C.

The heating went off at 10 last night and came back on at 5:30am this morning and the radiators are still hot to the touch and the house is warm, I'll go and start a new burn cycle at noon and given the weather forecast, I think I'll keep it fed so that it burns until this evening. I'm burning seasoned hardwood logs at the moment.

Ed.

I've searched this site, but can't find any mention of the Solar Focus Therminator II boiler.

Has any one looked into these?

It sounds like an excellent piece of kit, as it will run on logs or pellets.

(http://www.res.ie/sites/default/files/pdfs/RES%20-%20ThermiNatorII.pdf) Warning 3.3Mb

James

"Therminator II"

What more do you need to know... ? Its called a 'Therminator II' ... surely with a name like that its got to be worth a punt!

J

PS
found this:

http://oxfordsolar.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/therminator.pdf
http://oxfordsolar.co.uk/

Hi all you Guys and Gals out there

Does any one know where to purchase the best value 1500 litre buffer tank and laddomat 21 control system

Thanks

John B Humberside

John

We bought our Perge log boiler and Akvaterm accumulator tank from Perge UK. Rang them last week to get some info on my boiler, and they said they have their own range of buffer / accumulator tanks available now. 1000L and 1500L they told me are currently available, and they were cheaper than Akvaterm too.

They also supply the Laddomat kit from stock.

Again, nothing to gain for us, just they gave us good sevice on our purchase, and have been helpful since too.

Hi,

Just read this thread from start to finish as we're looking to get a log burning boiler next year when we build an extension. This will provide domestic hot water and heating to under floor heating in the kitchen, bathroom & utility (all in the extension) and to radiators in the living room & bedrooms (although these are not used much as there is a log burning stove in the living room and we tend to have the bedrooms cool). We would also like a couple of heated towel rails which probably could come off the radiator circuit. We don't currently have a boiler of any sort as heating is by electric storage heaters (to be replaced by the radiators) and log burning stove, and DHW by immersion heater. I have a few questions if anyone can help :-

Is there any problem with effectively taking three circuits from the accumulator - ie DHW, underfloor heating, radiators. All may be required at different times and different temperatures.

As the house & extension will be well insulated rough calculations show that a 15kW boiler would be sufficient burning just once a day in all but the most extreme weather. However these only take small logs (upto 330mm) and as I'll be cutting it all myself I'm tempted to go for a 25kW boiler capable of taking longer (upto 550mm logs) to ease the workload. Are there any advantages / disadvantages of going for an oversized boiler / accumulator and simply firing it less often (other than cost obvioulsy)?

I'm also a little confused about sizing of the accumulator. A 1000 - 1500l tank seems to be recommended for a 25kW boiler, however if this burns for 4 hours (as suggested by the manufacturers with softwood) producing an average of 25Kw/hr this gives 100kW which, if my calcs are correct, would lift 1500l of water by 57C. Ignoring stratification this would imply that I would have to wait until the average temp is down to around 30C before firing up the boiler if the heating is not on - too cold for DHW or radiators. Is this correct? Are there other losses / inefficiencies that I've missed? Or is stratification the answer to this?

With regards to stratification what sort of temperatures would you expect at the top & bottom of the tank before & after firing up the boiler? Also in summer when the heating is off and only taking DHW from the tank would this not invert the stratification if all the heat is taken from a coil at the top?

Hope these are not daft questions as I'm new to this ....

Many thanks,

Gary

Is anyone using a wood burning system in a designated smokeless zone or has anyone experienced any problems getting permission to do this?

hi Gary,
For zoning you will obviously have to select the different areas of the house, Ive got 3 zones, main living area, upstairs loft conversion, and downstairs bedrooms and bathrooms. The pipe runs were conducive to this layout. each of the zones has its own 2 port valve, and before that the pipework is common to all. With this in mind I think I'd go for one supply pipe from your boiler room and do the circuit splitting in the house, otherwise you would need a flowpipe for each of the circuits and possibly one large return. I don't know which would be most economic, that would need a bit of research. Theoretically, your circulating pump(s) could be at either end, but would have to be sized accordingly, and the bog standard domestic circulator may not be up to the job. Likewise the pipe run to the house would have to be a decent size I would guess at least 28mm possibly even 35mm, in the case of a single feed pipe, that would to some extent dictate your pump size. If your pump is at the accumulator end you will also need the pump control cable laid at the same time as the pipes.

Regarding the plate heat exchanger; Ifelt that it could better cope with any future limescale problems, you simply isolate the exchanger part and have it cleaned although I have taken some steps to mitigate this by introducing inhibitors in the rising main. I also felt that plate exchangers were the future. I'm fairly familiar with the German, Swiss and Austrian scene and they are about 15 - 20 years ahead of us with biomass and accumulators in general, and plate exchangers are becoming the current flavour there.

The circuit from the boiler to the accumulator and back is gravty / thermosiphon, large bore pipes, although there is a pump on the large loading valve which connects this flow and retun. This "blender valve" regulates the return water temperature to the boiler and prevents comparatively cold accumulator water entering the boiler too early in the firing, spoiling the efficiency.

Future power failure is something that I had thought about. My system has 3 pumps in total, domestic circulator, loading valve, and plate exchanger, plus the fan on the boiler and 2 small motorised dampers also on the boiler. I'd mulled over all sorts of solutions, wind turbine etc. but I think in the end I'll go for a small emergency generator, not very green I know, but after all the upheaval of the past months I need to get my life back.

I got my accumulator and plate exchanger from Austria and you are right the returns are not simply down at the very bottom except in the case of the large boiler return.I followed their advice, they sent me a diagram, and it makes sense to me. The general perceived wisdom that I dicovered on the subject is that approximately the top half of the tank is at the "working temperature" of 80+ C and below that graduating down to about 30 C with a small intermediate zone in between. I guess each accumulator manufacturer has a slightly different take on it.

regards, Mike

Gary,
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. It's a SSP/R1, 2000l, and it's from santer-solarprofi.at they are not very good with technical english, but I'm not too bad with my German, so it wasn't a problem, and we muddled through. If you want to discuss anything else offline; costs, design, etc, whisper your details to me. Im happy to give you any "pearls of wisdom" I can.

Mike

The idea of these boilers I understood was to burn hard and fast to maximise efficiency then let the fire go out. By continually burning at a low efficiency you will be wearing the boiler out. They dont have the longest lifespans (7-12 years according to my manufacturer).

Do you know where your leak is going?

Hi

I had my plumber set up a Perge 20KW Boiler to a 750Litre Accumalator tank.
From my exprience so far i wish i went with oil, and this is why i am here.

It is costing an absolute fortune to run, this week alone i have used the equivalent of arounf £50 on logs. The Tank seems to take 3 to 4 hours to get up to heat (80 Deg), then when i turn on the Rads, they seem to draw all the heat from the tank leaving me with a 40 Deg tank and luke warm domestic water.

Do any of you guys have any advice as to what could be causing this.

I bought my entire system direct from Perge UK and i am starting to get the sense that i was ripped off, the hidden costs, the parts that were not sent out, the parts that need purchasing additionally etc etc..

By the way, the Central Heating is running off the storage water and the domestic is ruinning through a coil in the top of the tank.

Many Thanks, i hope i have not hijacked this thread, but i could not see how to start my own.

Hi

I am not sure as to KW requirements, all i know is that this boiler and tank are sufficient to heat 12 rads. As per Perge UK.

Never the less, i have used loads of timber and the tank set up does not seem to be doing it's thing. I am not really looking at the warmth of the house, i am looking at the running of the boiler...there are certain issues there...I think in any case..

Thanks for your reply..