Wood burner

[iloveyankeecandle]

Getting a bit paranoid about all this gas business. Anyway, it's got me thinking about a wood burner. Has anyone had one fitted recently? What was the rough price and has it been worth it? I have a chimney but it's blocked up at the bottom where the fire would go so I'd need that opening back up.

God we wouldnt be without ours. I so wish we had put it in earlier, had it about 4 years now

We love it and it heats very quickly. I dont think its difficult to clean, the glass is self cleaning anyway so that never needs wiping or cleaning, we put the ashes out about once a week and get it swept once a year for £50.

You have to shop around for the wood and get it delivered. Luckily we have a tree load from a tree that fell down in my parents garden so we will use that this winter.

I had one fitted a few months ago, £2100, West Yorkshire.
I get wood offcuts from a local woodwork shop free and pick up wood locally, so many trees are felled and go into a chipper, so the people felling them have been fine letting me have them.
I have a moisture meter so dry wood is stored separately than the wetter stuff.
It's lovely and I'm hopeful it'll make winters more pleasant and power cuts less of an issue

We bloody love our wood burner.

We live in a village with no gas, so virtually everyone has a wood burner.

We have a massive wood shed and burn only really seasoned wood. Most of our wood is foraged. We fitted it ourselves as the supplier wanted £2k 🤨

@cherrypiepie I had to laugh at your comment about shifting logs with a disability. My DH was a few weeks post amputation with a serious neurological condition when our logs arrived and he being the determined character that he is decided to stack the logs. It took him about a week!

@Calmdown14 I think insulation might be the way to go to be honest

@Diyextension that looks lovely! I think they really set a room off.

This comes up alot over the years on MN and I am usually a lone voice shouting NO over all the romanticism.
I've had one for 40 years. We have no gas and power cuts every winter. My stove has a back boiler so can heat the water and a few radiators. So it's useful. We have oil central heating but the living room is never warm without the stove.
However it's a filthy pain to clean, you spend half your life carting logs in. Logs aren't cheap unless you have a lot of land plus the strength to cut your own. I would never, in a million years choose a wood burner if I had mains gas.
I actually stopped using ours 3 years ago because of my asthma and we've used electric heaters. Might have to rethink in view of electricity costs.

We've just had one fitted. They removed old gas fire and surround, put in chimney liner, new hearth and plaster boarded the sides. Stove was one of the more expensive ones.
Cost us about 4200, but we could have done it for 3.5 if we'd chosen a cheaper stove

We paid about £7k all in for two stoves four years ago (a white/cream Dovre Vintage 50 and a cream Charnwood C6). But we're also in a very rural location with no mains gas. We also have our own supply of wood to burn and in the winter we don't use our oil-fired rads in the rooms with the wood burners at all, so for us it's not just about the aesthetics but the cost. We sweep our own chimneys.

I don't think we'd bother with getting stoves installed though if we didn't live rurally.....

We have two - a large one in the dining room which was here when we moved in 20 years ago and we have just had a small one fitted in the living room. They supplement the central heating (oil, not on mains gas) Cost was about £3.5k for stove, chimney liner and insulation, pot and labour. Our sweep reckons they only need sweeping every other year. A square metre bag of logs costs about £90 and lasts a winter. I love them but I appreciate they are expensive and I wouldn't want to rely on them as a sole source of heating. By the way, you are supposed to let the ash build up. They retain heat better if the logs are burning slowly on a deep bed of ash.

Just a reminder that a stove should be fitted by a HETAS registered fitter or signed off by building control.

You are lighting a fire inside your house. It is not worth risking your life over.

Getting Uncle Bob who is very handy to fit such a thing is not advisable.

Had a 5kw inset fireplace fitted recently, 2.8k for install, fireplace, hearthstone and flue with gas capped.

The installers did say they are crazy busy, usually summers are dead but they are booked out until October. They said lead times and prices for orders are going up fast. We opted for a British made one they had in stock as the scandinavian ones were backed up for orders and like you we were getting twitchy about winter. The boiler won't work without electricity so it felt safer to have a backup just in case.

The cost of kiln dried logs is high but going up so worth getting some in and drying fresh logs for next winter.

Please don't install one unless you have no alternative www.mumsforlungs.org/our-campaigns/wood-burning

We’ve just replaced our stove and flue liner. We have oil central heating, so don’t need it to heat the house (though it’s a nice option to have for one of the many power outages we experience). Cost just over 4K.

It’s worth every penny and then some, if only for the December Saturday nights of sitting in front of a fire, whilst drinking mulled wine and watching Santa Claus the Movie. The house is thatched though, so the house insurance company took the opportunity to give us a right kicking.

We have two woodburners and I am so thankful, we have GCH so only use them high days and holidays but if Putin turns off the tap I know I can heat my home, make tea and cook food, it’s very comforting in these troubled times.

Had one fitted last week. Cost £3800 all in. Paid extra for the opening and outside edges lining with brick, without that (which is cosmetic) it would have been £2800. You do need a lot of space to store wood though, which we do have.

Not really, the most widely quoted data on air pollution from wood burning stoves comes from Defra.

amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/15/wood-burners-emit-more-particle-pollution-than-traffic-uk-data-shows

We are contemplating a wood burner.

Is anyone willing to show how much space you need to store the wood?? We are only in the very early stages of research as it will be a few months yet before we can afford it. We have a reasonable garden (70ft) so there's room for a log store - just wondering how big the log store needs to be...?

We’re getting one fitted soon. Just a warning though, in our area there is a long waiting list as I think everyone is worried about what the winter will bring. We had our quote etc done early June and it’s being fitted in Nov, we were in the shop last week and they said they were taking bookings into Jan now. The other stove installer in our area isn’t even taking enquiries as they’re so booked up.

We are storing wood in 4 different places in garden/shed.
How much you store depends how much you'll burn, tbh.
I have a fairly small stove but can get thru a heaving wheelbarrow load/day on full day's burn in winter. It's a lot!! it's also very frequent stove feeding. On a real day, I don't have time / I'm out too much , to burn so much. I'd say 1/3-1/2 wheelbarrow load on a more realistic day.

May i recommend stovepipe (flue) thermometer, to get temperature ideal?
I also have a moisture sensor now, great for keeping stores rotated.

We had one fitted into an existing fireplace. Tiled it ourselves and then had a small log burner fitted for £550!

It really depends how much wood you are going to buy.
We live in France, no gas, we have 2 wood burners. The large one is on 12 hours a day from end October until March.
We use between 7 and 8 m3 of wood.
Usually my dh cuts and stacks about 2/3 m3 around our back wall under the terrace roof. The rest sits under tarpaulin until we are running low.

If you were to build a wood store I would allow at least 6m3 of space.
The wood has to be stacked so air can get around it to keep it dry.
Invest in a moisture meter. Never burn wet wood.

Got a Charnwood c4 blu stove, just 5kw but wow an amazing stove! throws out loads of heat, very clean burning and uses hardly any wood, half what the old Villager stove used.

We fitted it all ourselves, with help from a retired HETAS engineer, the most important things were the quality of the stainless chimney liner, decent anti downdraft chimney cowl, distance of fire from combustibles (manufacture provided) & co2 alarms.

Around 4.5k with a chimney liner. We have a 5k one.

Please tell me yoire not using a forty year old stove? Thay needs replacing to one of the defra approved current ones. The old one will be very damaging for your health due to thr particles that will escape into the room,

we have two and old one nd a new efficient one, I seldom to never use the old one, I can tell the difference immediately with particles and only use it when there is a power cut and really need to replace it.