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Disconnecting wood burner from radiators

1 reply

mindutopia · 24/04/2020 10:02

We are in the process of buying a house (paused now to to covid because the lender needs to wait to do the valuation - all fine, neither of us in a chain and happy to wait). The house has an odd set up where there is oil fired central heating everywhere in the house except the lounge and a study next to the lounge. The radiators in the lounge and the study have been plumbed in to the wood burner. This was done by the owners before our sellers (previous owners lived there 35 years, so I suspect in the end they must have mostly lived in lounge and room next to it and only heated those rooms from the wood burner, I guess this change must have made sense at the time).

But it creates the ridiculous dilemma that if you put the wood burner on (it's in a lovely huge inglenook fireplace, so would be a shame not to use it), then the room heats up from the heat of the fire and the radiators also come blasting on. Sellers put it on for us so we could see the wood burner, but it was like being trapped in an oven in there! I cannot see any scenario when I would need both a wood burner going and all radiators blasting. It doesn't heat anywhere else in the house except those rooms (rest of house is heated from oil fired boiler) and there is no way to heat those rooms except through the wood burner.

We want to plumb these radiators in the lounge and adjoining study back into the central heating and just use the wood burner as a wood burner. Has anyone done this? How much of a pain is it and what did it cost? Obviously, we would get a heating and plumbing person out there to look at it and give us a quote, but given the current situation that isn't possible, so just wanted to get an idea. I found lots on google about plumbing central heating into a wood burner, but none about disconnecting it and returning to everything being on the boiler.

OP posts:
Muchlywrong · 24/04/2020 21:37

Plumbing the radiators into the boiler system, shouldn't be too hard to do. It may mean a bit of disruption for you though as floors may need to come up and holes will likely be left in ceilings or walls. It will mean though, that you should get rid of a tank in your loft, which should help cut down on your insurance. Make sure that your heating system is able to deal with the addition of two radiators. This means that the boiler has a big enough output for the house and if you have a sealed system, that the expansion vessel is big enough to cope.
The wood burner will be a harder thing to deal with. It normally involves adding a sand mixture to the water jacket of the burner. If it is 35+ years old, I would recommend that you see about installing a heat only log burner.

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