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Someone was telling us today that you can rig your woodburning stove to the radiators without having a backboiler. Is this possible and if so how is it done, we do have central heating as well, we have an oil boiler, not heard of this before, would appreciate any info as we are fitting a stove in the next few months

cheers Lyn

Surely you need a boiler, either a back boiler or one of the ones that wraps around the flue - Charnwood do one of those

Maybe they meant without having a tank in between (which is how I misread your post initially). Some systems run the backboiler directly to the radiators whereas others heat a tank of water then run the radiators from the tank.

I have heard of systems that waft hot air around the house (heated by the woodburner) through ducts, but that wouldn't use radiators.

I think we have what they might be talking about. Our stove has a rectangular "tank" only about 5cm deep but with an area that covers the entire back of the fire box. Without checking, this I estimate has a volume of about 10 litres and acts as the primary heat exchanger. From here, the hot water can go either to the radiators, to the hot water tank (where it heats the contents indirectly via a coil) or gets split between the two, depending on what we need at the time.

Surely that "tank" is a backboiler, Jon?

Thanks for all the info, looked at the Charnwood flue boiler, perhaps if we had not already plastered our house we could have fitted this before we put in the dry lining. I think our stove will heat the room we are sitting in very nicely and the heat will go round the house anyway if we leave the doors open, we are very well insulated now and one hours heat in the morning stays in most of the day, so hopefully we will save on 7 hours of oil when we get our stove installed.

I'd envisage a back boiler to be a larger vessel from which domestic hot water is drawn directly. To be fair, I'm paraphrasing what my wife (chartered chemical engineer - plumbing with really big pipes, in other words) told me when the stove was installed, and her view of the world might be skewed to calling a spade an earth inverting horticultural instrument in cases such as this. Don't tell her I said that.

The Riff-Raff Element wrote:I'd envisage a back boiler to be a larger vessel from which domestic hot water is drawn directly.

No, "back boiler" is the term used for the water-containing bit on the back of the stove, i.e. the heat exchanger. The larger vessel is called a thermal store, or just a cylinder, depending on the details of the system.

The Riff-Raff Element wrote:To be fair, I'm paraphrasing what my wife (chartered chemical engineer - plumbing with really big pipes, in other words) told me when the stove was installed, and her view of the world might be skewed to calling a spade an earth inverting horticultural instrument in cases such as this. Don't tell her I said that.