Advice on Choosing Pellet Boiler

11/09/2009 - 06:12

Hi All -I'm new to this forum - I'm renovating a village house in a hill village in Northern Tuscany, and have been here for just over 3 years.At the moment I'm looking to install a pellet boiler to heat my house, which is around 85 sq m and 230 cu m. I could readily buy a Laminox 18kw at around €2500, and there are various other makes in the 14-20 kw range at prices up to €3500 or more.Now, I don't particularly want to spend more than I need to, and I would buy the Laminox if I knew it would be satisfactory. Has anybody used one of these, or a small pellet boiler of any other make? Any help in reaching a decision would be much appreciated.Many thanks,John

Topic

Property

Renovating

Location

Tuscany

Comment

Are you looking to run a central heating system or have warm air heating or just convection heating. I think that there are several 'Horses for Courses' so what you plump for should fit that bill. We have a small pellet burner a Pallazzetti (cost about €1300) which just heats our Kitchen/dining room teh rest of the house we have wood burners. Look in to what your requirements are before deciding on a pellet stove as like everything else you get what you pay for.

Yes, I'm looking to run a central heating system (this already exists), therefore am looking for a caldaia/boiler.

Hi John and welcome. Have you considered a gas system? Is it possible in your area? We installed a new caldaia, had it connected to mains gas (which was available with a very small installation) and we paid for the lot much less than the cost that you quote for a pellet boiler (also have a look at the cost of the pellets and do some calculations there). If mains gas is unavailable look at the option of having a tank as gas bottles are expensive. My advice is to explore all possibilities.

Thank you for that Gala.In fact, I already have a gas system which was in the house when I bought it. But bottled gas is my only option, as there is no mains gas in the area (Vico Pancellorum). It is not possible to have a tank, as I have no land beyond the house.In addition to that, a couple of years ago I installed a wood-fired caminetto connected to the central heating system. This is very effective, but I had not understood the sheer volume of wood required to keep it going. At the time I had the use of an adjacent cantina for wood storage, and easy access for wood delivery through the neighbouring property, but the owner (who lives overseas) has not allowed the storage and access for some time now. The caminetto is therefore not practical for me to use, and my intention is to try to sell it.Hence my intention to install a pellet caldaia. I would still have to carry bags of pellets up to the house, but these are a lot easier to carry than firewood, and I wouldn't need to store vast quantities.

As Gala said it is worth looking at costs as Gas is now looking an attractive alternative to pellets. Wood is now expensive (it costs neighbour of ours nye on €1800 a year on wood heating caminetto) and as pellets are about € 4.50/.80 a bag they are getting more expensive. Even gas in bottles (you can get large ones around here) may be a cheaper option; delivered to your door in Vico.

Hi john-what is a caminetto and can it be attached to any central heating system/ I might be interested in buying it off you?i havent got your wood storage problem and aren't there year round. Why did you neighbour change the deal if they live abroad-what a painciao Shas

Hi Shas - A caminetto (in this case) is a steel box with a glass door which is meant to fit inside an existing fireplace (or an enclosure could be built around it) and it heats water for radiators and domestic use as well as the room in which it is located. Mine is a Jolly-Mec 29kw, dimensions 800 wide x 650 high x about 550 deep. It came complete with 2 pumps, expansion cylinder, heat exchanger for domestic water, various safety valves and a little electronic control box. Cost was about €3500 (not including installation) in 2007, but I guess its second-hand value is somewhat less. If you're interested I have enough firewood to demonstrate it in action - send me a private message if you like.When I bought the caminetto a friend of mine was renting the next-door house, and he was happy to let me use the cantina and access. Inadvertently, I introduced him to a single lady in the village, and in no time he had moved in with her...........must be a lesson there........ Anyway, the owner of the house made me remove my firewood from the cantina, and installed locks on the gates.Ciao JohnPS The caminetto is meant to be used with a normal central heating system, either stand-alone or with another boiler - for instance, I have a gas boiler on the same system.

I thought about then rejected a pellet boiler because of the difficulty in ensuring a dry storage area for the pellets. As I understand it, you'll need a lorralorra pellets and buying them by the bag isn't the most cost effective way of doing it.However, you may well be more advanced in Tuscany than we are in Marche, so I'm not saying "don't do it", more asking how you've overcome that particular issue

I have a largish ingresso, and my intention is to partition off a part of it for the boiler and pellet storage.

