I have been using this stove for a year on chilly evenings. I seldom use it during the day unless it is very cold outside. It was a little pricey but I could not find anything else that fulfilled
my requirements. I wanted an inset wood burning stove to fill a large fire place. I choose a boiler stove because without the water taking away most of the heat, the room would get far too hot. With this boiler stove, about 5kW radiates to the room, and about 25kW heats the water. The stoves hot water supplements my gas boiler using a heat ex-changer connected to the primary flow of the house central heating. The stove can be used with or without the gas boiler being active.I am impressed with the quality of the stove. It uses heavy gauge steel and is very well designed with manual flue and air intake dampers which I seldom use because the air intake is controlled automatically using a controller (not included). The plumbing connections are sensibly located and the air intake is well designed. It has an emergency thermal water dump in case the stove nears boiling point, which I triggered twice until I got the wiring right on the controller. The water in the boiler is always kept full by a dedicated header tank. The controller and the heat ex-changer are in the garage with the gas boiler, so the wiring and plumbing to the wood boiler runs along an outside wall for about 5 meters. The pipes outside are well insulated and the water has Antifreeze protection product for Central Heating added. The stove weighs 260kgs and required 8 men to ease the stove into position using scaffolding poles which can be passed through holes at the base of the stove. Avoid burning soft wood such as pine. Soft wood flares up and doesn't last long, and can smoke up the glass front. Use hard wood and don't fill the fire box much more than half way up. With pine I would burn 3 baskets in an evening, with hard wood hardly one basket, and the glass would stay clear. I have an electric chimney fan used when I had an open fire. This fan is very useful when starting the fire. It also sucks up the dust when emptying the ash box which is done every 7 days or so. Once the fire is established the fan is switched off. The stove door is 30 inches wide, and if the hearth depth is less, then hot cinders on the door inner lip can fall onto the carpet when fully opened. You need to carefully think how you are going to use the hot water. I used a controller, which can run 3 circulation pumps and has 3 temperature inputs. I use just two pumps and all three temperature inputs. The LED display is excellent and tells you exactly what is going on. The controller will modulate the electric air intake damper when the boiler reaches the set temperature. This works well so long as the fire box is not overfilled with wood. I used a plate heat ex-changer connected to my gas boiler primary system, for which there are no instructions. It is important the pump for the stove and the pump for the primary system start in the right sequence according to the temperature of the wood boiler and the heat ex-changer. Overall, I am delighted with the whole system and stove.
Stove expert replied:
Great review and a detailed installation set up, very informative.
We installed a Woodfire Evo 30 recently to serve an adjacent 2000l thermal store which in turn feeds underfloor heating for 140m2, 8 radiators, 4 towel rails, and hot water right round the house
. We retained the previous oil boiler as backup in case the stove (or the log handler!) needed respite. After 3 months use I can say that I am absolutely delighted with the stove. Its heat output is well up to specification such that, even in the current very cold weather, I can provide all the heat my house needs from a 4 hour burn each day. It will easily lift the average temperature in the store by 10c/hour. We have used no oil at all in the past 3 months. It is very easy to light. I have quite dry wood (chestnut at about 18%) and find one firelighter is sufficient - I do not need kindling. I don''t try to keep it ''in'' overnight - there seems little point and I think it would soot up if I tried. The glass gets some black deposits round the edges, but provided I keep the air inlet more or less open and the flu damper halfway or open it stays pretty clean. I've cleaned the glass only once in 3 months. The ash can needs to be emptied about once every 6 days. It's design is good and the process is quick, easy and clean. I have a Charnwood Island 3 in another room that gives you a face full of dust every time you open its door. Thanks to a clever arrangement with the flue damper opening the door of the Woodfire is clean. Chestnut spits a lot and some debris tends to settle on the inside of the door rim which seems unavoidable. I normally just sweep it clean as I go which takes seconds. It's hard to tell how efficient it is. I reckon I am using about 1.5 full wheelbarrows of chestnut a day at the moment. It was about 3 per week when the weather was warmer. Its appearance is very neat and clean. Ours is mounted in a plain white plaster wall and looks terrific. The stove does expand in use and the adjacent plaster gets pretty hot. The implications of this could have been spelled out clearer in the installation instructions. Our first plaster finish cracked off after a few firings as the stove expanded so we got the plasterers back and renewed it, incorporating an expansion gap of around 5mm between stove and plaster. There was little more cracking, but after a few weeks the heat began to break the gypsum in the plaster down and it gained the texture of orange peel. We then replaced the plaster for a 2nd time, this time with a heatproof gypsum-free render. This has been as steady as a rock. Among other things, it is worth making sure your system will operate by convection if you have a power failure, installing a Laddomat (or similar) to keep the flow temperatures right and having a pressure release valve with a clear flow into the drain. Above all, make sure access is possible to everything - we haven't had to tweak many settings in use, but there have been a few and I dare say some of the parts won't last for ever. I wouldn't be without a set of temperature dials adjacent to my stove that tell me the top, middle and bottom temperature of the water in the store. With this information I know when to stop feeding the stove, usually bringing it to rest with the temperature in a nice, reassuring 85-90c This stove does exactly what I wanted and was claimed and is a pleasure to live with. I am very pleased to recommend it. Steve.
Stove expert replied:
Sounds amazing and efficient, great comments.
