2 inserts or go with an outdoor boiler?

[ponyexpress976]

Recently relocated to a new house that has oil heat and hot water. Not really thrilled about the furnace set up but the house has a fireplace on the main level and provisions for a free standing wood burner down in the basement. The fireplace will be nice to look at but terribly inefficient. I've read about people having issues with two wood fired appliances competing for air and neither one working well. So my question is do I leave the fireplace as is for ambiance and tap in an outdoor system for main heat and hot water or do 2 inserts just for winter heat. What's a worst case scenario for all in cost on a boiler? The last insert at the old house was 5k installed.

 

[Deleted member 117362]

Have had an indoor wood furnace, fireplace insert and OWB now for 16 years. Will take the owb over all of them, just to keep mess, bugs and smoke outside. Other people like indoor stoves, to each his own. What brand to buy is a different debate. Not that bad to install yourself.

 

[crowbuster]

Same as duce. Owb for me. don't let anybody kid you....they go through the wood....and I love to cut wood

 

[Cody]

I vote keep the fireplace and get an OWB, ideal set up IMO. You'll have no issue heating the house and keeping the mess out, and when you want to enjoy a fire you have a fireplace.

 

[NSMaple1]

My boiler is indoors & I like it that way.

So this will come down to preferences, likely.

Keep in mind the wood you will need to put up each year - and don't skimp on or underestimate the cost of the underground piping. You'd have to price it out to see for sure but likely in the area of $15/ft.

But - you said oil heat & hot water. Do you have a hot water heating system, or forced air? 'Furnace' like you said usually means hot air - in which case I would also likely check out an indoor wood furnace.

 

[Marley5]

I like the looks of an indoor fireplace and for holliday burning but no heat to speak of.
Grew up with wood stoves.....hot in here, cold in here, smoke.

Burned a nice Clayton wood furnace for years. Stored wood just outside basement door and heated entire house evenly.
You'll need some kind of humidification system, preferably in ductwork.
And seasoned wood is paramount to avoid the dreaded chimney fire.

OWB for the last several years and by far my favorite way to heat my home.
Fill it once per day and no worries.
Simple common maintenance of checking water level and a water test here and there.
If you have access to wood, go with an OWB but from scratch you'll likely exceed $10K for unit and install, i did.

 

[saxman]

If the house has hot water heat the OWB is a no brainer. If you could get a bargain on a good used insert for your fireplace that might be nice for cool days and holiday fires


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[svk]

It really depends as there are pros and cons to both.

One of the best setups for indoor burning that I’ve seen is @muddstopper ’s home. He has a drive in basement and pulls a wagon full of firewood right next to the stove to provide several days worth of fuel with little hassle. He also has a hot water exchanger added on to his stove to provide instant HW during burning season.

If you have the 10k plus to install an OWB and don’t mind the trips to feed it as well as the extra consumption it’s definitely worth looking at.

 

[muddstopper]

Since SVK brought me into this, I will insert my 2cents. I really like my wood stove in my basement. True I can drive my gator loaded with wood right up to the stove, and I can heat my water in the winter time, but to do it over there are a couple of things I would and have changed. I no longer drive my gator loaded with wood into the basement. The thing was, I was usually toteing wood inside during winter and bad weather which means mud and mess all the time. I build myself two wood racks on wheels that I now just roll to the door and load up from the back of the gator and then roll them back to the stove. This eliminated the mud falling off the gator tires inside the house. Doesnt keep me from spreading wood chips from the door to the stove, but a minute of broom work takes care of the chips.

The second thing I would do is get rid of the free standing stove and install a wood furnace. The wood stove heats my house really good, but it relies on the heat riseing and getting thru the floor. I have a vent in the floor that lets the heat get upstairs, but this method doesnt heat the house uniformly. With a furnace, I could hook it into my current duct work and let the fan blow hot air into all the rooms. My wood stove currently means I have to open and close drafts to regulate the heat, with a furnace, fill with wood and set the thermostat and forget it.(not exactly forget it, but you know what I mean).

My personal opinions on OWB is I will never own one. First off,, OWB rely on electricity to get the hot air from stove to inside the house. Meaning in the event of a power failure, you either do without heat or you purchase a generator to run the OWB fans. Even a furnace in your basement will put out heat inside the house without electricty, might not blow thru your vents in each room, but it will rise thru the vents by simple convection so you dont freeze to death. Second, buring wood in a OWB just to heat water in the summer time is a waste of wood and labor. I can get 180 degree hot water in Dec and Jan from a solar water heater and I dont have to run a chainsaw or keep the stove fed when I would rather be fishing. The purchase price difference between a OWB and a wood furnace will heat my house for several winters using electricity. The only advantage I see in owning a OWB is it keeps the mess out of the house and you can use bigger and less quality wood for burning. I know a lot of folks just love their OWB and will call me crazy, but I personally know of several people that bought one and hate it, many have sold them and returned to a more conventional wood stove.

