Home heating and pellet boilers

A little history: when our house was built in the early/mid-70's, it had forced air electric heating.  In the mid-90's, when the Burlington Electric Department was busy trying to keep electric usage in Burlington down, they offered incentives to switch away from electric heating and the homeowners switched to baseboard heat with a fuel oil boiler.  In the 9 years since we've bought the house, we've seen #2 fuel oil prices fluctuate from $1.21/gallon to to $4.50/gallon; it's hovering just under $3.00/gallon lately, and I'm betting it'll be higher than that next winter.  Very roughly, we burn 850 gallons per year for home heating and hot water.


Now there are incentives to start moving away from fuel oil, but our neighborhood is not hooked up for natural gas (we'd have to have it delivered to a tank on-site), we have trees on our south side that we're not willing to cut down in order to do solar hot water, and our lot is all ledge so a geothermal heat pump is out.  So... how about wood pellets?


Around here, wood pellet stoves have become fairly popular, but these are not really replacements for your boiler, and some of the early pellet boilers require you to manually feed the boiler hopper ever So far, we've found the following leads:

• Building Energy VT sells the Fröling P4 boiler 
• Blodgett Supply sells the Woodpecker boiler 
• Maine Energy Systems imports and distributes the Oekofen boiler
• Pellergy makes a converter to retrofit the existing boiler
• Stove & Flag Works sells Harman boilers 

There are also lots of options for what the set-up could be like, from installer a pellet boiler alongside the existing oil boiler so that we have a backup (we don't really have room for this in the garage) to removing the oil boiler and oil tank and having pellet storage in a silo just outside the garage (which I actually kinda like because we'd be able to reclaim the space the oil tank takes up in the garage).

Perhaps more as the summer progresses.