Heating System - Concept

There will probably more about heating than anything else, this is the most interesting aspect technically and the most challenging.

We decided at the outset that Biomass was the way to go, heating a very old building at just under 10,000ft at the foot of Boreas Pass economicaly was going to be a challenge.

This winter, so far, has been relatively mild. But with the wind chill we have seen -45F. Fortunately this is not common, January has seen a relatively balmy high of 40F, and low in the teens. And of course we get sunshine and being relatively far south, longer days.

Biomass in our case means burning wood, which there is a plentiful local supply. But all the wood is softwood, Pine and Aspen, which has a lower btu value per cord than more commonly used hardwoods, and of course we are at altitude and most information assumes burning a lot nearer sea level.

Wood comes as Cord Wood, Wood Pellets and Chipped Wood.  We will be using Cord Wood for reasons I will deal with in another post.

We have decided to go with a Garn 2000, www.garn.com. The Garn has a burn rate of approx 400,000btu's and a storage capacityu of approx 1,000,000btu's. Arguably we may be better served by 2 Garn 1500's, but then the cost issue arises.

We also need back up systems, the Garn has to be manually fed, so as we do not have access to Natural Gas, nor are likely to, and our guess is that propane will be more expensive than electrcicity long term, electricty it is. We have no oil deliveries here.

The system will be located in the extiting garage, the aim is eventually to remove the garage, too useful at the moment, when the equipment will be housed in its own small building.

This buildings roof will be pitched to the south and fitted with Solar Hot Water panels to provide a supplement in winter and hopefully most of our hot water in the summer.