Like I said my 2cents and not saying I am right or wrong. With a basement, I would go for the wood furnace over the OWB everytime.

 

[Marley5]

Good points.

I personally would not own a OWB without a generator as mine is wired for quick hookup in the event of a power outage.
My entire house is hydronic so no fans and minimal wood consumption.

I will admit though, i thoroughly enjoyed my wood furnace, effective and efficient.

 

[blades]

Considering that the odb's that pass new EPA regs are rather few and far between right now and have ungodly price tags ( domestic mfg any way), not including install, I do not find them to be a good purchase - like solar about the time you break even it needs replacing. 10K would be a very cheap install more like 15 - 20k (because you really need storage for hot fluid to make them sort of efficient) everything included unless you are providing a lot of muscle. Indoor wood hot air units like the Kuma and such about a 4 hr main heat geneation tapering down in the coaling stages. Very similar to wood stoves. Even heat generation for long periods the pellet stoves still rein as king. Course the cost of purchasing pellets kinda negates the purpose. Some of the European units are light years ahead of US mfg. Parts become a difficult commody.
Then we get down to nitty gritty of installing a flue from the basement up or any where else for that matter - going up through the home can be extremely challenging- up the out side pricy as you need fully insulated all the way up. I have a 1990 built house- there is no good way to run a flue from the basement up inside, conventional furnace HE type exhaust through side wall, so no provisions were ever made for that . just some insight.

 

[rancher2]

Recently relocated to a new house that has oil heat and hot water. Not really thrilled about the furnace set up but the house has a fireplace on the main level and provisions for a free standing wood burner down in the basement. The fireplace will be nice to look at but terribly inefficient. I've read about people having issues with two wood fired appliances competing for air and neither one working well. So my question is do I leave the fireplace as is for ambiance and tap in an outdoor system for main heat and hot water or do 2 inserts just for winter heat. What's a worst case scenario for all in cost on a boiler? The last insert at the old house was 5k installed. Quote
You will have to decide how long your going to live there, how long are you wanting to cut wood. I wouldn't burn wood inside any more did that for 20 years I want the mess outside but OWB aren't cheap. I have run a Garn for 10 years and I like it heat my house,shop and domestic water with it. I did all the work and still ended up with $30,000 in the install but I heat three story house and a 30X60 shop.

 

[Huskybill]

I want to get a good quality insert for my fireplace on the main floor with a heatalator maybe a Vermont castings. And I was thinking about a soapstone woodstove for the basement. I have the vents in the main floor I just need to connect the duct work. I use a temp wood toploader wood stove in the basement now.

 

[muddstopper]

Considering that the odb's that pass new EPA regs are rather few and far between right now and have ungodly price tags ( domestic mfg any way), not including install, I do not find them to be a good purchase - like solar about the time you break even it needs replacing. 10K would be a very cheap install more like 15 - 20k (because you really need storage for hot fluid to make them sort of efficient) everything included unless you are providing a lot of muscle. Indoor wood hot air units like the Kuma and such about a 4 hr main heat geneation tapering down in the coaling stages. Very similar to wood stoves. Even heat generation for long periods the pellet stoves still rein as king. Course the cost of purchasing pellets kinda negates the purpose. Some of the European units are light years ahead of US mfg. Parts become a difficult commody.
Then we get down to nitty gritty of installing a flue from the basement up or any where else for that matter - going up through the home can be extremely challenging- up the out side pricy as you need fully insulated all the way up. I have a 1990 built house- there is no good way to run a flue from the basement up inside, conventional furnace HE type exhaust through side wall, so no provisions were ever made for that . just some insight.

I dont understand your comment about breaking even with solar. When it coes to producing solar electricity, you might be correct. Heating hot water is an entirely different matter tho. The first solar water heater I had the chance to work on was a buddy that wanted to heat his water to save on his gas hotwater heater bills. His system was pretty cheap to build. In fact, he way over build it and had to disconnect a few of his solar heaters as his water was getting to hot to have little children in the house.

His first solar heater was simply a pane if glass in a 2x2 ft frame with a few feet of copper pipe. The backing of the little heater was aluminum flashing painted black. He built 4 of these little heaters, connected together, and mounted on top of his roof. We took a old electric hotwater heater and cut the bottom out of it and installed a large coil of copper tube and welded the bottom back to the tank. The copper tube acted as a heat exchanger. The water from the solar heaters was circulated thru the copper tube in the tank and the tank was connected to his fresh water system and then to his gas fired on demand hotwater heater. As fresh water entered the tank it was heated by the hot water circulating thru the tubeing. We recorded 180 degree water at the tap and his on demand heater never came on. This was in Dec and Jan. He ended up disconnecting two of the solar heaters to keep the water from getting to hot. He did have to install a low voltage water pump to circulate the water thru his solar heater. He's a nerd and built his own solar panel to power the water pump. Anyways, I forget the total cost, its been several years since he built his system, but it was in the area of $200 and that included the water pump and the solar panel. His system is still working today. We did have to redo the hotwater heater tank as it rusted where it was welded and sprung a leak. I dont know how long it took to recoup his cost to build and install, but I figured my wood stove water heater saved me about $50 a month durning the winter. I think I spent $60 on copper pipe to build my exchanger so it about paid for itself the first month.

