What about pellet, chip, gasification and biomass boilers?

Pellet stoves with boilers come in many shapes and sizes. They may look quite like a contemporary woodburner, designed to be seen and enjoyed, or they may be designed to be installed in a shed or utility room, and look more like 'white goods'. Wood chip boilers, gasification boilers, and biomass boilers generally look like 'white goods' too and are reasonably large.

What all these appliances have in common is that they are much more automated than the traditional woodburner. Some can feed themselves fuel by the use of an auger taking fuel from an internal or external fuel hopper, whilst some still need manually filling. Many, however, are of a size which means that they might only need filling up once every 1-3 days.

Automatic ignition, controlled and very efficient combustion, timed operation are all common features of this type of boiler.

Whilst some pellet stoves can be simply installed into a heating system many of these stoves work best in conjunction with a heat accumulator tank so the initial cost of the system can be relatively high with a rough idea for the price of a gasification boiler and accumulator tank starting at £5000 and working up quickly.

Having said that these types of boilers are very convenient, efficient, and can provide for any heat output you could conceivably need for domestic use.

If you do decide to go for a pellet, wood chip or biomass boiler then do make very sure that there is an engineer on call to service your boiler and fix it if and when it goes wrong, and also that your supplier has a good stock of spares in the country.