Wood Boilers?

[KingM]

Anyone here have a wood boiler? I'm thinking about forking out the $$$ for one. We got our prebuy for the upcoming season and it was $14,000 for October - April use.

Of course I use a lot more than the average user, having sixteen guest rooms and sadly, many guests are completely oblivious to energy issues. I go into rooms in the summer and find the AC blasting when it's 72 outside. The same type of person cranks the heat all the way up in the winter and then leaves the windows open. Most people are not like this (and never AZers) but it happens enough that it makes it difficult to do anything to conserve.

Still, with all our use, $14,000 is out of control. I figure the upfront cost should be worth it and would be better than raising rates to try to cover the shortfall. I just want to make sure the system will be reliable and that I can handle the hassle of constantly loading the wood hopper and hauling wood all winter long.

[Marc]

Lots of good information at www.hearth.com.

Check out the forums, particularly the boiler room.

I'll warn you that they're more biased towards the indoor, high efficiency, forced downdraft type boilers, but then again, so am I. You'll burn less, but it's more work than throwing hunks of wood in out door smoke dragons. If you want to be a good neighbor though, forced downdraft is the way to go.

Check out HS Tarm, Eko, Econoburn and Wood Gun. There's a guy on hearth.com in the boiler room (handle is nofossil) who lives in your area that uses an Eko to heat his 3,500 sq ft house, all his DHW, and a hot tub and goes through about 4.5 cords (well seasoned hardwood) per year.

I'll hopefully be putting in a Tarm or Eko in the next couple years.

Also to consider with these systems... they work best and most conveniently with high volume water storage, and I'd imagine for the size of your inn, you'd be looking at a system around $15,000 installed if you wanted to be able to run off of it exclusively. Still, if you could get away with 15 cords or fewer per year, even if you were buying all your fuel at $200/cord, you're still looking at a pay back period of less than two years.

[dmc]

I Europe they have hotel rooms with a switch that turns off the electricity to the entire room at the door entrance... I think thats a great way to save electricity...

[snoseek]

Originally Posted by dmc

I Europe they have hotel rooms with a switch that turns off the electricity to the entire room at the door entrance... I think thats a great way to save electricity...

Is it just me or do a lot of things in Europe just make a lot of sense. Everything seems well thought out and I can think of so many occasions where I would wonder why it can't be like that in America. I also like going into the store and buying a beer and cracking it while waiting for the train-Why would stuff like this need a law in this country is beyond me.


Sorry for the hijack-carry on.