Why heat with wood?

Because it's economical:

Forests across Europe are capable of producing far more wood than can be used at this time. That means we can rely on the price of firewood remaining stable for the foreseeable future. You'll find trees growing close to home, and logs are easy to transport and easy to store. Wood is a great fuel and a wood fire produces a cosy, homely atmosphere.

During the growth period, trees store solar energy for us to release when we burn logs in winter. All this energy comes to us free from the sun year after year. Burning wood in central heating systems releases just as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as would be generated if the wood were left to rot on the forest floor - no less and no more. Renewable forest agriculture ensures that this greenhouse gas is reabsorbed into the growth cycle. Clean-burn wood combustion, therefore, is environmentally neutral and does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. The introduction of a CO 2 tax on firewood is unlikely in the extreme. Woodburners have to be state of the art, however, in order to ensure the clean-burn conditions to produce flue gases consisting almost entirely of water vapour and carbon dioxide - precisely what we exhale ourselves.

Because it's environmentally friendly:

You lay the wood in the gasifier/feed chamber (1); this is where the wood gas is generated. This chamber is narrow at the top, widening further down. This is the ideal geometry to keep the flames from burning up into the centre of the wood stacked above the fire. The primary air supply (2) is from both sides, and this helps ensure that the stack burns away close to the bottom along left and right, so the wood in the stack will keep feeding gradually down into the fire.

Because it's easy:

The ceramic liner (3) significantly increases the temperatures at the inner wall. That means the entire chamber is hotter, so the wood gases more effectively. The firewood, therefore, can have a higher moisture content than usual and doesn't have to be split. The temperature at the inner walls of the feed chamber is too hot for tar deposits or the acids that can damage the boiler to form. The wood gases are drawn through the slotted orifice (4) and into the ceramic swirl combustion chamber (5), where the intensive swirl mixes it thoroughly with the super-preheated secondary air introduced from the rear, and combustion takes place. The subsequent path of the fuel gases through the superheated afterburn chamber (6) underneath the swirl chamber is long in order to allow adequate reaction time for the combustion process. Here's a tip: Wood ash is an excellent fertiliser. The ash content of wood is only about 0.4%, however, so you'll have only about half a bucketful a week of this free food for your garden plants.

Because it's clean:

This chamber has a large door, so it's easy to stoke the fire even if you burn large, thick pieces of wood. In many cases, you won't have to bother splitting your logs. A sickle-shaped plate set the door aperture enables the fan to draw off the smoke straight into the flue when the bleed flap is open, making the boiler all the more convenient to stoke. You won't have to refill the chamber very often, however, because you can stack an enormous quantity of wood in this boiler. The HERLT HV 35 has a usable feed-chamber capacity of 250 litres - that's more than 100 kg per fill if you burn hardwood. That would be enough to heat an average singlefamily house built to modern specifications for two days in cold weather. If the weather is merely chilly or if you have an energy-conservation home, you won't have to fire up the furnace again for 3-4 days, maybe even longer. One fill of wood will keep the HV 35 burning for between 4 and 11 hours, depending on the density of your firewood. The HV 49 will burn much longer, and the continuous-burn HV 14 and HV 195 longer still. The large feed chamber means that HERLT boilers are ideal for low-grade, light kinds of wood as well. Is of state-of-the-art, induced-draught design. A quiet, variable-speed fan (1) at the furnace outlet draws the gases through the combustion chamber and past the heat-exchanger tubes (2). As well as ensuring optimised combustion, this principle keeps your boiler-room virtually smoke-free. When you light the fire or when you have to restoke the furnace, you can open the bleed flap (3). The fan then automatically speeds up to its highest throughput. The heat-exchanger tubes are vertical, so they cannot trap ash deposits and they remain easy to clean. Remember, however, that the bleed flap is only a bypass for these special circumstances. It generally has to remain closed so that the flames will be drawn downward and the furnace can function as a wood gasifier. The wood gas passes through the fire-resistant special-steel grille of the slotted orifice (4) and into the ceramic swirl combustion chamber. The ceramic material is a catalyst and its presence accelerates the reaction of fuel gas and air. This is what produces the yellow gleam at the surface. The external skin of these boilers is patterned special-steel sheet with a foamcaoutchouc layer applied to the inside as insulation. There are no unhealthy mineral fibres to make their way out of the furnace and into the air in your boiler room, while the insulation and the overall design both ensure that very little heat is wasted to the room. Consists of the swirl chamber at the top and the long afterburn chamber at the bottom. When the furnace is in operation the burning gases reach temperatures as high as 1000 and the bottom chamber glows red to white C, hot. A high-temperature-resistant insulating layer separates the combustion chamber from the water-cooled steel boiler. The burning gases are swirled to each side in cyclone-like eddies, an action that produces intense flame colouration. This patented technology is the key to virtually zeroresidue combustion and ultra-clean flue gases. We can all expect even tougher emission-control legislation in the future, but you can rest assured that HERLT boilers are way ahead of any requirements likely to be introduced in the foreseeable future.

