Didn't know where to put this, a fire...

[spottedbike]

I have a working fire place. I back onto a woods and have part of that woods within my boundary too.
How can I learn how on earth I make the fireplace work. If I Google it I'm just so scared I'm going to muck up, also I have no idea how I get wood, does it have to be dried first and any particular type of can I hack down a tree and go for it.

I am feeling particularly stupid about it all and don't know who to ask that can help but I know we won't be able to afford heating bills this year and our salaries have not gone up just dreading it.

Our house and water are heated by logs (via a modern burner/heating system) and we use several tonnes of wood a year... Multiple wheelbarrows of wood a day and a lot of hard work. "A few trees in the garden" plus dead wood from a small woodland area wouldn't do the job at all, and ours is an incredibly efficient system with basically zero heat wastage. An open fireplace is nothing like as efficient. It'll be lovely for a night sitting in front of the fire, but it isn't the answer to how to keep your house warm!

I think you keep skirting the issue, but you really can't cut down any trees on your landlord's property.

@FlippertyGibberts I genuinely don't think they will care But I will check.
Thanks @GreenEggsAndBabycham yes multiple wheelbarrows do sound like a massive ache! When I say a few I mean completely wooded 0.25 acres. Unless that is only a few?! Maybe I'm just a teeny bit ignorant ...

In most areas you are not able to burn 'green' wood i.e. unseasoned wood due to the amount of smoke it gives off thereby contributing to air pollution.

I wouldn't be keen to use a fire or even a log burner indoors for air quality reasons.

I was brought up in a house heated by open fires. Wood gives out very little heat, even when we’ll seasoned. Some types of wood burn better than others but generally an open wood fire is more decorative than warming.

So collect what you can and store it. You'll feel by the weight of the wood whether it's dryish or fresh.

Make a little pyramid of dry sticks and leaves with slightly bigger sticks around it. Light that, and add bigger pieces as it gets going.

You need a metal frame in the fireplace. You can't light it directly on the brick/concrete base.

You won't be able to collect enough for the winter, but may get enough to keep the heating off on the borderline days. It will keep the damp at bay, too.

Burning fresh wood will be a huge amount of work for very little heat.

We have two open fires and use house coal. We have a log store full of logs but in all honesty you spent all night throwing logs on the fire whereas with coal pile it high early evening and that’s it till bed.

For a traditional open fire you will need proper house coal, you cannot buy this off the shelf any more in most of the UK, it has to be delivered from a suitable merchant. It’s cheaper than smokeless fuels and gives off much more heat (and some smoke).

When we were using an open coal fire for most of our heat we were using nearly 25kg a day.

Our local coal merchant is currently asking £400 a ton delivered, we stocked up with three tons at £220 a ton a while back but prices for everything seem to be heading up.

I take it you are rural so don't have any clean air/smokeless rules where you are?

Do you own the trees/have permission to take the wood?

My extended family are farmers and have log burners. they have some woodland adjacent to grazing land and will sometimes coppice or chop up fallen trees/limbs of trees. These need to be chainsawed then split ( they use a tool on the tractor, manual log splitting is hard work). Then the wood is left in a farm shed for 18m to season. Even with this system, they use oil in the range/night storage heaters as well.

I don't think you can take wood you don't own without permission of the owner. You will be looking at buying your wood for at least the first year.

At least the physical effort will keep you warm.

Definitely check - there could be a tree preservation order as this is possible on areas of woodland as well as individual trees. In that case, felling the trees would be a criminal offence.

I can’t imagine the landlord won’t care - logging looks incredibly ugly and will damage the value of the property. Also, are we talking massive mature trees? If so, if you intend to cut them down, you will need to hire a professional - cutting them down yourself will be impossible without the right tools and dangerous with them if you don’t know what you are doing.

When I was a child, I lived in a house where the only heating was a fire (project house where the central heating went in after we had a winter without). What I remember best is how cold it was. You could have a scorching front and a cold back because the fire didn’t heat the room. There was a reason for the Victorian fashion for high backed chairs with wings - it kept the cold off the bits not facing the fire.

Also, we used coal not logs. Heating with just wood in an open fire is inefficient to say the least.

We heated ourselves entirely through log burners for many years, from wood we gathered from our property.

We never cut down living trees. We harvested trees that had died naturally, and were sufficiently dried to burn the same year (we had access to significant forest). Check with whoever owns the forest around your place, they may be OK with you harvesting dead wood on that basis.

