How to quickly and effectively convert an old central heating boiler into an ecological and automatic one?

Many users who bought traditional solid fuel central heating boilers a few years ago do not want to dismantle the current heating device and incur the high costs of hydraulic installation. Current regulations impose new exhaust emission standards and many older boilers simply do not meet them. An easy and quick way is to modernize the existing heat source to an automatic and ecological one - i.e. low emission.

A modern biomass burner with a feeder can significantly reduce exhaust emissions in the boiler

After installing a modern biomass burner, which has many work automation functions, we can significantly reduce exhaust emissions in the boiler. By burning pellets or briquettes, which are granulated, dry fuels with a constant calorific value, we can achieve much better operating effects of the device than when burning coal or poor-quality wood. In addition to pellets, our burners can also burn wood chips, sawdust and even grain mixtures. Agropellets and agrobiomass are also cheap alternative fuels to sawdust pellets or fuel oil. As you can see, the range of fuel amounts that can be burned in our burners is truly impressive!

Modernization of a central heating boiler with a manual feed to an automatic one – is it worth it?

Modernization of a central heating boiler with a manual feed to an automatic one – is it worth it? – this is one of the popular questions asked by customers. Certainly, you need to be aware of a few important issues regarding the modernization of the device itself. There is no subsidy for this and the investor does it on his own. Moreover, changing the burner and feeder to a biomass one does not change the device's certificate. We don't smoke, we have much lower exhaust emissions and better combustion, which means we don't poison our neighbors, but formally we have a device without a certificate - unless the law changes in this area. The highest profits and return on investment are made by business customers who use high-power boiler rooms to heat their business or companies. By immediately converting the fuel to cheaper ones, they can count on large savings visible after the first heating season. It often happens that the cost of modernizing a boiler room is paid off after just two heating seasons, and yet we still have much better operating comfort and a degree of automation of the heating system.

Automatic burner operation means much greater operating comfort and lower fuel consumption

Thanks to the use of a fully automatic burner with a mechanical slag removal system, we have an innovative solution for biomass combustion. We have fully automatic ignition and firing up as well as extinguishing and power modulation. Thanks to this, the device does not work when there is no heat demand, which reduces fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. Thanks to the innovative design of the BRENNER burner, we are not limited to pellets, but can burn much cheaper alternative biofuels such as agrobiomass, briquettes, wood chips, sawdust, seeds or grain. This provides measurable financial benefits in the annual costs of heating your home or company. The larger the building or the heat demand, the faster the return on investment - therefore the beneficiaries are primarily companies, public buildings, large farms and factories.

Not every central heating boiler model is suitable for modernization

Unfortunately, the central heating boiler model is not suitable for modernization with a new burner. We must have a combustion chamber large enough to accommodate the biomass burner head, which in the case of the wood chip or sawdust version is much larger than the pellet version. Pellet is a granulated fuel with a relatively high calorific value, so it does not require a large burner surface for effective combustion. If we are talking about burning fuels of lower quality, we must have a burner with an enlarged bed and capacity because these are fuels with lower calorific value and bulk value. Therefore, we need to provide more fuel to achieve efficiency and specific power. Problems with achieving power may occur when the wood chips are moist and therefore have less calories. Therefore, a good biomass burner must take into account not only the parameters of good, granulated and qualified fuel, e.g. pellets, but also the parameters of lower calorific fuels - not qualified. It should be remembered that agro or forest biomass is often an unqualified, non-homogeneous fuel with a variable calorific value - therefore it is a much worse biofuel to burn and is more demanding. A dedicated burner with innovative aeration and mechanical slag removal systems is used to burn such biomass. That's why their price is higher than pellet models, but it often pays for itself already in the first heating season - wood chips, sawdust or briquettes are simply much cheaper than sawdust pellets. Agropellets and agrobiomass, as well as chips from miscanthus and other energy plants, are also cheaper. The rate of return on investment depends on whether we have our own biomass resources or buy them.

Our company has experience in replacing furnaces, burners and entire feeding units in heating boilers of many well-known manufacturers. We have modernized and repaired boilers such as Viessmann, Mavera,  Nolting, Herz and Binder.