The feed chamber

The boiler

The combustion chamber

The electronic controller

It controls the fan for the draught, the air supply and the discharge pump. It measures boiler and flue-gas temperatures and shows the readings at all times on the large, illuminated-digit temperature gauges. Adjusting the temperature ranges is a straightforward operation that the stoker can undertake as necessary. These adjustments allow the system to be adapted to the building's chimney and to the quality of the available fuel. If chimney draught is adequate, the furnace can even operate in natural-draught mode some of the time. Only top-quality industrial-grade materials are used for the controller, too. The assembly is splash-proof and well sized. Temperature-resistant silicone insulates all the wires and cables. No PVC is used anywhere in the entire system.

Efficiency in its many guises

Boiler efficiency, combustion efficiency and effective-heat efficiency are terms often used by heating engineers. Efficiency is measured only when the furnace is burning at the peak of its performance. Any wood-fired heating system linked to a small storage tank is bound to be lit very often, but for most of that time it will probably not be performing at peak efficiency. Wood starts to gasify at about 400 even if the airflow control flap is closed or the fan C, switched off. The temperature in glowing embers is always in excess of 400 so the fuel is C, constantly generating wood gas, which merely vents unburned to atmosphere if the furnace is idling. Losing this unburned wood gas can easily double the quantity of firewood the furnace has to burn. When tested, however, the boiler was on a test bed and its flue-gas temperature was pegged at 140 so the certificate shows an efficiency rating of 92.5 % C, ....... In the real world, however, condensate, acids and tar will form if the gas entering the flue is not hotter, and it will prove virtually impossible to keep the chimney in good condition. If the mouth of a chimney is wet and freezes the next time the fire is allowed to go out, structural damage is inevitable .... Consequently, HERLT furnaces are set to ensure a temperature of just about 90 right at C the top of the chimney. The technician climbs up on the roof and measures the discharge temperature. For the sake of argument we'll say the reading is 107 so the technician C, goes down to the boiler room and adjusts the furnace controls to reduce the flue-gas temperature by 17 The gases exiting the chimney are now about 90 boiler efficiency C. C, is better by about 1 %, and firewood consumption drops 1 % accordingly. A brick chimney will invariably give off a certain amount of heat to the rooms of a house. Only the heat retained by the flue gases discharged above the roof is really lost, and this waste heat has no more than a minimum effect on boiler efficiency. In theory, the controls of a HERLT furnace could be set for a flue-gas temperature of 120 C, say, and the proud operator could boast about 94% efficiency. The downside would emerge in the long run, however, because the furnace needs to discharge flue gases into the chimney at no less than 170 in order to achieve its self-cleaning effect. C Operating the boiler at a high flue-gas temperature is a viable alternative to costly upgrading if you have an old, wide, poorly insulated, freestanding chimney. A temperature of about 235 translates into 86 % efficiency and you would burn about 3 % more wood, but you would C be ahead by the sum saved from not refurbishing the chimney. The HERLT HV controller is easy to understand and easy to use, so you can always set your system for the trade-off that maximises economy and useable heat output. Consult your specialist heating engineer. An accredited chimney sweep will explain how to keep your chimney in good condition.

