Our Wood Pellet Boiler decisions.........

farmerboy

WHF wrote: »

Hi

Depending on the size of your house and estimated KW of energy you'll use, my advice would be to invest in a separate hopper. We have a 3.5 tonne hopper so always manage to get approx 3 tonnes delivered when we still have a .5 tonne as back up. It costs £205 per tonne to have blown in. In our first year we used 11tonnes but given a harsh winter I would anticipate using 13 tonnes. Basically it is costing us between about £2.5 - £3k per year to centrally heat and hot water. Our oil costs would have been £6k. Some friends of ours have a pellet boiler and didn't get a separate hopper. They really regret that now. They are forever having to fill it up and in winter were filling every other day. It is easy to forget to fill it too!!

We also have a 500 litre buffer which is superb. There is always a massive store of hot water available and this can be called on 24 hours a day. Once up to temperature (76-80 degrees C) it takes very little energy to keep it at that level so you don't need to have the boiler running at max for that long at all. You will need space for the buffer alongside the boiler.

The system fully installed with hopper and buffer cost £16.5k and is located in an outbuilding. Our RHI payments started last month and we receive just under £8k per annum, pretty much paying for the system over two years.

As I said before if you have the space, get a 3.5 tonne hopper and a buffer. You won't go wrong. The extra £1300 or so you will have to pay for the hopper is money well spent. You will make that back quickly with the RHI payments and will save money over time on the pellet delivery costs. More importantly you will save yourself a hell of a lot of hassle with having to fill you boiler up all the time. You will also need to have a large dry storage area for all the 10kg bags of pellets.

Hope this helps!

Hi

What kind of hopper have you got for that price? and what type of feeding system? Also who supplies your pellets?

Were having a Okofen boiler fitted in early October, and I cannot get the hopper and bulk costs to stack up. The cheapest hopper and feed system I was quoted was around £4000, for a 4t. When pricing the pellets the savings were around £10/t over bags and that was for a minimum 5t load, your 3t would be a lesser saving.

Storage and handling of the bags are not a problem as the boilers going in a 20ft square shed with access for the farms loader.

RickMoney

Also interested to hear the model of boiler you had fitted WHF

[Deleted User]

Bentleyboys wrote: »

Hi pgatens
I have a MCZ hydro installed for 4 years now and just self replaced the ignitor. It cost 25 quid picked up myself from my installer llani solar who are brilliant btw :-) I bought 2 so now have a spare

My experience of MCZ has been nothing but positive I think its more to do with the installer

same here, we also have a musa hydro installed 2010. We do get it serviced every year and the flue is swept at the same time. The ignitor was replaced this year as a routine, although we have not had any problems

Blimey some people are using loads of fuel. We use < 1 tonne per year and maybe 1.25 tonnes in a very bad year. We are now receiving rhi and getting £950 a year for 7 years.

For those of you having awful problems due to incorrect/bad installations, if you feel that you are getting no-where and have a file of evidence, then I recommend going via the small claims court. We did after a poor solar pv installation and we won