Wood fired central heating without electric

[Katymac]

I have a wood burner that fires out central heating

It has an electric pump

If the electric is off (longer term) is it safe to use my wood burner?

Nope - you've lost me again

you say your pump is on 24hours a day.

If you try to run it off a battery this will flatten it quite quickly.

I meant that if you had a pipe stat, it would start the pump only when needed, so the battery would last longer.

I am familiar with pumpless circulation, works OK for upstairs rads, not much good downstairs, but putting a pump in is likely to obstruct the thermosyphon/convection circulation, because it is fitted to the pipe and will be in the way when not spinning. I don't know how you'd design it to work. I expect an experienced stove installer would know how.

If you can get it to heat the hot water cylinder without a pump, and the family can cluster round the stove, that would be a big gain over people with no heating and no hot water.

I assume it's on all the time whenever I touch it it's vibrating

It's attached to the timer for the immersion which is also on all the time (I run a business from home & hot water gets used a lot) we are considering putting a 7 day timer on instead of a 24 hour one - but it's a lot of effort for not very much saving - but if I jiggle it about at all I will do that.

The wood burner does heat the immersion when it's on & it does that first before the radiators

heating water with an electric immersion heater is very expensive. I presume you have no gas.

Nope 10 miles to the nearest village with gas

This is interesting. We have a very complicated plumbing system totally baffles every plumber and this has been a problem for us when we have power cuts.
The multi fuel stove has a back boiler which heats the water and can kick into the CH system. There is a pump which detects overheating and starts to circulate heat around the radiators even if the CH is switched off. Our hot water tank is at first floor level and so requires a pump to get it around the house.
In a power cut we end up having to damp down the fire because the water overheats. One gravity radiator isn't enough to get rid of the heat and we have a tank full of hot water we cannot use because the hot water pump doesn't work.
PigletJohn Your suggestion could really work for us. We don't do DIY so I would have to get plumber though!
One question. If a portable battery could power the CH pump could it equally work for the oil boiler? Our oil boiler appears to be powered from an enclosed socket on the wall next to it.

yes but I don't know what current an oil boiler uses. It might be in the manufacturer's literature.

You could try something like this

You will need to know power used in 24 hours in kWh or fractions thereof, and also peak power demand, which will probably at startup when the fan and pump start running.

I expect it is wired to either an FCU, or a socket with an anti-tamper cover

Great, thanks for your help

Was thinking about this thread earlier today when I was wiring up the ups for the router and it dawned on me that one of those would be suitable in this situation

No I don't mean ups the courier in case your wondering it stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply

They probably are not as cheap as a leisure battery and inverter but we now have four of them of varying sizes depending upon what they are providing back up power for, 2 of them were a steal for the spec from a closing down auction at a local garden centre which they had powering the computers and epos till system and the other 2 were careful watching and waiting on eBay

They are basically a box you plug into the mains, and plug the item you need back up power for into the ups

They monitor the electric supply while keeping there internal battery charged and they instantly kick in if the incoming voltage drops or goes off

Would work really well for emergency heating pump circulation in a power cut, a case of plug in and forget and it's there when needed

Now I have yet another thing added to my amazon wishlist zombie !!(although those I could probably justify to myself as business related)

If you live with regular power cuts and use lamps around the house a lot they can also be used with them as they would stay lit and kick in when the power goes off allowing you to still see properly whilst getting torches and lanterns out, assuming you keep a torch or lantern handy near the lamp that is powered off the ups

Some of those things are 10 of thousands of pounds!!

I don't understand the size thing but I guess I can read up about it

Thanks for the suggestion

others are about £100 though

The real expensive ones will keep a full office of IT equipment going for hours, the cheaper ones will give you chance to finish your work and shut a computer down properly without it crashing and you loosing the work you are in the middle of

I got 2 that were 650 watt output from ebay for about £80, just a case of watching and waiting once you have an idea of what size you may need