we have a pellet boiler as our main hot water and heating system for the house all year round... anual running cost 900 euro plus the electricity consumption i guess ...but that is just to drive pumps and motor for feeding pellets ...all very low consumption.. we heat around 175 m sq of the house... so about 375 m cu we but roughly 300 x 15 kg of pellets a year.. we have storage so we order them all at one time and maintain the house at roughly 21 c during the winter ... ours is very much a functional type boiler with a hopper beside in which you load around 6 bags of pellets at a time..however have looked at the type you mention and in reality they are quite common and offer good alternatives to either town gas or bottled or wood.check max consumption figures..ie i think around 3-4 kgs an hour and think that this means loading in at least two bags a day.. so make sure the pellet capacity is high as poss..some take around 30 kgs ..so only 1 day..at highest settingswe paid this year euro 3.10 per bag.. 40 cents a bag cheaper than last year..but figures quoted suggesting 4 euro would be a fairly accurate guestimate of what you should be basing costs on... there is no reason at all that they should increase more than any other fuel source as wood is a common building material worldwide and have seen no mention of it being replaced as a source.. forestry and the sustainable management of is a growing business and is one of the few renewable energy sources grown on ground that is little use for anything else...our boiler can also burn wood ... maize and any other material suitable for these things .. pellets are just the most efficient to use it in terms of waste produced... it can run a month with residue of about half a bucket of ash i guess..as regards bulk loads of pellets i think they are rare.. bags in 15kg sizes are all that i have seen... and there would be marked difficulties in any other form as water and or damp makes them swell straight away and you are left with a mound of damp sawdust...we ran our gas boiler ...we have tank gas... for a weekend...we are trying to empty it as we have a new in ground tank... for 5 days keeping the same temp as our pellet boiler and we used 75 lts of gas .. the pellet boiler would have used 5 bags.. last time we bought gas...2 years ago now it cost almost a euro a litre.our last house had mains gas... and i can happily look back on those bills and have them as a thing of the past... yearly runing costs of around euro 2000 and being careful with temps and as a backup 30 quintale of wood for the fire.. about 400 euro worth... so i am happy with pellets.. a bit of work carrying, storage for 50 bags or so would be ideal as a minimum...... and also if this is to be your main heating supply a local reliable supplier with storage where you can arrange ...paying in advance to have maybe 2 or 3 pallets kept for you.. buying in summer or late spring can reduce pellet per bag cost down to euro 2.50 but these people sell to make space so you have to take them away quickly... however as an idea our footprint of storage for one years heating/ hot water.... being around 10 m sq .. we stack them high finally when estimating all the costs of your boiler ... make sure the pumps are included.. and the flue costs..we have a stainless steel liner all the way to the top of the house.. they need efficient outlets anyway my thoughts and our costs... hope it helps another thought... just to maybe make costs more comparative we live in Abruzzo, coastal side of the mountains...so weather is a bit different as we are further south... a bit like comparing maybe Manchester to London... so you might need to factor in plus 10 % or so as regards costs

Many thanks Adriatica for your very helpful reply.Your experiment seems to indicate a running cost for pellets of around one-fifth the cost of (tank) gas, which fits in with what I would have expected. Speaking of "being careful with temps", I had my thermostat set at 13° last winter (using bottled gas), heating the downstairs only, and the cost was around €3,50 per day, or equivalent cost to 1 bag of pellets per day - I would hope to get a lot more heat out of a bag of pellets! Your 21° sounds like pure luxury!One factor which I think I need to look at when choosing a pellet boiler is the cleaning routine - a couple of anecdotal reports indicate a big difference in the amount of work required for different makes (the reports refer to stufe which heat water rather than caldaie, but the principle is much the same). I really need to see the boilers in a showroom and ask searching questions.........

Absolutely right. However the auto cleaning boilers might be two or three times the price of the more simple ones! You may find it quite difficult to get cleaning routine information out of a supplier before commiting to buy though!

Having collected and compared data from various sources I have compiled a table of energy costs for just about anything. It is in the form of a bar chart showing how many kW.hrs €1,000 will buy you. I'd be happy to send a copy to anyone who PMs me. The answers to some of the conversations here are that wood reigns supreme with over 25,000 kW.hrs - enough for a year of heating. Assuming you burn wood anyway for the joy of the flames etc it would be hard to pay quite a lot more for pellets.... they will get you 14,000 kW.hrs for €1,000. When you get to grips with all the facts in an orderly way you end up with the solution that so many people are installing - and talking about - around Umbria and Tuscany. Integrate a wood stove, some cheap solar panels and a heat bank and you'll have good heating at a minimal cost. In case you are wondering, pellet stoves are not the next best thing to wood. They are comfortably beaten by heat pumps which have no cleaning out issues or storing fuel and about as maintainance free as your fridge. I would urge you not to base your heating strategy on gas as there is some chance of all gas systems being redundant over the next few years. The Russians have already shown us that they can fiddle with supplies and I hear that the supplies do not match expected growth in demand.

You also need to consider if you can put the boiler well out of the way as there can be noise .That's the same with any type of boiler though.Having no spare room we will need to buy a boiler that's inside a pellet stove.These are fairly common in Italy but cost a bit more than a boiler you can hide away such as the type Adriatica has.Most of them are very fancy not really in keeping with the rustic appearance of our house so we continue to look for a plain cast iron one with no embellishments! Unfortunately these seem to be sold only in the US.