Why bother with a storage tank?

Oil- or gas-fired burners simply shut down when they have generated enough heat. A log-burning furnace, on the other hand, keeps on kicking out heat until all the flammable matter contained in the fuel has been consumed. Wood gasifies at temperatures above about 400 and the process will continue C, regardless of whether an airflow control flap is open or closed or whether a fan is turning or not. The ratio of wood gas to air that creates a flammable mixture has only a narrow bandwidth, and this also has to be borne in mind. The excess wood gas generated in an unbalanced system simply vents unburned to atmosphere. No wonder so many people puzzle over why their wood-fired central heating systems gobble up so much fuel. All internal surfaces of a combustion system (and this includes the inside faces of the chimney) have to remain hot enough to keep condensate from forming, but at the same time they should be as cool as possible to minimise the heat lost with the flue gas and to maximise boiler efficiency. If a boiler operates at the minimum flue-gas temperature when under full load, then obviously the temperatures at these all-important internal surfaces are going to drop below the condensation point when the furnace is burning at less than full power. Creosote could form in the chimney and catch fire. Condensation and acids could damage the boiler, and its useful life would be seriously curtailed. If you set things up so that your boiler can always operate under optimum conditions, the payback is enormous. It takes the form of minimised firewood consumption, a very long boiler life, a happy chimney sweep, and neighbours cheery because they never have the nuisance of smoke drifting into their gardens or homes. A correctly sized storage tank can absorb at least as much heat as is generated by a furnace stoked with one full charge of firewood. The HERLT HV 35 is well able to heat 4000 litres of water to over 80 with a single charge of wood. The heat stored in this way would be enough to keep a single-family C home snug and warm for two chilly-to-frosty winter days. A bigger storage tank means an even higher level of convenience. Around six in the evening, say, when you have time, you could light the furnace. At about 10 o'clock you would stoke the fire again and by the time you wake up in the morning the boiler will have put so much heat into the storage tank that it will be some time, probably days, before you have to think about lighting the fire again. So you have an easy time with your woodburner, but that's not all. Just take a moment to think how much longer a boiler is going to last if it only has to be fired up at intervals. So make it easy for yourself and for your furnace and install a big storage tank.

Tanks of this nature are pressure vessels and they are always cylindrical in shape. They can be manufactured to stand upright or lie on their side, and there is virtually no limit to size. In summer the storage tank will be used to produce only domestic hot water, so it should be very well insulated against heat loss. Good insulation means you can wait several days before you light the furnace again. Mineral-fibre batts, sheep's wool and flax wool are some of the materials conventionally used to insulate steel storage tanks. Loose-fill insulation inside a retaining compartment is also very effective. Pearlite or cellulose insulating materials are normally used, but one very effective way of insulating a storage tank at low cost is simply to use a good thick jacket of wood shavings. Steel storage tank with compartment prepared for wood shavings as loose-fill insulation.

