Tell me about your wood burner

[Lottapianos]

The living room faces the north side of our house, and is a very cold room. There is a fireplace with an open chimney in the room and I was considering installing a wood burner. We live in outer London

I know nothing about wood burners so please tell me about yours. How much to install? Do you love it or do you regret it? How much of a pain is it to clean out? Ta

Love ours. We lived with an open fire for perhaps 12 months when we bought this house. It barely warmed the room. Spent £1000 on a small ( limited by size of fireplace) wood burner (that was total price including fitting) and it really makes a difference.
It is a dry heat though and makes me very sleepy. Easy to light the fire and easy to keep clean. Does create a lot of dust, but it depends on what you are allowed to burn on it and that depends on your local regulations.
I think it was £1000 well spent

we love ours.
Our living room was cold. We had some buikding work done to insultae the long North facing outside wall, and at the same time put in a wood burner. We did also change the radiator.

The room went from freezing to warm. I would say though that while it is LOVELY with the fire on, it is important that it is warm without if we want it to be, so that I dno't have to light the fire.

Fire is on most weekends.

hard to say how much exactly to install as some was done by builders, and some by specialist. About £2,000 including cost of burner. Ours is a multi fuel, so you can burn coal or wood, but we always burn wood. You need to check your local by=laws, if you are in an area covered by 1952 clean air act, then technically you shouldn't have one. That doesn't seem to have stopped half of London, but strictly many wood burners are illegal if they burn wood.

Wood isn't cheap. We have a large garden with a wood store by the house and a massive wood pile at the end. The pile (actually it is fairly well organised) is of wood from trees. We ask nieghbours and friends to let us have any wood from trees they have trimmed etc (NOT pine trees though) and we store it for 2 years. You can't burn new wood, it must dry out. Store it under cover for 2 years.
We also skip dive pallets and fence posts and off cuts of wood. Very careful to only get pieces with no paint/stain/creosote on.

We've had ours about 6 years and never bought wood (dh has bit of a thing about only using recycled wood) It takes a fair but of work to cut it and saw it and store it. You need an electric saw.

cleaning - empty ash tray about once a month. It does make the room a bit dusty, but not bad.

should say ours included the cost of the pipe.

If you have an open fireplace, first thing I would do is block the chimney with an old pillow, or a blown up bin bag. Lots of your heat is escaping up the chimney.

Then you can see how cold the room actually is.

burner is lovely though, really lovely.

Are you allowed in London, I thought there were some controls due to air quality (the burner haters will be along soon).

I think DH uses an angle grinder to cut most of our wood, lots of it cast off scavenged surplus in past years, but he is supposed to order a delivery soon.

Not a problem to clean if only using wood, and we compost the ashes, but ours is quite small which means it needs very frequent feeding, about once every 45 minutes. Bigger ones can be fed less often.

I've got one in my north facing living room. Its a country kiln one and DP did the fireplace and my dad and brother fitted the stove, it has been inspected by the building inspector as part of overall renovations.
I get free wood, usually hard wood and its stored for about 9-12 months before burning. The stove is lit all winter and when its cool in summer as I use it instead of the gas central heating as much as possible.

I used to cut the wood up myself with a chain saw but DP has taken that job over.
It does create dust but I do achieve an overnight burn.

love it , and a well used log burner creates very little smoke. Burn non-seasoned wood, bits of kitchen, old pallets etc and you'll be creating lots of smoke.

but... London. is it allowed? do you have space to store a ton of wood for up to 2 years?

to be fair, we burn a lot of old pallets, but they are left to season with the other wood, so by the time we burn them we don't get smoke.

should have been clearer - not treated old pallets, which is what some of the buggers round here use. Cough...

After years of open fires I finally got a multifuel stove installed in my very old very cold little house - it was the most powerful one I could find to fit the fireplace (I think 12kw) but also the ugliest. Such an amazingly massive difference! I use a mixture of kiln dried firewood, partially seasoned wood from my own trees and smokeless coal