Last summer we moved into a house which only has electrical heating and hot water. Being a stw member I also have a log burner!

However despite the electric heaters being modern, our annual energy review has shown we are using mega amounts of kWh !

There is no wet system in place. How much disruption is it to get radiators on the walls?

Then to the main event, has anybody installed a wood pellet boiler? The running costs seem small and the rhi looks like a good incentive. In the real word, how much does the rhi pay you per annum? I know it depends on property efficiency but a ball mark would be handy!

How expensive and easy to source have the pellets been? I was thinking of getting a simple system where I pour bags of pellets in every 10 days or so.

Any problems with wood pellet boilers? They seem a better option than oil at the moment.

Thanks

Yes. Travelling atm so can post in more detail later. Smudger and bear in here are pros unlike me

Quite common round here.

Space for the hopper will (possibly) be an issue. Depending on rate of consumption/time between fills.

Think most who have them near me do a twice weekly fill and a weekly “clean” in the winter and a weeky fill/fortnightly “clean” in the summer.
I say “clean” cos as far as i can tell it takes about 2 minutes, including walking down the basement and back…… 😕

Watching with interest as we are in a similar position of having no wet system. Was considering electric boiler but others on here eg Stoner suggesting ashp’s. Wood pellet boilers also of interest depending on costs and repayments.

One of my customers had one fitted, works well, but the company installing it went bust, but luckily the chaps who installed the thing carried on with the maintenance.

The pellets are cheaper if you have a large storage shed so they can be blown in as opposed to bagged deliveries

Yes. We’ve had a Windhager for 5.5 years now. Really impressed. It was a straight swap for an oil combi but now we have a hot water tank too (high pressure hot water).

Pellets haven’t gone up in price for 3-4 years I’d say. At the time the cost was slightly less than oil but oil is dead cheap now, or was. We have bagged pellets and get them a tonne at a time. Hopper takes 12 bags to fill, couple of times a week in winter once every 2-3 weeks in summer. Really tangible measure of how much fuel you’re using. Cheaper to buy bulk and loose but then you need storage that can receive blown pellets. There’s an attachment for our boiler that allows the pellets to be pressure fed so you don’t need to empty the bags in.

RHI has changed now but we got the cost of the installation, plus the cost of the fuel for 20 years paid quarterly for seven years. There’s a calculation based on how efficient the house is but we get almost the whole cost back.

Compared with oil it’s much cleaner and more pleasant. The ash needs emptying every couple of weeks in the winter but that is just opening it up and chucking it on the compost heap. The Windhager control system is immensely complicated but works really well once you’ve got it set up. Really clever. There’s a little smoke when it fires up but nothing noticeable when it’s going.

Ours works just like a normal boiler, ie it comes on on demand. Some are set up to heat a big tank of water to store the heat which is then used to heat whatever needs heating. That way the boiler is on for a longer period to heat the big tank up rather than being on and off like ours is because most of them are not designed to do that.

Stoner will have graphs and all sorts!

Just thinking out loud here but if radiators, etc would be impractical to install, would storage heaters and PV be a decent solution?

My neighbour has a log powered boiler, which has a decent sized pump house containing the boiler and a huge thermal store. He has solar panels on the roof which keep the thermal store topped up. Inside the house, there is a good area devoted to various manifolds, pressure vessels and pumps, which makes their utility room look like a submarine’s engineering department. The system works well, and powers underfloor heating, DHW and rads.

It uses logs like you wouldn’t believe, which he insists on cutting and splitting himself. A good chunk of his leisure time is spent processing logs.

Don’t discount an oil system – much, much cheaper than biomass to install and no less disruptive to install rads and tanks.

Your epc determines the payment so you should have one from your purchase, but when applying you do need an up to date one. See here for Scotland https://renewable-heat-calculator.service.gov.uk/EnterDataFromEPC.aspx

Better than oil if your payments are enough plus I guess you are doing your bit as well.

We have a Klover 120 which is like a modern aga linked to an energy store. Bloody love it but it does take a while to get used to it.

Only thing that annoys me is that to keep getting RHI we can’t add extra heat sources to the energy store. Seems a bit weird as I’m allowed to have an electric immersion but not solar thermal.