Evening all, glad I stumbled upon this site & hoping someone can help, my brother makes furniture so we have loads of wood to burn, I have got a little villager at the moment & with the doors open heats the whole house, which is great (unless you are in the room with the burner & it gets a bit hot) I would like to get a new one with a backboiler to give us some hot water & maybe a radiator or 2. We live in a 70's house in cornwall with a normal electric hotwater tank in the airing cupboard & a cold water tank in the attic & currently have no rads, does anyone have advice on the best way to go about doing it & maybe a diagram so I can get my head round how it all works?

Plumbers & heating engineers are rare a rocking horse poo down here so I am going to do as much as I can myself & get it sighned off before going live & will get advice along the way.

My 2nd problem is my Dads house, they spent 5k having an oil burner fitted 5 years ago, it was always too hot & they used to have the windows open with the boiler on all the way tough the winter as even set on the lowest setting it was too hot, they have since given up on the oil as they are skint & have decided to jump on the free wood wagon from my brother.

We are removing the old oil burner & they have bought a wood burner with a back boiler, they used to run about 3 rads off it aswell as hot water, my question is how easy is it to change them over & how & also would they need to replace the current liner which was fitted with theoil burner? I heard that they would need to change the tank in the attic to a stainless one, is that right?

any help or advice on these would be very welcome.

thanks for reading
pete

hello again, I have just taken out the old oil burner & it has 2 ports on the back for the flow/return but the new wood burner (aarrow) has 4 ports & all the diagrams in the instructions show how to install using 3 or 4 ports but not 2?

any idea why 2 are not shown,

once again any help would be wecomed.

ta
pete

thanks Tony,
it has the flow going up through the hot tank in the airing cupboard & rads, my Dad thinks the rad system is a closed circuit, not gravity, as you can proberley tell I have not clue about what I am talking about but trying to get info on my Dads behalf (who has less of a clue, but won't admit it!)

does this make sense?
pete

Hi

I have installed and tested a low cost woodstove adapted to make it clean burn and added a carefully positioned back boiler. The back boiler feeds by gravity into a thermal store from which mains pressure hot water is generated via a plate heat exchanger whenever the store is above 50C. If below this hot water is heated by my gas combi boiler as per usual by switching solenoid valves. I have now added a second plate heat exchanger to feed heat into the gas central heating circuit (closed circuit) which is enough for three rads. My gas use is now down by 80% as the wood is free! and I do not require heating in kitchen were the stove is and in the room next door. I reckon the cost of the whole install was about £600 using as much eBay parts as possible and pluming it in my self. I have an option of solar input as the tank has a standard coil in the lower half. Just waiting for the price of evacuated solar heating tubes to fall before completing the system

Is or was the pump pumping water through the boiler?

Are the pipes that go too and from the boiler pumped?

small header tank with pipe over it = vented system.

Simplest and cheapest way to go would be to run the pumped heating circuit out of two of them and use the other two for gravity hot water.