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19 January 2010

The Garn, heart of the heating system




We have chosen the Garn for a variety of reasons:

Price
High reputation
Simplicity, especially important in Park County, can not quite be mended with a hammer but not a lot to go wrong.
Built in storage.
Ability to vent horizontally.
Will be burn pretty much anything, not sensitive to moisture etc.
Provision to add in Solar Hot Water
Ability to include electrical elements for our back up avoiding the cost of a separate boiler.

The big minus is the inability to autofeed. It would have been nice not to have to make a regular trip to feed it. It is not that time consuming but if we are not here we are more dependent on our back up heating source.

The cheapest autofeed wood would be wood chips, but with our harsh winters they would need to be stored in a silo that stopped them freezing into one big lump. I have yet to come across a system that is targeted at the residential rather than commercial market and is available in the US. Or will likely to be anytime soon. We are at the high end of Residential Boilers, there is some overlap, a small commercial boiler is six figures, well beyond our means.

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