Im trying to figure out what would be the best system for me with money no issue. I am building a rancher approx. 1800 sq ft . on a slab with no basement. My walls will be 2x6 with r20 plus 2 inch Styrofoam on outside of walls for approx. r35 walls. I will have infloor pex for hot water in floor heating. My system would be outdoors approx. 75 feet from my home or 100 feet. Any suggestions is greatly appreciated whether I should buy OWB or gasifier unit,,most of my wood would be birch....I can build a small building say 10 x 10 for a indoor unit if that would be better...thanks for any info.
I'd definately second the post to contact a design professional who specializes in what you want to do. A good design will save you its fee many times over in performance of the product over time and save you a lot when or if you go out for bid. A tight spec will save you a lot of headache. If the bidders are not familiar with what you want done and you are building nonstandard, well above code minimums, the bidders will have a tendency to do what they normally do, which is conventional. It looks great for what you can see, but they skip anything costly in the places you cannot see, under the slab, under the siding, the radiant, the boiler, no one looks at the boiler except for the readers here. Don't let anyone talk you out of the radiant, just be sure to have outdoor air temp reset control over the loop temp , and zone it. You will want the bedrooms cool or no heat at all and the kitchen, bath toasty.
I'm leaning towards borrowing as much as I can from the Passivhaus standard next time I build. Pay now or pay later, much cheaper to pay now.
Some thoughts: There will be a lot of days where you will be able to heat the house just from the plasma TV, cooking, running the PC and coffeepot. Along this line there will be a lot of days you will be able to heat just from the standby losses of an inside boiler and inside storage. If you're buying cordwood, you have a perfect application for a pellet boiler, especially for the modulating fire rate - ability to turndown the firing, for great part load performance efficiency. If your design by the numbers shows you a few ton annually burning pellets, you would have to weigh that against the labor savings of pellets and the saving of a second primary heat system if you go cordwood gasification. The install cost of a pellet boiler over a cordwood boiler with storage and a backup heat source, the savings will buy many years of pellets. This is why design first and run the numbers, instead of building first and adding up the cost of building without a solid well prepared plan.
AC could be one or two small window units or a small minisplit for dehumiidification, so your primary heat loads, radiant and DHW are hydronic. You need a boiler for primary (pellets).
I forget what I read in the various threads, but if you were afraid of fire hazard from inside burning, that's a thing of the past. Modern gasification wood burners do not produce any creosote in the flues, just light noncombustible ash. Just run with smoke detectors and there will be times to supervise or maintain the fire, but not a fire hazard with modern high quality equipment
