Help with fitting a Wood burner heating system? Help and information on all topics relating to your central heating, air conditioning and ventilation issues.

[rich.skelton]

I am fitting a wood burner with a back boiler to replace my old oil boiler. All the pipework is now complete but i am struggling to work out a simple system to turn the pump on and off remotely for the heating side of the system.
I don't feel the need for a room thermostat or timer as when the wood burner is on i want the heating on (Potentially 24/7). Can i use pipe thermostats so when the pipes get to a certain temp the pump is switched on and so also the heating. When the pipes drop below a certain temp the pump would switch off so only heating water by gravity feed. This sounds to me like the opposite way round to how pipe stats are normally used.
I could just have a switch but this would then continue to pump cold water round the house if the wood burner died down too much overnight.

Any ideas.

[Lymp]

Hi,

1) I am just about to fit a wood burning stove, but I can't find a pump to specifically boost the gravity driven flow between the boiler and the hot water tank. what does the industry call it? Where did you get it? My Google searches all refer to central heating (recirculation...?) pumps.


2) Switches - for both c/h and the above "boiler" pump. Yes - same problem as you.

For now, I am just going to switch the c/h pump on and off manually. I'll probably just turn it off before someone wants a shower, and certainly back on again if the water starts to boil in order to dump the heat! Should be fun in summer.

Eventually I'd like to attach thermometers to the cold inlet to the stove, and the stove itself.. Maybe there is something out there which measures the inlet water temp and the stove temp, and switches the heating on depending on those. Still searching for that though.

regards

Steve

[rich.skelton]

I am led to believe you can't have a pump on the heating side of the hot water. this must be gravity only otherwise if the pump failed, you could boil your back boiler and potentially crack or otherwise. You can pump the clean hot water to your taps. is this what you mean. You must also have a place to heat along with your water on the gravity system.
I have had to move all my heating system to accomodate this. There are such things called pipe thermostats. they fasten to the pipe and you get high temp ones and low temp ones. I can only presume these turn pumps off when too hot and on when too cold on a standard system.
I wondered whether you could use a tank thermostat and attach this near your burner. again though, this normally turns things off when hot and on when cold. We need the reverse. Do you think you could wire in backwards to give the opposite effect.

[zebb]

Hi , Google H2panel.co.uk you may find it useful :)

[doctordiesel]

woodburner pump I have a woodburner with a back boiler I have put a normal heating pump on the inlet side of the boiler with a pipe thermostat to turn on the pump when the water gets to 55 degres as this is the temp recomended for my fire the back boiler is made of welded mild steel so I took the veiw that if there was a power fail no damage could come to anything as the system is vented and any steam or pressure is vented outside the building the system uses 22mm copper tube running 3 big radiators and has been working for 3 years also I had the fire burning flat out with the pump turned off and as predicted the water boiled and a big cloud of steam came out the vent this is not the recomeded way to install but it works