Biofuel furnace options?

[baskinglizards]

Hi everyone,

I just joined this forum and this is my first post. We need to replace our aging furnace and looking into biofuel-fired models; hoping I can pick your brains on the subject.

Our current furnace is an oil/wood combo located in our basement and is a forced hot air system. We bought our house two years ago, so we've been using this system for 2 seasons (coming into the 3rd season). After just a few months, we stopped using oil because the cost was absolutely outrageous - $600 to fill the 250 gallon tank and it only lasted about a month! :-O (Our house is 2200 sq. ft.) So we mainly used wood the rest of that season.

Last year, we bought a Breckwell Big E pellet stove and set it up in our living room, hoping to use it as our main heat source. It did a great job of heating most of our house, but certain areas (kitchen, dining room) didn't receive much heat and we soon discovered that on very cold days (of which we get a lot - we're in Vermont), we absolutely had to have a heat source in our basement, otherwise our water pipes would freeze up.

So we're looking into getting a furnace for our basement that would connect to our existing forced hot air duct work. We've looked at Traeger furnaces, Magnums, A-maize-ing Heat, American Harvest, etc. but aren't sure how reliable each model is. Another problem we have is our basement has a very low ceiling - only 69" from the concrete floor to the floor joists, and several of the biofuel furnaces we've looked at seem to be too tall to clear that.

Finally, we are also looking for a furnace that offers the option of heating our water, because our water heater is also dying!

Anyone have any suggestions? It would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!!
Julie

 

[hearth_login]

Check out http://groups.yahoo.com/group/altfuelfurnace/

 

[baskinglizards]

Thanks for the link. We did think of biodiesel, but here it costs about as much as oil does - insanely expensive. Maybe it's cheaper if you make it yourself. Definitely worth looking into.

 

[kinsmanstoves]

Any thought to a second Big E????????

 

[baskinglizards]

Where would we put it? You can't hook it up to an air duct system...

 

[kinsmanstoves]

All depends on how high your foundation goes up and where the ground is. You can drill through the foundation above the ground line.

 

[baskinglizards]

The issue isn't so much making it fit in the basement, it's the fact that pellet stoves really just blow air into the room, and we don't want to heat the entire basement. We want to hook it up to our duct work, so we need a furnace that can accomodate a plenum... I know Traeger makes corn and pellet fired furnaces; any experience with that company?

 

[Eric Johnson]

My only suggestion would be to look into some sort of an outdoor wood burner. Depending on your location, you might be able to run a relatively small one and use a forced-air heat exchanger to convert the heated water into hot air. That way you could heat your domestic hot water, too. OWBs get a bad rap because they tend to smoke more than modern wood stoves, and they are not as efficient (because of the unburned smoke). But they do have some advantages, one being that they are outside your house and therefore you don't have to worry about a chimney or increased insurance costs or ceiling clearance. Plus, all the mess is outside.

You might find a small OWB that works for you. And now they're starting to make clean-burning gasification models, which could be used almost anywhere, if you have dry wood. Kinda pricey at the moment, as the technology is just being introduced.

But I think a conventional OWB is at least worth checking out.

 

[baskinglizards]

Only real problem I see with that option is having to go outside twice a day to stoke the fire. I love using wood heat as a secondary heat source, because it's cheap, but what do we do when we need to leave for a week?

 

[kinsmanstoves]

Depending on your existing chimney you may use it. Sometimes a liner will be needed. Talk to an installer where you got the first Big E they should help you. Eric

 

[Eric Johnson]

I used to own a Marathon "Yankee Longwood" boiler. They're made in NY State. Mine was an oil/wood combo. I know they make a furnace, but I'm not sure if its has an oil backup. But good quality equipment at a good price.

Getting back to the OWB option for a minute: You can always put a cheap (and/or used) oil furnace in your basement as a backup. You've already got the ducting and the oil tank, and probably an old oil gun from your existing furnace. BTW, I'm not clear on what's wrong with your existing combo furnace. Is it shot?

 

[baskinglizards]

Our existing combo furnace is 25+ years old and it has holes forming in the heat exchanger. The burner on the oil side is also about to die, apparently. The furnace guy who last serviced it said that technically, we shouldn't even be running it because of the hole in the heat exchanger, but we figured it should still be safe to use it to burn wood, at least for a little while. (For now it only has one very small hole that we can temporarily patch up with a high-temp welding putty.)

We may very well go with an oil-fired furnace as a backup because of the automation component, e.g. when we need to leave for several days, and get a wood or corn/pellet add-on for daily operation. Since our basement was formerly an old dirt cellar (our house is 120 years old), maybe we could recess the furnace somewhat so it will clear the ceiling? The current furnace is actually set up that way now - when the former owners decided to pour a concrete floor, they poured it AROUND the existing furnace! This furnace is 48" tall with an 18" plenum sitting on top, so hopefully, we can find a wood or corn/pellet furnace with approximately the same dimensions...

The OWB option is interesting, though. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on the fact that you have to go outside all the time to tend to it.

 

[Eric Johnson]

Yeah, you need a new oil furnace.

My boiler is in the barn, which is attached to the house with a greenhouse, so I don't have to go outside to fill the stove. However, I do have to put some appropriate clothes on and walk out there in the cold, which can be an inconvenience. But I'd say overall, not having the wood/ash mess in the house or the occasional backdraft, or worries about burning the place down, makes going out to tend the boiler well worth it. Plus, I store my wood right next to the boiler room, so a season's worth of dry wood is right there. And you probably only need to feed it twice a day--less when it's warmer.

Think about it this way: With a stove you're going out to get wood and haul it to the stove on a regular basis, anyway. It's probably the same amount of work and exposure to the elements. Either way, the fresh air and exercise is good for you.

 

[baskinglizards]

Yeah, those are all very interesting points. Also looks like outdoor furnaces are actually less expensive than indoor models. How does the boiler part of it hook up to your house? Through underground pipes?