Thread: Wood stove with hydronic heating

Hmm, never seen it Steve, but it'd be similar to boiler heated hydronic, which I have worked on.

The inslab piping, manifolding and pump setup would be the same, just that your hot water source is slightly different when using a wetback.

I can ask a master plumber mate who has only just moved from Jindabyne to Canberra.
If anyone has done it, he would've.

Check out the following. There are quite a few available and a Wise unit is the one I’m thinking of installing. They are based in Albury.

Albury Consolidated Industries

I have done a few electrical in floor heating installs and would advise that if you go ahead , keep a very close eye on your grano workers , they tend to be a bit rough & you only get one go at it . damage the pipe work and it is all for nothing .

I have found a roof fan which has summer and winter will move a lot of hot air around the home.
If you are on a new build it is more important to get your main living rooms to the north with the correct eaves ratio, this will heat up the house a lot on a sunny day in winter.
I put the hydronics coils into my floor when building but have never bothered to hook it up as the house is very warm due to the north facing windows.
There are several good books on building energy efficient houses and the stuff works but it does take planning

Ian
bittern

I have lived with such a system for 23 years, The system has performed faultlessly. Uses a Stanley kitchen stove to provide the heat. Also heats the hot water when the sun does not (has a rooftop collector). House insulation is, of course a prerequisite for any heating system to do well.

You need to get the concreter, plumber and electrician on side, and most importantly, you need to get an experienced system designer - ours came from Wangaratta in Victoria, and you can expect to find them close to the mountain areas of Australia.

In Canada a lot of rural people use an "open" boiler system.
It is a wood heater (using either coal or wood) with a water jacket - but it is not a sealed system.
The boiler is usually kept in an out building though and the water is plumbed to the house but they use above floor heaters to run the hot water through.

Our neighbours have a gas fired under floor hydronic system for heating. His father use to work in the industry for may years and now is retired and he designed the system and our neighbour says it turned out to be cheaper to run than what they anticipated.

We did some investigating when we were looking at building a house in Murrumbateman. Our experience was that perseverance was required to get around the "just put in a split system" brigade, since then I have heard that a friend near Blayney who converted an old shearing shed to a house has the entire building heated very efficiently with a wood fired hydronic system. The trick is finding a good team who can install it (or provide guidance)

Regards,
Tote

Just to mention a few of the features I would not have thought of -

1. You need header tank with automatic filling to replace any evaporation, and overflow due to expansion.

2. Need thermal switch on the riser from the stove to ensure the circulating pump runs when the water is heated to avoid boiling in the system. It also switches off the circulating pump, saving power when the fire goes out. Mine is more complex, as it also heats the hot water, and uses a second switch to see it does not switch on until the hot water is hot.

3. The system need to be designed without possibility of airlocks.

4. Mine has multi loops with control valves on separate circuits to heat different bits of the house by different amounts. I have not really used this.