In message , The Natural
Philosopher writes
If you have a few acres of woodland and don't mind chainsawing and
carting the stuff around, and dealing with the daily ash, wood burners
are good.

Have you considered a biomass fired system? There are an increasing
number of wood pellet suppliers around the country and these modern wood
burners are little more trouble than oil boilers as they are largely
automated.

A quick Google threw this link up;

http://www.nef.org.uk/logpile/fuelsu...letboilers.asp

I was the project manager installing a biomass co-firing system at
Rugeley Power Station and we regularly manage to replace 10% of the coal
we burn with environmentally friendly biomass (effectively carbon
neutral). With most of the big coal fired power stations doing this in
the UK there is quite a network of biomass (mainly wood pellets)
suppliers springing up all over the place.

Indicative costs are here;

http://www.nef.org.uk/logpile/pellets/cost.htm

Fuel works out cheaper but the hardware is significantly more expensive.

Cheers,

Andy
--
Andrew Sinclair http://www.smellycat.org