Solid fuel heating system

jblakes

Afternoon all, 

We moved into a 300yr old cottage six months ago and it has as the title says solid fuel heating system.

I have a few questions, we have left over ovoid that we are getting through, problem is they don't seem to burn that hot, upstairs doesn't get much warmer than 18-19c, other issue is they don't burn for that long maybe 5/6hours which doesn't help over night. Can somebody suggest if there is better fuel to use?

Also there always seems to be air in the system, when I bleed highest rad, a ton or air comes out and continues to do so at a much slower rate, thing is when the pump pushes the water round (not sure though). It's this normal?, if not how do i go about sorting it?

Kind regards
James

MattyJ80

I'm not an expert but we have a solid fuel stove with back boiler that does our heating and hot water - been living with it for about a year.
We also have an immersion heater that comes on overnight on 'cheap' electric in the summer. As well as that we have an electric boiler, but have only used it once purely to make sure it would work if the solid fuel system was out of order at any time as its VERY expensive.
We also found the electric boiler introduced a lot of air into the system - we have a cold tank and header tank system.
I bleed the radiators every few months, and although some air comes out its not as much as you describe.

To be honest 19c sounds plenty warm enough to me - we're in the middle of the North York moors in a stone built house, so it can get pretty cold, but thats what jumpers are for
I would suggest getting a HETAS registered solid fuel engineer in to check the system and make sure the radiators are balanced - adjusting the flow and return of each rad to ensure optimum efficiency.

Our stove will happily tick over during the night as long as we load it up before bed - you can also bank it up on one side (basically pile up the hot ovoids and ash) and then in the morning spread it out, riddle it, throw on some kindling and logs, open all the air controls and away it goes.
We always had combi boilers before, so it does take some getting used to, and is a bit of extra work. If you can get a free supply of firewood then all the better - we're about to take a few trees down so hopefully once seasoned, we'll have a good supply for next year and the year after.