I've always had an open fire and depending on the size of your room, mine have always heated them extremely well but our houses have been well insulated too. Coal would be better than wood though and the price of coal is about to go through the roof. We've a mixed fuel stove in our new house which is supposed to be far more efficient at heating a room.

In an open fire, coal does give off better heat. You could use collected small sticks or split logs as kindling to start it off if you collect some now and store indoors to dry out.

I roll up knots of newspaper, then sort of Jenga the kindling and couple of small logs then once it is going shovel the coal on.
You need a fire guard and a coal scuttle and a companion set for cleaning it out.

You can't cut down trees but you can collect up branches from the ground that have already fallen and keep them somewhere dry until needed.

Our fireplace doesn't heat the whole house but makes the lounge nice and cosy.

@CatherinedeBourgh that's interesting actually. We had a tree surveyor come recently and he marked all the dead and dying trees so I know which ones they are.
I'll investigate using coal as well.

Im not going to start cutting trees down Willy nilly and im not a complete fool around trees just fires 😁. The pretty trees will remain untouched and there are no TPO but even so I'm not going to hack down some old oak tree. I will ask LL though .
We will be here until the LL kicks us out, rents have more than doubled since we came here and we already got it cheaply. LL has no ambition to sell afaik. The house isn't in the best of condition but it's ok. I'm more scared to ask about the double glazing issues and the fact I have reasonable gaps between inside and outside of a number of windows (I can see the actual outside without opening some of the windows) than for fire wood tbh in case he thinks he has to outlay too much money on us being here.

If you're just experimenting for the first time then you don't need to do anything special! As said, ensure the chimney is clear of birds nests etc, then just chuck some balls of newspaper on it followed by any old sticks/wood you can find, get it lit & get a feel for it.

People do collect firewood from woods. It’s not ideal but people do. Also driftwood from beaches. Make sure it’s seasoned. Smokeless fuel lasts longer. if you buy a big pallet of seasoned wood it’s better.

fires are pretty easy really.

Freshly chopped wood takes a year or so to dry out. So its no use chopping down any random trees now (which may be considered theft) to use this winter.

Order in some wood for the next few months. Store in shed. Order kindling too.

To make a fire I put two fire lighters at the bottom. Then over them I make a jenga tower with the kindling. About 8 storeys high.

Then a bigger log on top of that.

Mind you we have a very modern efficient log burner. Open fire might be different.

Open fires definitely less efficient and harder to get going than a log burner.

Our log burner does heat up our sitting room very nicely and the heat spreads to the rest of the house (small cottage). So I think we could do quite without or with only minimal heating.

Not sure an open fire will work so well though tbh.

Another thing to consider - do you live in a smokeless zone? If so, you’ll need smokeless coal or very well seasoned timber.

Look around your local area, we have a local tree surgeon who sells off last year's seasoned logs , we've bought 2 tonnes for £150 that'll get us through the winter with a fire each evening. We don't use it during the day as we're mainly at work and even with a fire guard I don't trust DS. It keeps the living room nice and warm and greats our bedroom above too

You can also get moisture metres quite cheaply, try not to burn anything with more than 20% moisture

You can get moisture meters very cheaply from amazon. Stick them into the wood and you'll see how much dampness is in them. I forget what % you need to get below, but Google will know.

We bought a load of seasoned logs last year, and they were OK (just below the damp threshold on the meter) but they smoked a lot on lighting and didn't ever get to a roaring fire. When they ran out we got kiln dried and the difference was incredible. Easy to light, and burned well with a nice amount of heat.

I reckon it would take a few years for wood to get to a point where you get the most out of it, so I reckon it's not worrh your while to even attempt collecting/chopping/stacking/storing your own.

Open fires are rather inefficient, a closed stove generates far more heat.

Fresh wood (i.e. a chopped down tree) needs to be cut, split and seasoned to get the moisture level down. Seasoning takes 1 year per inch thickness, plus a year.

There are smokeless fuels ("coal") that will work on open fires, but like wood they'll burn far more efficiently and put more heat into the room in a closed stove. Hard fuels have been rising in price. Smokeless fuel has risen 30% compared to what I was paying last year, but shopping around and buying our entire winter usage ahead of time has brought the increase down to something more manageable (<10%). And given the reassurance that the tonne of fuel in the coal shed is bought and paid for, and can't increase in cost any further.

You must get the chimney swept first. A good sweep can advise you on how to use the fire. Start gathering fallen wood now, get it cut and stacked ready for use.