Steel storage tanks

The plastic HERLT Flexotherm multipart storage tank

Steel storage tanks are made in one piece and very often it will not be possible to manoeuvre one to the ideal location in a building. You can still have a storage facility matched to your boiler, however, by using our branded, large-capacity, economical, plastic water storage tanks with steel lattice supporting frames. The container is round and open at the top; its inner skin is a reinforced plastic membrane, a special product designed for resistance to high temperatures and ageing. This skin is inside a very strong bag made of a synthetic fabric. However, it is the external, multipart steel lattice supporting frame that is mainly responsible for containing the pressure of the water in the tank. A lid made of membrane-coated high-grade crossbanded plywood closes the tank. All the pipework passes through this lid, and the apertures are all well sealed. The storage tank accommodates 4 generously dimensioned copper-tube heat exchangers, or more if necessary. The heat exchangers are for heat input and removal. As through-flow heaters they offer full protection against Legionella bacteria for domestic hot water. They can also be used to transfer heat from solar absorbers, off-peak electric water heaters, heatrecovery appliances, heat pumps and so on. FLEXOTHERM storage tanks can be heated to 90 the water they contain is not pressurised and it C; stays in the tank, in other words it is not usually pumped through the radiators. Aluminium-backed mineral-wool batts are the most common insulator, although organic wool can also be used. Coloured artificial-leather jackets are available as optional extras. Loose-fill insulation is recommended for storage tanks installed below floor level in round, purposebuilt chambers. Storage-tank diameters in mm: 1200/1400/1600/1800/2000/2400/3000

The storage tanks are generally built to make full use of available headroom; the maximum height is 3500 mm.

Make your wood-fired heating system convenient and easy to operate. That way you'll enjoy heating your home. In summer you can utilise the tank's storage capacity for cold water to cool your house.

Here's a tip:

Herlt wood-gasifier boilers are quality products

We use only premium-quality materials produced in the EU and all the materials we use have factory test certificates. The boilers are manufactured start to finish in the small town of Vielist in Germany's northeast, not far from Hamburg and Berlin. The boiler bodies of all the models from the HV 14 to the HV 65 are robotwelded, high-quality units. Instead of budgeting for promotionals and advertising, we spend money on satisfying our customers so that they will recommend us to others. HERLT boilers are made of thick steel, and that means more weight. The thick steel and the absence of condensation in the boiler make the units extremely durable. Combustion takes place almost entirely inside the high-grade ceramic liner. The grille in the slotted orifice is made of an outstandingly fire-resistant metal alloy. The curved jackets are made of pattern-rolled special-steel sheet, so they too help maintain the value of your investment in a HERLT boiler.
Wood-fired heating boiler to DIN 4702, Part I and Part 4

The HERLT six-year guarantee covers the boiler body, the electronics, the fan, the grate, and so on. A ten-year guarantee is available on request.

Both these furnaces have stoking chambers measuring 500 litres in volume, so you can stack half a cubic metre of firewood above the fire to feed the flames. That's plenty of capacity to heat a fair-sized building with ease. These boilers are often installed in single-family homes, too, because they are the first choice for people who know they'll have little time to spare, but want to combine comfort with ecological viability. Very often, they find that it's enough to fire up the boiler once a week. The HV 49 is exempt from the special boiler-room regulations that apply in some countries to facilities rated at 50 kW or more. Another plus is that it burns longer - about 9-10 hours if you are burning softwood, or 12-13 hours if you have hardwood logs. The HV 65 has a higher heat-output rating. Both these furnaces will burn round, unsplit logs up to one metre long. Once the fire has been kindled the logs can be anything up to 35 cm thick, so the size of logs you burn depends primarily on what you can conveniently handle. There's no need to make sure that the wood is perfectly dry, so you usually won't have to bother splitting the logs for curing, particularly if you burn softwood. You stoke the furnace by laying one end of the metre-long log on the bottom edge of the feed-chamber door aperture and simply pushing the wood into the chamber. The extractor fan means you won't have to stand in a cloud of smoke each time you open the door. This newly developed model for half-metre lengths of firewood has a relatively low output rating but a comparatively large-capacity feed chamber with a usable volume of 300 litres, so it can accommodate more firewood than the HV 35 and is slightly larger overall. The combustion chamber, by contrast, is small. The gasifier/feed chamber, like the combustion chamber, is super-insulated to prevent unwanted heat dissipation to the water in the boiler. This furnace is designed to burn continuously, kicking out 14 kW of heat for up to 24 hours. The principle is one that opens up new horizons for project planning. On day one, the boiler heats a single-family home without transferring heat to a storage tank. Consequently, the system could be designed with a smaller-capacity tank, or a large-capacity tank could be used to store usable heat for longer. Alternatively, you can have the storage tank charging during the night when the radiators are cold, and on the next morning you can use this additional heat while the furnace is still lit. This concept could be used to heat a house with a heat requirement slightly in excess of the boiler's rated thermal output. This is a world's first, an innovation that combines enhanced wood-gas quality, highly effective combustion-chamber design and long steady-state burning with constant parameters to achieve outstandingly low emissions levels well able to vie with those of natural-gas central heating systems.

