Central Heating
Central Heating
Wood Fired Heating Oui?
Tuesday, 13 March 2012
We decided that it would be fun to have a wood burning stove. I did some research and discovered that it was possible to buy one also that acted as a central heating boiler. I’d never done anything quite like this, but went ahead and sourced one (in England) and arranged to have it delivered to France. The stove weighs 200kg, so I also bought a hydraulic trolley jack to move it around.
I also started buying vintage cast iron radiators on Ebay It’s amazing what you can get for ten or twenty pounds! They can be heavy...really heavy...crazy heavy.
I bought a central heating pump from Screwfix, and various fixings and stuff to connect the UK pipes to the French stuff.
Once the stove arrived at the house, it was a simple matter of building a gently sloping wooden ramp over the front steps to push it up.......
I plumbed the radiators in using surface mounted white pipes, from Brico Depot, which work with chrome fittings - all very attractive, but not very good at holding the water back. Who would have guessed?
The stove is designed to have two water circuits connected, a gravity one....where the hot water rises by convection, and the cold water falls in the same way, making it circulate without a pump..and a pumped circuit, to feed the radiators.
On the first filling of the system water poured out of every single one of the lovely chrome fittings, each one had to be carefully prodded and sworn at to seal the leaks. I nearly ran out of expletives!
Bleeding the system was tricky, but once it was done and the stove fired up aha heat...and not only that - heat in rooms that had never been heated before.
Since then there have been some glitches, the big freeze of March 2012 (-12 centigrade in the house), where the rads froze so hard that two broke (I had spares!) and most of the stupid chrome fittings popped apart. I have also moved the pump to make it more efficient. but apart from that, the stove just sits in the dining room reducing tons of wood to fine ash and sending a delicate warmths through out the cold back of the house.