Windhager BioWIN260 with wood pellet feed system and 3 Ton hopper (Waldo county - Maine)

[heaterman]

Time for me to get to work too.

Changing out a chimney in a single wide today, hopefully before the weather gets ugly here. Rain and high 30's this afternoon.

 

[Tennman]

Better than start from scratch I thot I'd resurrect this excellent conversation which was very informative.

Discovered yesterday a pellet manufacturer less than an hour from our home. Today I could go there and purchase bulk pellets at $165/ton. When I get to the point of buying all my wood that price makes burning pellets almost a wash. This discussion was addressing merging multiple energy sources then everyone needed to go to work. We will always have blow down and trees falling needing clean up on our property so a wood boiler has its place. But age, available time, my "free" labor moving off, and knowing I can get pellets down here is making me rethink our upgrade for next season.

For the foreseeable future, we're stuck with forced air although some baseboard radiant could be added downstream. So if we added a BioWin, is hooking it into our two vertical 500s a bad thing? We can isolate our storage to one 500 tank when we run the pellet. After finally getting storage I'm loath to scrap it. So what is the latest thots on merging multiple energy sources to include a BioWin? Discovering this pellet plant has turned my upgrade plans upside down.

 

[Karl_northwind]

That Shouldn't be a problem, maybe a little less than ideal as you would have storage losses from the 1 or 2 500's, and they're not really necessary with the windhager bio-win's modulation. burning to that size of storage I would put some 3rd party return protection in place instead of just using the control in the windhager. I don't remember what your distribution side is, but I put in 50 or so gallons as a buffer with air-based systems, and can get up to 2 hours run time per ignition, which is great. that's averaged out over half a year, with half of that time period doing only DHW. The supplier provides buffer tanks if you want.

and BTW, $165 A TON wow. we hear that we have it good in Wi, with 5 plants or more, and winter price is $220 plus.

K

 

[heaterman]

Let me know when you want it delivered. Tennessee is nice about the end of April. Lol

As Karl said, that amount of storage certainly isn't needed but if you plan on integrating a BioWin into the system and keeping the wood burner also as a secondary heat source I'd say run with it.
Shouldn't be tough to get it sandwiched on the system so it would function very well.

 

[Tennman]

Thanks guys. Yes HM we'll be talking. This time around I want the pros involved from the beginning instead of generous help from Hearth sprinkled over the first 2 years debugging the system. We will have a system design up front. Our 500 gal tanks have +4" of foam so if the main reason not for the pellet to feed storage is energy leakage, I'll accept that inefficiency for the benefit of the BioMass helping when necessary. Yeah... Tennessee isn't very nice for a nawthoner in August.