Wood burning stoves - any experience? Would you recommend or not?

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I would really love one of these, I think, but have no idea how practical I'm being. They look lovely, but are they a faff?

Currently we have an open fireplace, our house is Edwardian and it certainly would be big enough to accommodate the ones I've seen.

I would love to hear the good and the bad bits, that would be very helpful, as having had a look, this is a significant investment.

Pudden We are thinking of installing one and have been at the cost. We are however in north east england. Could you please let me have the contact details of your installer? You can PM me if you like. Tks.

Mind you, for the difference in price, I could afford to send a taxi to get him

Rather where are you? I'm in se london and ours was only £2500!

Also if you're looking for wood, I recommend freecycle. We've got most of ours from there this year. Also contact a local tree surgeon, apparently they have to pay to dispose of the wood.

Well I am just round the corner in SW London

we have one in an old cottage we're renovating. 1st job we did was knock the old 60's style fireplace out as the nook we have was larger then the kitchen. I love it and I can't wait to move in & get firestarting!!!

A multifuel one is far more practical than a woodburner. If you have a hot-water cylinder, it can heat that for you with no discernable extra cost.

A ton of wood contains far far far less heat than a ton of coal so you will constantly be carrying it about and feeding the stove.

The wood will bring with it an interesting assortment of spiders, woodlice, beetles, grubs and woodworm, and will be fundamentally dirty and dusty. Not as dirty as an open fire though.

You will have to empty out the ash and carry it through the house at least once a day. Some of the ash will blow about inside the room so you will have to take up dusting and buy a pinny.

There is no need to empty the ash pan every day.

You need to leave a rather thick bed of ash to protect the bottom of the stove; I can't burn enough daily to leave that much ash. If I'm burning full time, say 14 hours/day over the Xmas break, I can get thru a heaving wheelbarrow full of wood (about 4 quid in money), and still don't need to empty the ashes daily.

Sometimes I empty all the ash, though, and put down a bed of sawdust & wood shavings (we have loads!) as thickly as possible, this doesn't completely burn down except over something like 12 hours, so I think (hope) insulates the bottom well enough.

Ours is a very small stove.

Oh yeah, re microbeast visitors: we often have wasps over-wintering in our wood, they end up buzzing around the light fittings & have to be evicted all winter. But coal waste is very nasty, acidic, no? Can't compost it for a start, and you can't put it straight into the bin because it would burn thru, so have to store it somewhere in a metal container until it completely cools down before you can bin it. And it stains clothes worse than wood ash (I think?).

Some people turn all that into a positive, don't they, & make soap from coal ash?

Do you all live in smoke-free area or, if not, do you only have the DEFRA approved stoves? Having to burn smokeless fuel slightly puts me off the idea of them (still plan on getting one though)

non-smoke-free, that should be

Ooh go and get yourself a stove. We have 2 stoves and 2 open fires in our house and the stoves heat the room up much better. We have a Clearview and just had a Termatech with a soapstone cover installed in the kitchen. It's just fab.
They are multifuel so we are burning all sorts, wood, rapeseed logs, peat and smokeless coal. We find the smokeless coal the most cost effective and gives out the most heat. If you are going to install it in your fireplace you need at least 30 cm of hearth in front of the stove so sometimes installation can be more costly if you have to remove an old hearth, replace it and refix the fire surround, line the chimney etc.

We have 3, playroom, kitchen and sitting room, all currently on and lovely.

I bloody LOVE ours

It's been alight all day actually. Logs at 1st then I shut it right down with coal and it kicked out heat all afternoon. Put a few more logs on and it's roaring again

We bought a ton of wood (all split seasoned ash) for £85 - my MIL pays £130 for similar load. It's worth shopping around for wood (we get ours from a friend of my BIL who is a tree surgeon)

AFAIK tree surgeons IME normally chip all their felled trees. Plus, unless it's ash etc it needs to season.

We buy TESCO bags of kindling from some old chap down our lane for 1.20 a bag. We buy 2 bags a month.

Havent scavenged any wood - really should do but don't really know how to!

