"The R-value for wood ranges between 1.41 per inch (2.54 cm) for most softwoods and 0.71 for most hardwoods. Ignoring the benefits of the thermal mass, a 6-inch (15.24 cm) softwood log wall has a clear-wall (a wall without windows or doors) R-value of just over 8. Use the average width of your logs to figure out their overall R-value" I pulled this off the U.S. Dept. of Energy publication Energy Efficiency in Log Homes: (broken link removed). Add in your insulation R-value and you'd have the R-value of your walls to plug in your heat loss calculations. Being an older log cabin you might have issues with air infiltration (drafts) you'd need to consider, depending on how the walls were insulated.
Do more than one heat loss calculation and average your results. I did five or six of them and had one outlier that would have caused real problems if I'd used that calculation.
Some of the things I am looking for:
1) LITTLE TO NO SMOKE-
You should not get any smoke from a properly functioning gasifier, other than the first few minutes when you light it up before it starts gasifying in the lower chamber.
You can't smell any smoke outside from my Tarm Solo Innova while its running. I use 1000 gallons of storage so it burns full out as designed. It doesn't idle and produce smoke or creosote that way. No smoke inside either unless I get careless and leave the door open too long when lighting up a fire. Even then it sucks most of the smoke back in.
2) EASY TO CLEAN/MAINTAIN (I had the tubes with turbulators in them on my pellet boiler and I HATED cleaning them!!)
You have to get over that Patti. Turbulators are necessary to slow down the hot air that is heating your boiler water in the heat exchange tubes. Otherwise too much heat escapes up the flue too quickly rather than heats your home. Garns are designed differently so maybe they don't have them.
You can lay your turbulators on a big piece of cardboard and clean them with a broom. I remove the boiler's excess ashes once a week and scour the heat exchange tubes plus clean the turbulators every other week in peak burning season. An ash vacuum removes the remaining mess after most of the ashes are scraped out. A wire boiler brush on a rod turned by a right angle drill scours the heat exchange tubes in nothing flat. Honestly I don't like the job either, but what can you do. It's less annoying than paying the propane company every month.
3) LONGEST BURN TIMES POSSIBLE BETWEEN RELOADING (the fewer times I have to reload it the better! Right now, I have to stoke the Benjamin every 3 hours- not so nice when it is -30C at night lately.)
Roughly speaking I burn once a day when the outside temperature is in the 40F or above range and twice a day when its below freezing.The more storage you have the longer you can go between burns. Seeing as you're living way up there in Ontario you'd probably be in the two burn a day category with adequate storage for most of the winter. Its rarely below 0 degrees Farenheit in Virginia so I don't know at what temp you'd have to move up to three burns a day.
4) BEING ABLE TO BURN WHOLE LOGS OR LARGE SPLITS would be preferred to small splits like a Froling requires.
Maybe the Garn or Garn Jr. could pull this off. My splits have to be 6 inches (15 cm) or less. I burn mostly locust, oak, cherry, some softwood, pine and cedar, plus some unidentified species. I like some softwood right on top of the kindling to get a fire going. I vary the split sizes, but use more larger splits now than I did at first. I do mix in some smaller rounds, not worth the trouble of splitting, that have dried for a couple years. I burn about five cords annually to heat 3000 sq ft., but I'm in Virginia, not Canada,
5) PRICE
If i were you, I wouldn't consider a brand where there wasn't easy parts availability and dealer support. I've called Tarm Biomass in New Hampshire several times and they've always been great in figuring out installation and operation issues. I'm sure there are other reputable dealers out there. I'd also make sure my boiler manufacturer has been around for a long while and hasn't outsourced their manufacturing to Asia. Making a big purchase like a boiler off Ebay would be buying a pig in a poke. If you have any issues at all you will be out of luck. The Attack line is manufactured in Slovakia in Europe which may make it difficult to get parts or help, if there are no well established North American dealers. Maybe they have dealers in Canada. I don't know.
A good boiler is going to cost you, but it should last and pay for itself many times over. You'll notice a number of individuals who've been on the Boiler Room a long time started out with less expensive units, have ended up upgrading, and taking a loss on the cost of their original less expensive boilers. Consider the boiler as part of your mortgage payment if that helps. Once its paid off, you're done with it. You just have to make payments for a while longer to get a quality boiler. You don't really want to kick yourself later and have to replace it in the long run after its paid off.
I am afraid you might have some problems with your long piping run being undersized at one inch. There are several threads where this issue has been addressed. After you do your heat loss calculation, you can size your boiler, and then size your piping and circulators. There are threads on how to do that too. Then you'll know if that one inch piping is adequate. Heaterman was a great help in explaining how to do that for me in one thread of mine he kindly answered. Good luck Patti,
Mike
