Who uses an outside wood boiler & what are your thoughts on the different competitors

I think Phil has an extra one.

I have one...its a central boiler classic model. I am on my 8th heating season with it already and i love it. keeps my house plenty warm, over 4300 sq ft...and i also heat my domestic hot water with it using a heat exchanger ...so i turn off the breaker on the hot water heater when in use...and save an extra 40 per month or more in electricity. So far this year i have used 6 cords of wood..

Get what you pay for. Or. . . you pay for it one way or another. I saved a bit up front on the cost of my boiler. I am paying for it now with additional firewood consumption. Do you have a good source for firewood? Ends up being a decent bit of work.

checkout airstove.com its a forced air unit they work great.

14 yrs. ago I was researching a outside wood burner. My son said with my health issues and age I had no business with a wood burner. So I installed a corn stove and couldn't be more satisfied. My total year cost burning corn is about 400.00. I have a good supply of wood in my woods.
I have no wood to cut, split, store or put into the wood burner once or twice every day.
I burn 6-9 gallons of corn everyday and take out a clinker about the size of 3 slices of bread. I'm done in less than 5 minutes for the next 24 hrs. The total clinkers for the year are less than a 5 gal. bucket.
Only downside is a slight dust from the corn when dumping into the stove. I got a good heavy duty vacum corn cleaning outfit and that takes care of 90% of the dust.
There are good and bad corn stoves and my son and I both have one of the best. In 14 yrs. the only repairs I've had to do was replace a 60.00 blower fan.

Frank might be onto something with the corn burner. Truthfully, I think Gern has a good firewood source. Buys some, cuts some. Last we spoke this was the case. Myself? I am fortunate to have all the equipment a guy would need to easily handle massive quantities of wood. I am closing in on 40. Been heating exclusively with firewood the last 7-8yrs. Maybe a little longer. My parents are supplied by me as well. They might use a cord or two a year maximum. They have a wood burner and it is more supplemental now as compared to nearly an exclusive heat source when I was a kid. If an indoor unit is out of the question, there goes the ideas of an insert, corn burner, buck stove. . .

If outdoor unit is what you want, do some serious math. Add up your heat bills. Figure your cost of the unit to include underground pipe, fittings, chain saws needed, trailer, splitter, etc. Say your expenses are $8000 and heating bills are $2000/yr. Four year return on your investment. That doesn't include your time and gas to get firewood. That is free. At 25-35yrs old, $2000/yr in savings really helps justify the expense. I am not sure I will want to be doing the firewood thing when I am 60-70-80yrs old. Hope I am able to, but not sure i will want to. At 45-50yrs old I will start losing my helpers as they graduate. lol

IM going towards geothermal. Prices have come down quite a bit

I have a Taylor water boiler 7500 that can heat up to 5000 sq ft. It works great and keeps the house toastie with the more radiant heat. With that comes less static electricity and dry nasal cavities. It's more than paid itself off but like others have said, the work can become tiresome if you don't have the heavy equipment to work smarter not harder. I move a lot of wood around after cutting with my wheelbarrow or quad and small wagon and that gets old pretty quick. The nice thing about my stove is it has a 31x32 inch doorway for loading up with wood so I don't have to split much if any but big chucks weigh a lot so consider that too! I burn about 6-8 cord a year and this is the first year I ran it over the last 3 seasons due to not having enough wood cut. I ran it the first 5 seasons after we built our house as I had plenty of wood on hand after clearing our woods to build our house. The boiler also heats our water and hot water never runs out.

If I had it to do over again I'd have gone GEO Thermal back in 05 but with the corn furnaces Frank is talking about that is prolly what I'd do now!

Just a note! The reason you must have enough wood to burn is you do NOT want to run out as there is the real potential of having water lines freezing and bursting. The water lines are in a closed circuit and is heated to about 180-200 degrees. There are expensive chemicals you must add to the roughly 600 gals of water in my particular stove along with an ionizing rod which both help to prohibit rust with all that hot water circulating for such a long period of time. The 3 quarts of chemicals run about $130 dollars every 2-3 years and the ionizing rod is replaced every year and year and runs about $30 the last I checked. The whole unit cost me $7500 but paid itself off the first 4-5 years I had it but it just depends how expensive alternate heat sources cost and how bad the winters are. The first year I ran it from early Nov all the way till Late May. This year was Dec 1st till whenever I guess.... I have exhausted 2/3's of my entire wood supply:-/ so I hope it starts to warm up soon! Lol I have a 1.5-2 month worth left I hope! Last year I bet we spent nearly 3K in propane thanks to overly inflated gouged prices due to that "shortage" that was suppose to have happened!

If you do run out of wood and temps are still below freezing you must drain the system and blow out your lines to prevent any expensive repairs to the outside lines and heat exchanger. The downside is your wasting the chemicals than need to be replaced in the future along with all that water.... So just make sure you don't run out of wood! Lol

Hope this helps Kevin!

I often wondered what the life was of those outdoor wood burners. Neighbor down the road has one and it looks like it's about to fall apart and I'd bet it's under 10 years old.

Chuck- many have lifetime warranties on the welds. Not sure I want to find out how good any of the warranties are. 10yrs should be no issue at all. I would think 20-30yrs is realistic depending on the make.

Ric- I had to add chemicals the first time I filled it in order to get the warranty. They recommend every other year in mine. I never empty it. Then again, I run it all winter.

If I redid my corn stove again I would go with a add-on corn burner to my furnace. My new (20 yr.) well insulated house with 6" walls is almost 2600 sq. ft. and 90 ft. long. The corn burner is at one end and does well. Since the house is so long I have 2 furnace units. One unit for the living area and one for the bedrooms-baths. The 2 furnaces are on standby minimum heat and only turn on for short periods below zero.
With a add-on to the furnace it would be a little more even heat. I paid 1800.00 and my pay back on propane fuel was less than 3 yrs.
I was the general contractor on building my house and the house is so air tight the water in the stools go up and down when a inside door is closed. I caulked every crack and all electric wire holes top, bottom and sideway holes through the studs. There is damn little air entering my house to reheat.