Indoor wood boiler choices

[tibikedad]

I have the dual-fuel (wood with oil backup) Tarm Excel 2200, the bigger of the two units, with a 820 gallon storage unit. This is my 4th season burning, and as long as I burn dry wood that has been seasoned ~1 year, I have had no problems with it. Except for when the weather drops below 0 degrees at night, I easily make it through the night with plenty of heat left in the storage tank. When the weather is in the 40 degrees F region, I can make it 2 days on a single burn (I have a 3000 sq ft house and keep the temp at 69 degrees everywhere).

The Excel has a separate section for the oil burner / exchange tubes, so there is no mixing of wood and oil. The oil can be set to kick in when the tank drops below a set point (I put mine at 140 degrees, and it rarely fires). However, if I leave the house in the winter for a few days, I don't have to worry about anything freezing.

No matter what boiler you get, you should invest in a storage tank. It makes the whole setup much more efficient, and you are not a slave to the boiler. If I could do this again, the only difference would be to increase the size of the tank to 1200 gallons. That would give me 50% more storage heat.

BTW, I also get all my domestic hot water from the storage tank. I essentially have unlimited hot water, a plus when you have teen-agers who don't care how long they take a shower.

One last thing ... don't trust a plumber to know how to install a wood boiler unless he/she talks to the Tarm technicians first. I had a plumber who "knew everything", and he screwed it up badly. It took me 2 weeks and tons of phone calls to Tarm before we was able to figure out what the plumber did wrong. The technicians were great, and I was thrilled with their knowledge and patience. In the end, the plumber fixed his mistakes, but if he had discussed the installation first, none of that would have happened.

 

[BioMan]

Don't buy a greenwood furnace

Im inbetween an indoor boiler and an OWB. I have a lot of pine and hemlock to burn. Do these indoor units burn softwoods efficiently? My other problem, i dont currently have a chimney. As these are pretty good investments, i was thinking that i could run a SS flue for the first couple of years and then get a masonary chimeny built.
Ive looked a little at the Tarm and Greenwood.

I would stay away from Greenwood. I bought a 200,000BTU unit 3.5 years ago and had nothing but problems with it. The company would not support their product and finally went bankrupt. Several of the employees started up again and are marketing stoves again but no matter what they say on their web site, they don't know how to make a good wood boiler.

 

[AIM]

Dredged this one up from the archives...:msp_w00t:

 

[winterpalm]

Tarm boiler warranty is no good.

I bought a Tarm wood gasification boiler 6 years ago and it started to leak after 4 years. I took the insulated side off and one of the welded “stay rods” where the inner and outer walls are held together was cracked around the weld.
I contacted Scott Nichols at Tarm USA and filled out a warranty form. I got a quote from Morehead Boiler to fix it and pressure test it.
Tarm said they would not pay that amount. It cost too much they said.

I then had to weld it myself and hope for the best. It stopped the leak.

I’m not happy that Tarm which is a 30PSI boiler tells me it can be welded by a non certified welder and Tarm won’t pay for a certified shop to fix this factory defect. I thought all pressure vessels over 15 PSI had to be welded by an ASME welder.
So I resubmitted a claim form for my time and haven’t heard back in 6 months.

So Tarms warranty is worthless. I wouldn’t buy one if they don’t stand behind there product.

I still need to buy parts so I don’t want to put my name here as you can imagine.

I added an e-mail from Tarm below. Note that they say there boiler is not a code boiler, but I see 30 PSI stamped on the boiler tag.

E-mail from Tarm back to my dealer.

Thank you for sending these over. I find the quote for repair welding to be a bit of an over-shoot. There are entire boilers that don’t cost that much to make (materials and labor) and we are talking about a pin hole leak. Moorhead Machinery is probably not the right place to go for this type of small residential repair. This company probably is typically performing repairs on multi-million Btu boilers that are located at power plants, and large commercial/industrial buildings. If your customer insists on using this company, please ask for a quote without the hydro-testing and code repair stamp. The boiler is not a code boiler and therefore does not need to be hydro-tested so that it can be code stamped. A new quote from a company scaled for residential work rather than power plants is recommended.

Feeling good about wood,
Scott Nichols
Tarm USA, Inc.

800-782-9927 x- 102