Osby - Swedish Manufacturer

[sdrobertson]

If someone had a contact that they trusted I wonder if it would be affordable to purchase one of these cool boilers overseas and have it shipped.

 

[churchillrow]

We're looking at roughly 300000 btu which seems to be the upper end of the residential boilers.

If I recall correctly, Econoburn will build 500,000 and 1 million BTU/hr units for burning firewood. They're available with ASME rating, too, which is often required by certain codes.

in my situation I don't think firing 5 times a day as heaterman suggested Would be necessary for the garn would work as it would be paid staff stoking the fire and that is getting to be a full time job. If they can afford it we'll try to size the boiler so that their firing max 2x per day at peak load. Is it just my perception or are the garns more "plug and play" than the other boilers. Obviously you don't need to hook up storage and I've yet to see a "tuning your garn" thread.

By the way, where are all the self feeding cord wood boilers

 

[DaveBP]

KOB/Viessmann has an English site:

(broken link removed)

 

[Como]

We're looking at roughly 300000 btu which seems to be the upper end of the residential boilers.

If I recall correctly, Econoburn will build 500,000 and 1 million BTU/hr units for burning firewood. They're available with ASME rating, too, which is often required by certain codes.

in my situation I don't think firing 5 times a day as heaterman suggested Would be necessary for the garn would work as it would be paid staff stoking the fire and that is getting to be a full time job. If they can afford it we'll try to size the boiler so that their firing max 2x per day at peak load. Is it just my perception or are the garns more "plug and play" than the other boilers. Obviously you don't need to hook up storage and I've yet to see a "tuning your garn" thread.

By the way, where are all the self feeding cord wood boilers

I do not have one, I have seen one in operation and talked to the new users about their experience.

They were filling theirs with very soft greenwood. Twice a day. From what I saw and what I have read, 5 minutes.

For us it would be no real issue as if we are open we are right there to do it, if you have staff and a big site and they are stopping what they were doing and it could be a bigger issue.

Processing all that wood I think is a bigger issue.

How you cost your, or your staffs time is certainly a factor. Which is why spending $500,000 to produce 650,000btu's makes sense for the Rec centre, but spending say half that to produce half that make no sense for me.

Plus we do not have that money!

Viesmann has another subsidiary, Mawera? There equipment probably could self feed cordwood, but we are talking industrial sized boilers.

 

[Gooserider]

We're looking at roughly 300000 btu which seems to be the upper end of the residential boilers.

If I recall correctly, Econoburn will build 500,000 and 1 million BTU/hr units for burning firewood. They're available with ASME rating, too, which is often required by certain codes.

in my situation I don't think firing 5 times a day as heaterman suggested Would be necessary for the garn would work as it would be paid staff stoking the fire and that is getting to be a full time job. If they can afford it we'll try to size the boiler so that their firing max 2x per day at peak load. Is it just my perception or are the garns more "plug and play" than the other boilers. Obviously you don't need to hook up storage and I've yet to see a "tuning your garn" thread.

By the way, where are all the self feeding cord wood boilers

IMHO, the issue is basically that cordwood doesn't scale UP well - as the demand goes up, the time and effort to process and handle the wood gets excessive, plus stuffing it all into the boiler... Even sizing for only a couple burns a day doesn't help that much, as it is going to take longer to fill a bigger firebox, just because you need more wood...

OTOH, as I mentioned earlier, chips don't scale DOWN well - there is a certain level of expensive infrastructure that you need to support chips, and it doesn't make a good fit with a small boiler...

Automating cordwood doesn't work because cordwood is to irregular to work well with automation.... To automate cordwood you'd need a very sophisticated robotic hand and arm to deal with the different sizes and shapes in the pile, and very sophisticated multi angle machine vision with a lot of complex algorithms and fuzzy logic to figure out how best to fit each split into the firebox. Unless you are really fussy about what you take for splits, (which makes your acquisition costs higher) they will come in different shapes and lengths - round, pie wedged, trapezoidal, rectangular, and so on, not to mention changing from one end to the other, and crooked - when a human loads a firebox, he plays a sort of subconscious "Tetris" game of how best to place each split so that it will give a properly packed firebox. However unlike Tetris, the blocks aren't uniform, so there is a lot of "best fit" estimating involved - from a computer science standpoint this is a VERY tough problem... It MIGHT be possible to solve it today, but it would take some really serious money and effort, and I wouldn't put bets on it being successful any time soon...

Unfortunately Como and some of the other folks with large scale projects that have posted here, are at that middle size "dead zone" where they are at the upper end of practical for cordwood, but not big enough to be cost effective for chips...

Gooserider

 

[leaddog]

[

Unfortunately Como and some of the other folks with large scale projects that have posted here, are at that middle size "dead zone" where they are at the upper end of practical for cordwood, but not big enough to be cost effective for chips...

Gooserider

I have to disagree with that statement. I have a 40hp tractor and you can get a chipper for less than $2000. Gravity box wagons are a dime a dozen, 6in augars are also. There is wood material everywhere waiting to get chipped. Alot of tree people will drop off chips free. Just think of all the xmas trees that are dry and going to the landfills. Yes it might take some thinking outside the box but handling alot of cordwood isn't easy either.
With a chip burner that modulates you wouldn't need water storage, would only have to monitor instead of feeding it and would be using the equipment to move chips instead of muscle power. It would be more like a pellet boiler but not tied to fossel fuels. I could even get paid to clean up brush piles.
granted it's probably isn't for the small house in the city but for all the people out in the country it would be better than cord wood. Just look how corn burners started to take off. The problem was they were tied to fossel fuel and the grain got to expensive. Same with pellets. With chips anyone can get a small chipper and make there own. Of course that takes alot of the money out of things so the people that promote sales of boilers aren't as apt to promote if they can't make any money after the sales.
leaddog

 

[pybyr]

I think I recall pretty confidently that WoodGun has some boilers that can be set up for chip feed- and in the BTU range that might be useful for the application being discussed here. Check out their site.

 

[renewablejohn]

If someone had a contact that they trusted I wonder if it would be affordable to purchase one of these cool boilers overseas and have it shipped.

Dont even think about it. Your homeland security are so paranoid any item shipped to the states would be totally dismantled on arrival although I suppose we could supply an instruction manual similar to that found in an airfix kit.

I could have sold loads of the Danish REFO boilers to the states but the import barriers are to great if the manufacturer is not prepared to put in the effort.

 

[churchillrow]

It does seem to be a bit of a catch 22 when stuck in between cord wood and chips. Something I'll have to look into is fossil fuel backup/topup to keep the feeding schedule reasonable. If you can make 3/4 of your heat with wood you'd probably still be ahead of the game and i the center already has some pretty large oil fired boilers.

Augie