Saturday, December 4, 2021

A new fireplace for next winter: A pellet burner

Late winter, our wood burner cracked at the back of the firebox, so we decided to walk the talk - the  sustainability/eco talk - and replace it with a more environmentally sound pellet burner. This is a fire, but it only burns pellets of wood, and it's electronic, so we can control the heat and turn it on and off from anywhere with the phone. The pellets are made from radiata waste at forestry operations, so no more wood stacking and splitting for us. Elbow says about time and thanks very much.

New fire coming in (with kitchen still life).


And on test burn.




The new chimney goes out the wall and up, instead of going up on the inside and through the roof. But, EXACTLY where it had to pop out sat the monster unit that drives the heat pump/air con thing, on a large block of concrete. We debated getting rid of the unit and having one form of heating and no air con, and decided against that.

So, air con guys came and disassembled the unit to temporarily move it away while the new fire went in and then they rejigged the connection and reassembled the unit on its block of concrete. Does it work when they plug it back in? Of course it doesn't. Expensive exercise. 

This is them putting the unit back, before they tested it and  we all went 'bugger'.



So now we have a heat pump/air conditioner that is only a fan. We'll see how that works through summer and next winter and if its any use keeping it just to move the air.


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