Anyone with a biomass boiler?

[Twoshoesnewshoes]

My oil boiler is on the blink! It’s about 18 years old so I think this may be it.
I’d rather not replace with oil, due to carbon footprint.
has anyone got a biomass boiler?
or LPG gas?
house is large 4 bed semi, two lbathrooms.
thanks x

Anyone?

Can you do a heat pump? If your house has decent insulation they are v good.

I had one and we changed it after four years. It was so much work. The last thing you want to be doing in the depths of winter or in the pouring rain is fetching logs or sorting pellets. It's also much more expensive now since you have to buy your fuel from certain suppliers.

Thank you!
@parietal I’ve been really put off by a few people in my village who could barely afford to run their heat pumps due to the electricity costs. Happy to hear others experience though.
@bluebirdy3987 i was looking at an automatic chip fed one, we live rurally and there’s always lots of wood for sale. Did you have to fill yours a lot?

Ours was a log one since we have woodland so our fuel was free. It was a pain in the arse. You could effectively load up the furnace with about ten logs and it would then heat the tank but it was a lot of work. The tank also needs to be large to heat the house and to provide your hot water so you need lots of space for the furnace and the tank and in the case of a pellet fed system the feeder and the store for the pellets. You now have to buy your logs or pellets from registered biomass supplier on the government list, you cant just buy from any local supplier..

Everyone I know who has had one has then had it removed. We have no mains gas so we have just reverted back to an oil boiler but we also have solar panels and batteries so we use electric as much as possible now (immersion and the batteries both used overnight on the low rate and then this cheap electricity stored in the batteries is used during the day). For most of this summer the electricity company paid me to power the house.

We have LPG and it’s fine. Quite expensive but cheaper than oil.
we’ve been waiting on having the tank buried as it’s ugly but it’s been painfully slow getting that agreed and now all the spray diagrams have been rained off the lawn 🤦🏻‍♀️

@PissedOffNeighbour22 that’s interesting, I think it’s possible to get ‘greener’ LPG too, do you use that?

I’ve been looking at lpg and bio-lpg, seems like it might be a good option?
anyone got a biomass boiler and like it?

Do they still pay the renewable heat incentive for biomass? Most people I know got the biomass system for the incentive payments. I think it's stopped though now.

I've never heard this about having to get logs from an approved supplier, and we've had a biomass boiler system for nearly 20 years! We supply our own logs via our own woodland, is that not allowed?

No I don’t think we do. We’re moving to Calor soon though so they may offer that. We’re with a smaller local supplier at the moment so can’t see them offering anything like that.

It's allowed if you are not claiming the RHI payments. If you get payments then no, the rules changed so that you have to use certain registered suppliers.

unless you get authorised to be an approved self supplier

We are going to get rid of ours after 18 years.
Pros
We made our own chip from our own trees and supplied others so it was free.

It has an enormous storage tank so copious amounts of hot water.

I like the eco aspects.
Cons
Finding a good fuel supplier is hard, wood chip boilers don’t like it if the moisture content isn’t perfect or the grading size is wrong.
It takes up a huge amount of outdoor barn space.
Check where the spare parts will come from, ours are usually from Sweden and can take weeks.

Servicing is expensive.
We had a fire in the wood chip storage area once when the automatic detection system failed, fortunately I spotted the smoke!
It’s hard work filling it up even with augers, elevators and blowers no system is perfect.
It’s surprisingly heavy on electricity to turn the augers.