Outdoor woodburner

Log fires the easy way.

Aahhh, there’s nothing like the glow of a wood-burner to make you feel cosy and toasty. Ouch. There’s also nothing like a woodburner to give you loads of dust, damp, smelly wood, and yuck, spiders in the woodpile!

Not to mention you actually have to chop up all of those logs, or even worse, pay someone else to do so for you.

The answer is at hand – perhaps. Its an outdoor woodburner. Instead of spending money on something tasteful for the sitting room, with a slate hearth,and a smokestack in compliance with the building code, you could spend the dough on what actually matters, a huge efficient burner, which takes ANY size of log, and transfers the heat DIRECT to your hot water system and moves the heat EVENLY throughout your home.

The wood-fired hydronic heater (OWHH as it is called on the EPA web site) is in more demand in rural, cold climates where a steady supply of wood is available, though can be found throughout the US.

From the outside the OWHH (boiler) looks like a small shed with a smokestack located near the building(s) it is to heat.

From this �shed� a fire is burned that will heat water or water/antifreeze that will be pumped into the building(s) through insulated underground piping. This can then be integrated through a heat exchanger into a forced-air furnace, radiant baseboard, or radiant floor heating systems. The traditional type system is designed to run or seasoned wood to give the cleanest burn, and in most areas what can be burned is regulated. Though as the EPA has started a voluntary program to make these systems more eco-friendly we have seen wood pellet and corn versions which are toted as being �green�. Since both of these alternative fuels can be a burden to kepp up with additional attachments such as hoppers and bins are offered to make feeding theses fuels easier.

NB: since the stacks of these boilers are relatively low to the ground, an average of 6-10 feet, the smoke can become a nuisance as it tends to stay close to the ground. Make sure your system has the orange tag that EPA starting issuing last year to certify a cleaner burning boiler system. Then look into your local area regulations, before you decide to install this system.

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