The boilers for metre lengths HV 49 and HV 65

The small continuous-burn HV 15

The ODIN outdoor boiler with specialsteel flue

If you install your furnace in a basement boiler room you have no option but to find the easiest way of getting the firewood down there too. Carrying firewood isn't the easiest of jobs, so it's great if you can barrow your logs straight to the furnace door, and even better if your boiler is set up close to your woodpile. Shift the furnace out of doors keeps woodchips and sawdust out of the house, there's no ash to get scattered over the floor, and you have all that extra space indoors available for quality utilisation ... In timberframe houses and loghomes in particular you have less fire risk and lower insurance premiums. You can cut construction costs because you don't need a chimney, and you still enjoy the relaxed pleasure of heating your home with nature's most convenient fuel wood. All the boiler's external surfaces that the inclemencies of the weather can reach are made of special steel or are hot-dip galvanised and powder-coated with a plastic finish. Our outdoor boilers come complete with a special, extra-thick loose-fill insulating jacket.

An option for these models is an oversize stoking door. You also have a choice of colours. The cowl on top of the boiler is hinged: it protects the electronic controller. The jacketed special-steel flue would usually be slightly taller than shown here in this photo. Outdoor versions of the boilers for half-metre lengths of wood are available on request. The ODIN is designed for metre lengths and is available with a 49 or 65 kW rated output. The heating pipes enter the from below: they are usually buried in the ground. Outdoor boilers always have to be installed in such a way that nothing can freeze even if the furnace is out of use for an extended period of time.

The ODIN is designed and built to meet ultra-high requirements.

The HV 66 Burns metre-long lengths of firewood and small bales of straw at the same time
The boiler is rated at 66 kW and its feed chamber offers an effective capacity of 740 litres, so it can take enough wood to burn for a very long period of time. The door of the feed chamber is very large, designed for manual stoking with small bales of straw up to about 90 cm long and either 50 x 50 or 40 x 60 cm in section. As is the case with all our furnaces, untreated wood is the only acceptable material for kindling the fire. Dry, naturalwood kindling and correct procedure are essentials for starting the fire with very little or virtually no smoke. Once the fire is burning well you can keep it going with wood only, or you can add one or more small bales of straw. Before you add fuel, always be sure to open the port in the combustion-chamber door to check that the chamber is glowing bright red, indicating that the furnace has reached its full operating temperature. The amount of firewood in the gasifier/feed chamber should always be enough to ensure that some wood is left after one hour's burning; in other words, straw should always burn together with wood. If the pressed bales are slightly damp you can increase the amount of wood, so that the straw will dry out, so to speak, on the wood fire. Then the straw will burn well, too. Do not try to burn wet bales, or bales of straw on their own without firewood. This high-capacity furnace is a high-convenience appliance providing a supportive means of utilising straw, often available as a surplus material, to generate enough energy to heat a small building in a costeffective boiler. Bear in mind, however, that only an experienced operator should stoke the fire with straw bales while the furnace is burning, and that it is important to comply with the codes of practice for fire safety and safety at work.

