Heat

We've been obsessing about heating options.  For the past several weeks, Ba'al and I both thought that an old fashioned wood stove of the parlor stove variety would be perfect for our home.  We found several that we liked, replicas of classic designs that we both agreed would fit in well with our overall aesthetic.  Then we found a potbelly stove that had been designed for use in train cars.  Ba'al, being a lover of all things related to railroads, fell in love.  I liked it too.

Then, last night, we heard something about pellet stoves somewhere.  Ba'al spent a good portion of the night researching various pellet stove options.  Corn pellets (made from corn cobs) are cheaper than wood pellets (made from sawdust) but harder to find.  The cost of a pellet stove is similar to the retro wood stoves we found.  A ton of wood pellets costs the same as 170 gallons of propane and lasts about the same time.  However, pellets burn with far fewer emissions than any other viable heat source.  I think we have found the heat source for our yurt.

For the basement level, which will be dug into either an existing hill or a manmade one, we are going to put in radiant floor heating.  This leads us to yet another choice.  As mentioned before, we want to use a tankless water heating system.  However, a tankless system probably isn't practical for radiant floor heating.  We have to talk to someone who knows about these things to be sure.  The sites Ba'al looked at today recommend a particular water heater as being especially good for radiant heat systems.  So do we put in a tankless system and a traditional tank?  One big and one small tankless system, with one dedicated to the needs of heating floors?  Suck it up and buy a really big water heater tank?  I'll post the new links later this evening.