We have only had our central heating on once briefly so far. The chimney heats the bathroom & dd2s room which is lovely. (dd1 room is internal so is warner any way)

it's just DP and I that shiver in our north facing room with no heating

he's a tightarse

OnlyWantsOne "...It's been alight all day actually"

that reminds me

They take a while to get hot

I used to have a MF in a cottage with a biggish main room, if I lit it when I got in from work, after having a mug of tea, it was quite a while before the room was warm. I could keep mine alight overnight by banking with "coal" and damping, but it would not stay in untill the next evening. Probably a much better bet for people who are at home most of the day.

www.aarrowfires.com/our-range-of-stoves/ecoburn-range/ecoburn-freestanding.html

no naked flame but still visible fire
no smell
no sparks
WONDERFUL
our hearth is build from garden path slates so cost £75 plud £75 to the brickie who fitted it
leaving it chewing while we go out - not something you can do with an open fire
it takes about 2 hours to get really hot but on a cold weekend its the bees knees

We've got a multi fuel AGA Little Wenlock, it's fab, the longest we kept it going was for two weeks and then it only went out because DP forgot about it. Much better than an open fire. DP is a builder so put it in himself, didn't need a chimney liner, just got the chimney swept and checked before installation. I can't recommend them enough!

Can I just ask, do we need to buy a proper wood and coal store or is there a budget way of doing it?

if you are getting through enough coal or smokeless to need it delivered (this is the cheapest way) then you will need some kind of bunker or coal cellar. If you are just buyiong a few plastic sacks, they will get dirty and dusty if left outside (you get a certain amount of black dust just from shovelling and handling it or tipping it into your hod)

Wood is best kept under cover to keep the rain off, and not in contact with the ground. A shed is better as it will reduce the amount of wildlife. You may get mice nesting in it as well as the wildlife. If it is inside it will dry out and burn better. You can get a log box to keep by the hearth, remembering that wildlife will crawl out of it.

We have this one without a back boiler. It sits in a very large inglenook and looks lovely.

I think it cost about 2.5k including installation, liner, flue pipe.

It really chucks out a huge amount of heat. We burn a mixture of coal and wood as just wood doesn't get hot enough. I have an endless supply of wood because of my job (building inspector).

Much cleaner and safer than an open fire, plus no smoke!

We have one and we love it. DH loves chopping wood and has taken on the job of managing the fire- must make him feel macho, in the same way as barbecues do
Ours is just a cheapie from the fireplace warehouse but chucks out some heat. It heats the whole house if we leave the lounge door open, meaning the boiler goes off, saving us money. It was a bit fiddly at first to find out the best settings, but DH has got it just right now. We do get some free wood, as we have friends in construction, but we have bought logs too. DH chops them and piles them up in the garage on an old metal shelving rack.
At first the glass did get black and had to be scrubbed a couple of times but it doesn't happen anymore.
I don't know if we live in a smoke-free area, as I couldn't find out any info anywhere.
There is always lots of wood on offer on freecycle.
The most expensive bit for us was the fitting as we had an old gas fire that needed taking out. We also had the chimney lined, even though the fitter said we didn't really need it; we just felt safer doing it.

i live in a Victorian house, so it's got all the problems you get with old houses being draughty and taking ages to heat. furthermore it's an old school so our dining room is huge. We had an open fire in here and have one in the much smaller living room. We had a Clearview fitted in the dining room last year, and the difference is amazing. The chimney breast goes up into our bedroom(which is accessed via a staircase in this room). Through last winter which was cold we turned off the radiator in our bedroom as the heat going up the stairs and then overnight coming off the chimney breast was more than enough to keep it warm (and i should add our bedrooms are in the eaves which makes them even harder to heat in cold weather).
The open fire in the living room is useless and has to be going for a good few hours to heat the room. We're currently saving to have a woodburner fitted in there too.

We live rurally, have a wood man at the end of our road who we buy from throughout the summer and also a wood fair in Sept. We bought two bags of wood (the sort sand comes in from builders merchants) and paid £46 a bag. (we did have to get it home ourselves though)

When the weather is very cold i keep it in constantly (it takes a while to get the hang of this). I save electric in the winter by using it to boil the kettle and slow cook stews/heat soup etc on it (but this relies on you having one that is big enough and fitted in such a way that you can access the top)

You need to think about storage of wood, both inside and out. We're fortunate that we have a large understair space so we can get about a weeks worth of wood in there. If you don't have space then you need a big log basket (and this will mean there will be bits on the floor where you sit it). You need a routine of stocking up the wood daily in that case.

We are moving away from coal for environmental reasons, but if this is not an issue for you then look into get a multi-fuel burner.

Some woodburners come with a wood store underneath. We didn't particularly want a log basket in the sitting room so we bought one with enough space underneath for a couple of days' worth of wood.

OH YES, my MIL has a lovely new burner fitted, (cant remember make or model) but her fire place is huge (as is the burner) and she can get two or three days worth of wood under it (its sits on V grand legs)