Fuel from forests and from our fields, the most dependable way of generating heat

The HN 13 natural-draught furnace

Appearances don't deceive: PowerFRED is sturdy, easy to control and easy to fire. This furnace swallows a lot of wood at one go. It's perfectly happy with low-grade timber, and it can stomach dampish fuel and large pieces of firewood. PowerFRED makes life easy and that little bit more cheery. PowerFRED is a back-to-nature design - no electronics and no electricity supply. The qualities are all inside. Everything is lined with solid ceramic and firebrick, just like a masonry heater. The ceramic firebox feeds to an afterburn chamber where the fuel gases have plenty of time to burn out. So PowerFRED burns very cleanly and will be a big favourite with your neighbours as well. When it's time to start the fire, open the small door at the top and light a small fire with paper, wood shavings or the like in the kindling and cleaning chamber. The draught develops as soon as you close the door, and it's almost as strong as a forced draught. Then you can take your time lighting the main fire in the large firebox at the bottom and stoke the flames with wood. PowerFRED is a natural-draught furnace; the draught regulator is simplicity itself, but the combustion technology is state of the art. It's no lightweight, because the walls are thick and it has a solid ceramic core. A chip off the old block, PowerFRED is built to last. Like all our other boilers, PowerFRED is manufactured entirely in Germany.

Max. per. operating pressure: 3 bar Max. per. operating temperature: 95 C Weight: 380 kg Water capacity: 145 litres Width without jacket: 810 mm Length: 1200 mm Height: 1450 mm With ribbed-tube heat exchanger for overheat bypass

Rated thermal output: 13 kW Operating range: 12-17 kW Feed-chamber capacity: 180 litres Log length: up to 60 cm

PowerFRED - economical and good - for single-family homes

Wood-gasifier heating boilers. The HERLT HV series Data sheet

The HERLT company manufactures complete woodburning heating systems in its Vielist and Waren plants in Mecklenburg, northern Germany. The company's installation specialists install the systems on customer premises throughout Europe. They cooperate with franchised heating and plumbing engineers. If there is no local franchised partner, the HERLT specialists take on the job themselves. Only when integrated into a precision-planned and built turnkey central-heating configuration can a wood-gasifying boiler develop its inbuilt abilities to the full.

HERLT Installation and Service

So ask us for details of turnkey configurations.

Unlike oil-fired and gas-fired boilers, a wood-burning furnace has no fault-prone components like jets, ignition electrodes, filters and so on, but on rare occasions faults do occur. Abnormal operation is indicative of a fault affecting the controller, and this can be reported by phone. HERLT or the agency in the country in question will respond immediately and dispatch a replacement controller by parcel service on the very same day. Delivery is usually within twenty-four hours. All the customer has to do is back off the large fastener securing the original controller. Then it's a matter of unplugging everything, placing the new controller in position and snapping the labelled connectors on again. The plugs are all coded. Each plug will fit only its corresponding socket and there is no possibility of making a mistake. The boilers are designed for this mode of straightforward service. The defective controller goes into the box and straight back to us.

No waiting for heating: that's what our service philosophy is all about

This boiler generates heat for production facilities, hotels, schools, agricentres, and so on. The firewood can be up to 1200 mm long; the feed chamber has a usable capacity of 1200 litres and will take Euro-pallets all in one piece. The low emissions values also make this boiler ideal for burning AI-grade waste woo, in other words treated wood-based materials without waterrepellent agents and free of plastics. The boiler is tall, so it is generally set in a pit about 65 cm deep to make it easy to stoke. The very high level of cost efficiency it can achieve is the outstanding feature of this model. Requirements in terms of fuel preparation and fuel quality are minimal. The wood fuel is available in large quantities at very little cost and can easily be stored in the open. This model can also be supplied as a mobile unit in a heating container, a very attractive option for commercial heat-supply contractors.