 

[homemade]

I say it depends on what equipment you already have. If you have access to loader tractor, dump trailer, then owb is nice to keep the mess outside.

If your a pick up and a smaller chainsaw, splitting maul kind of guy, then an indoor wood boiler would be the way.

They also make fireplace inserts with hot water heat capabilities.

 

[blades]

commercial installed photocell type system. a lot depends on area - don't stay to warm around here for very long per year. ton of plans for what your friend built- remember the ones in Mother Earth news back in the 60's-70's. There were hot air gain units as well. this stuff is called passive. Photocell type is active and you need to store the electrical energy. There is a a whole slew of numbers for gain vs ambient temp. on passive systems, temperature zone related as well. I remember one set that tracked the sun during daylight hours to get maximum gain/ electrical output, could be used with passive or active roof mounted systems.

 

[muddstopper]

Your talking electricity and I am talking heating water. The solar panel system that tracked the sun was a Zome system. I did the math on a complete system back around 1991 or so and the total cost was around $13grand. Couldnt afford it, but it would have probably paid for itself by now. I just did the quick and dirty math and figured I have used around $67,000 worth of power since then. Ouch!!!. They keep telling me that solar power is getting cheaper, but it seems to me the opposite is true. Its all the extra equipment you have to have that runs up the cost of going solar power. Solar heaters dont need all that technical stuff to work. You can make hot water in a bucket setting on top of your car in the sun. The passive solar heating only works if the sun is shining. I have been to a few solar project houses and they where very nice, but layout and positioning are so important to get the most out of such types of heating. I have even seen a hot water heater turned into a air conditioner. I never did figure out exactly how that thing worked. It took the heat out of the air to heat the water and would blow cold air into the rooms. The little heat exchanger thing wasnt any bigger than a bread pan, but his house was cold and his water hot. I need to go back and look at it again, the guy that had it just had it rigged with cardboard duct work as it was a prototype. That was a few years ago, probably find that type system on the market now, if it worked as well as it seemed to. Anyways, how did we get from insert's and owb's to solar power?? We didnt just hijack the op's thread, but we ran it off the road.

 

[blades]

only mentioning solar such in reference to owb that will pass 2020 specs noting that hot water storage is key to efficient operation of wood boiler inside or outside for even sustained heating same as solar heating of water. ya afer that rhings went south discussion wise . up down heat cycle -nature of wood heating in a stove or insert /hot air furnace- boiler avoids that but must have sufficient storage. dosent get as cold NC vs WI so here in WI tend to look at duration factors of heat availability .

 

[muddstopper]

Water storage isnt that big a deal for me. I used a standard 40gal electric water heater, (not connected to electricty) to store the hot water from my homemade heat exchanger. The heated water goes from storage thru my other "connected" electric water heater before going to the kitchen and baths. Water runs from my well into the storage tank before going into my electric heater. this way, I can keep it connected year round and in the winter time, any hot water used from my electric tank is replaced with hot water from the storage tank. Heres a pic of my heat exhanger I think there is 30ft of 1/2 copper pipe shrouded by thin aluminum sheet metal. I just hung this on the side of my wood stove. I removed the popoff valve and the drain valves from the tank and installed tees to connect my heat exchanger to. I reinstalled the drain and popoff valves in the tees. The water just circulates from exchanger to tank by natural convection.It will heat up pretty quick too. I thought I had a pic of the complete setup but I guess I dont. Anyways. there are times that my water gets so hot that the popoff valve will open and drip water on the basement floor. Easily cured by just using some hot water upstairs as the storage tank refills with cold water. I have to keep a bucket under the popoff valve just incase it decides to drip. Usually when it drips, I just tell the wife to turn on the dishwasher or wash a load of clothes. I really need a larger storage tank,not because I need more hot water, but a larger tank would probably stop it from getting so hot the popoff valve opens up. I really dont know how much water my little setup would heat, but I have checked the temps coming out of the storage tank @180*f several times. I would be very happy if it just reached 120*f. Heres a pic of the exchanger hung on side of stove, but not connect to the water tank.

 

[svk]

Bill, maybe you could find a dead hot water heater that had a good tank and hook it up in line for extra storage?