Oracle

  UlsterRugby Everything you want to do is certainly do-able, so long as the components of the system are designed and compatible for the type of system. You simply cannot for example hope to connect a back boiler wood fire designed for open vented system to a French Pressurised system - common sense would answer that question without too much research. Now there are some folk who have done just that I have to say, but they, by an large have the skills in engineering to accommodate the special provisions necessary to prevent system failure. Whereas I get the impression that you are not so interested in the 'wheel reinvention' approach, so keep it simple. So, it follows that you are in France and should therefore follow French plumbing norms, without which there will surely be implications of some kind later on (insurance et al;). Hence the best approach from a guidance point of view would be to abandon thoughts of duplicating an UK configuration and adopt European (pressurised) - you may not know, but the Scandinavians have been doing this for many, many decades and are probably the world leader in wood fuel heating systems so why not copy them and use components which are made there. Their approach is simple, nearly all systems involve a pressurised thermal storage - as big as possible, something like a multiple of 10 x your floor area (in litres) say 100m2 house, then that is 1000lt Thermal store, its not definitive but its a starting point. Then connect your stoves, solar panels, heat pump and every other heat generation or collection source you have. Likewise connect your rads, underfloor circuit, DHW whatsoever to take the heat out to where and when you want it and there you have it.  The system runs on about 1,5 bar and there is pressure relief in the form of expansion vessels, and as a last resort, over pressure valves to dump excessive pressure if it all gets too hot. As the water inside is deoxygenated, then you have no problem with corrosion and so the components should last for many decades. Its really not complicated and any decent local plumber can fathom it once the schematic has been designed. (therein lies the rub - it needs to be designed) On the wood stove side, the essential component is a Laddomat, which is a device to solve the problems to which Big Mac was eluding. That is, you cannot hope to run a wood fire efficiently if you're harvesting heat constantly - it just put the fire out. So its essential for a modern 'hands off' system to have the control automated to some degree - which means a Laddomat (PM me if you want more info on these things). Solar likewise has to be designed and certainly I would encourage anyone to always included solar into any system design as its relatively simple and the energy collected is free both in money and labour terms which is unique to Solar. There are other issues to discuss but to cover more than that here is too much typing. Oracle