The big boilers HV 145

This boiler has an even larger gasifier/feed chamber to take almost four cubic metres of wood in onemetre lengths. It will burn continuously for 24 hours and put out 230 kW. That means it can be stoked once a day, always at the same time. The HV 195 is ideal for covering the base load of large consumers such as large-scale hothouse growers or animal-fattening centres, and also for large public buildings and zone-heating systems, particularly in the heat-contracting sector. This boiler, too, is designed for installation in a pit. The cross-section tapers toward the bottom, but the other components are standard for the HV series. The recommended configuration is outdoors with a weatherproofing shelter. The furnace cannot be restoked while combustion is in progress; each charge must be allowed to burn out almost completely before fresh fuel is added. The possibility of smoke escaping while the stoking door is open cannot be excluded. A comparable oil-fired boiler would consume about 800 litres of heating oil every day. Financial benefit for the operator is very high. The boiler creates jobs and contributes to environmental protection.

HV 195

Kindling the fire

If you are used to packing a stove with fuel before lighting the fire, you'll have to think again. HERLT gasifiers have to be lit first before being are charged with fuel. What you need is a good big handful of chopped, dry kindling. Put this on the grille in the feed chamber, place a firelighter or some crumpled newspaper on top and light it. Don't use corrugated cardboard or straw - they always smoke. Then press the green start button on the controller to start the fan. The fan-induced draught draws the flame downward through the kindling. The feed-chamber door is open; the boiler starts burning right away in gasifier mode with excess air, so it produces virtually no smoke. Now you can go and fetch the firewood. By the time you come back in about three minutes the little pile of kindling will have almost burned away. Now you can stack the feed chamber to capacity with firewood. Remember that the wood you put in the chamber has to be ignited by the burning wood underneath it, otherwise gasification would be diminished or disrupted and the flame could even fail. It would be inviting trouble if you set thick, wet oak logs right on top of the small fire you started with, because the kindling might be gone entirely before the oak starts to burn. So the wood you put in first should be fairly good, not too thick and not too wet, then you can stack the heavier stuff on top.

Stoking a burning fire

The large-capacity feed chamber takes plenty of wood, so you won't have to stoke the fire all that often. Once the furnace is lit you can stoke it with thick logs. The gasifier/feed chamber has a ceramic liner to minimise heat dissipation to the boiler water. That keeps the interior of the chamber much hotter, so the wood gasifies all the more effectively. You can burn heavy logs and wood with a higher moisture content than in a conventional woodburning stove. Woodcutter, spare that effort! ... and enjoy quality time

for yourself and your family ...

It is only during the evening that most people find the time and patience to fire up and stoke a furnace. The boilers like the HV 22, 35 and 65 that have a high thermal output in relation to their feed-chamber capacity have burned off about half a charge of wood after 4 hours. So once you've lit the fire you can restoke the furnace the same evening, before you go to bed. The boiler will keep on generating heat during the night; this heat is transferred to the large storage tank and that will keep your house cosy and warm. It will probably be a few days before you have to light the boiler again.

Your best bet is to burn the cheapest wood you can get. As cavalry officers were wont to say, "If the rider is no good the horse should carry him well". And if we apply that to heating with wood: "A truly good wood-burning furnace will manage fine with poor-quality firewood", in other words fuel that is wetter, thicker, less dense and less willing to burn than well-dried (but costly) split hardwood blocks. People used to say, "you get heat three times out of every block of firewood". The woodburning stoves of yesteryear always needed good wood, preferably birch or beech, sawn, split and chopped to size, then stacked and left to dry for two whole years. Pretty as a picture (see the photo on this page) but demanding an awful lot of time and effort. And who would have that much time to spare nowadays? The ceramic liner in every HERLT gasifier heating boiler generates temperatures inside the gasifier/feed chamber that are much higher than those achievable in boilers with only water-cooled metal walls. The gasification process, therefore, is much more intense and the requirements in terms of the quality of the firewood are correspondingly low. The small continuous-burn HV 15 boasts a particularly thick ceramic liner. This is a super-convenience boiler, and small as it is it is not the cheapest in the range. It would not perform to the best of its abilities if it was fired only with finely split, very dry wood that burns eagerly, and its electronic controller would be hard put to deal with this sort of treatment, no matter how well intended. So if you are considering one of our boilers, and particularly this high-end model, you should take this little snippet of advice to heart: If woodcutting is your sport and like ex heavyweight champion of the world Muhammad Ali you want to chop and chop just to keep fit, please buy another make of boiler.

