Heating with gas/wood combo

[mac42]

I'd like to do get a boiler, hot water tank and wood-burning stove with back boiler and connect them together, such that I can switch between the fuels. I'm wondering are there kits that give you all the control gear for this? I rented a house when I was a student that had this arrangement although it was all based on manual valves and took us hours to figure out what we had to do to switch to wood heating. When we eventually got it working it was brilliant, although I think there was no control on the hot water temperature via the back boiler and it came out super-heated sometimes .

That was about 20 years ago. I imagine an arrangement like the above wouldn't go down too well with building control these days, so I'm looking for something off the shelf that does this with the control gear and valves and is relatively safe.

thanks,
S.

 

[dcawkwell]

Don't bother you will soon get bored with the wood burning stove.
Filling it, cleaning it, lighting it. No useful heat for an hour,
lighting it again, getting up to put more wood in it every 20 minutes.

Take quite a few out for people going back to a nice gas fire.
No mess, no lighting it. They just work. Wood burning stove is
the dark ages.

Wood stoves are very wasteful. A lot of the heat goes straight up the chimney.

 

[gremlin16]

http://www.h2panel.co.uk/h2index.htm

 

[mac42]

Don't bother you will soon get bored with the wood burning stove.
Filling it, cleaning it, lighting it. No useful heat for an hour,
lighting it again, getting up to put more wood in it every 20 minutes.

Take quite a few out for people going back to a nice gas fire.
No mess, no lighting it. They just work. Wood burning stove is
the dark ages.

Wood stoves are very wasteful. A lot of the heat goes straight up the chimney.

I think you're missing the point. Drinking beer is also from the dark ages, but people still like to do it, inspite of the fact it would be more efficient drinking vodka .

About burn time, if you pack a stove with large pieces of wood and close the vents it lasts to the morning, so that depends entirely on how much heat you want from it, and the type of wood you put in it, and the sizes you cut it. If all you do is chuck in kindling with the vents wide open I can see where the 20 minutes comes from. Most of the wood I've got has come for free from people throwing stuff out. If you take that into account efficiency isn't such a big deal. I suppose there is the carbon-neutral thing going for stoves (not the reason I want one), but the fact remains that if you grew up with real fires you tend to miss them.

cheers,
S.

 

[Boilerman2]

Have a look at the link below

This company manufacture a Thermal Store, which has up to 4 prioritised inputs, and also provides mains pressure hot Water as well

so you could connect in order of priority
1. Wood Burner
2 Solar Thermal (otional)
3 GS or AS HP
4 Oil or gas fired Boiler

www.chelmerheating.co.uk

 

[mac42]

That chelmerheating place looks ideal, thanks.