Which fuel burns best in a HERLT gasifier?

Table of calorific values

You can heat your home with the light kinds of wood that can be bought for next to nothing - poplar, willow and alder. HERLT boilers have huge feed chambers, so you can make up in bulk what your fuel lacks in density. Bear in mind that emissions-control legislation might require firewood to be stacked for 2 years to cure after cutting. After that you can toss it in the fire, without bothering to check whether it's wet or dry.

The 85-400 kW gasifier heating boilers for round straw bales

Separate brochure available on request

HERLT evaporative cooling

Although heating in the industrialised countries of the northern hemisphere is a big contributor to climatic change, another increasing factor is the burgeoning drain on global energy resources for cooling in hot countries and elsewhere. Nature's principle for cooling is simple and totally environmentally compatible. Evaporation from a wetted surface is always going to cool things down. We perspire, dogs pant and many animals take to the water when they feel too hot. HERLT evaporative cooling is patented worldwide, and it works on exactly the same principle. This unit incorporates special heat exchangers that cool night air is inducted past. This air is moistened beforehand by water jets, and the effect of evaporative cooling further reduces its temperature. This chilled air flows through the heat exchangers to cool the water in the building's heating and cooling system. In summer, the storage tank is used to store the cold water until it is needed during the daytime. When the sun's rays push the mercury up, cool water is pumped through the plastic capillary-tube mats in the ceiling plaster or in the cavity behind suspended ceilings. The mats have a large surface area and they spread the cold very finely, just as the capillaries in our skin distribute our blood. The system is also ideal as a radiant ceiling in a space-heating configuration, because in this case too a difference of only a few degrees between the heater and the air in the room is all that is necessary. Heat has always reached our Earth from above, and that's just the way things should be. For new building projects in particular, with very high requirements for a healthy living climate, ecological compatibility and low costs, we recommend the

combination HERLT wood/solar and evaporative heating and airconditioning system

The solar systems

A 4000-l storage tank heated by a wood-fired boiler can provide all the hot water you need for showers and baths for all of 12 days. If you couple your woodburner with a solar system, however, you have a high-end combination system that slots neatly into the busiest of lifestyles. Solar heat can even replace a great deal of the electricity that the washing machine in a conventional home draws through the meter. You'll find, too, that there's something extra-enjoyable about showering or taking a bath in water heated by the sun. Your woodburner's storage tank is shared by the solar system, so you're saving on cost. Well-insulated pipes interconnect the solar absorbers and the storage tank. An electronically controlled recirculation pump keeps a non-toxic, frostproof thermofluid flowing through the copper pipes between the absorber panels and the tank. You can have the absorber panels mounted on spacers just slightly above roof level, or take out tiles and go for an 'inroof' configuration with the panels seated directly on the rafters. Only high-grade flat absorbers are used for water-heating systems. If, say, you have a wellinsulated 4000-l storage tank, you could install about 6-8 m2 of absorber surface area. That would be enough to give you some solar heating on cool summer days. If you want solar-assisted heating in winter as well, however, you will need more capacity. That's about 16 square metres at least of absorber surface area for a single-family home. Careful planning is a must for solar-assisted heating, and systems of this nature always work best with low-temperature heating surfaces in the home, in other words ceiling, underfloor or wall heating. If you can see all that, you really should consider the future-proof and in the long term very economical option of installing a hybrid wood/solar heating system.