Wood burner

[lovemycar]

I have an open fire but lose a lot of heat up the chimney. I am thinking about investing in a wood burner. For anyone who has a wood burner what are the positives, negatives, and potential cost of making this change. TIA for any advice.

[Throwncrumbs]

@Ricco12

No they aren't.. burning wood is far better than burning fossil fuels

Wood is carbon neutral and a renewable source of heating your home.

There is No scientific evidence found for adverse health impacts from exposure to the indoor air typically associated with modern, enclosed wood burning stoves

This is the same old shite spewed out all the time by people using wood burners about how they are not as bad as burning fossil fuels..,difference is is that when you go outside and your next door neighbours chimney is spewing out smoke and crap for you to breath it is totally different than them having the central heating on. More and more people are getting these things because ‘oh it looks so homely and lovely’ that pollution has gone up in city’s where they shouldn’t be used anyway. It like going back in time, in years to come there will be people with lung issues caused by these unenviromentally fires! Hope they do get banned in city’s, what’s the point of going for electric cares when people are burning wood day in day out!

[Fragrantandfoolish]

@Throwncrumbs

This is the same old shite spewed out all the time by people using wood burners about how they are not as bad as burning fossil fuels..,difference is is that when you go outside and your next door neighbours chimney is spewing out smoke and crap for you to breath it is totally different than them having the central heating on. More and more people are getting these things because ‘oh it looks so homely and lovely’ that pollution has gone up in city’s where they shouldn’t be used anyway. It like going back in time, in years to come there will be people with lung issues caused by these unenviromentally fires! Hope they do get banned in city’s, what’s the point of going for electric cares when people are burning wood day in day out!

Electric cars make fuck all difference. It’s a tiny percentage reduction . Because all the trucks and lorries remain diesel . Many of the vans. About 30 percent of the trains are still on diesel.

the ignorance is astonishing

[bellac11]

Wood is not a finite resource. Oil is a finite resource.

[BiddyPop]

We got one a few years ago now to replace an open fireplace.

Much better at heating the room. Because it burns at a higher temp/more efficiently and with secondary burning of smoke, there is much less ash and hardly any embers - everything gets burned properly.

I agree with others about the wood ash for cleaning the glass.

A couple of things I recently found helped. get it lighting initially with plenty of flames to heat the flue and get the drAught going properly to suck the smoke up and out rather than the cold air pushing down and trapping the smoke in the stove (which makes the glass get black) - so start with a firelighter and some very dry sticks that will catch quickly with all the vents open to allow lots of air in. (And yes, hot fires will often burn off any smoke residue on the glass, but not always).

And once it is going properly and there is a draught sucking properly, but also a nice glow of embers going, turn down the air enough to manage the burn - you want your logs to burn well with enough air to prevent smoke but not so much air that the logs burn through too quickly.

But at the end of the night, when it's just a small amount of embers left, (well after the last log was thrown in), don't close the dampers but open them up so the last bit burns well rather than getting much cooler and starting to smoke from not enough air. Or you might go to bed with a nice clean glass but wake up to a blackened one.

[BiddyPop]

Wood is not finite, but it is much easier to plant and grow new trees than it is to crush organic matter under pressure to make more oil and gas.

[BiddyPop]

Sorry - mixing up my finite and infinite this morning. Yes -oil will run out. But you can grow more wood (which captures carbon as it grows).

[PigletJohn]

It will be easier if you are a strong woman able to use a saw, splitter and an axe, and you are planning not to get old or hurt your arm.

[EstherHazy]

Just re the cleaning thing -

We quite often end up using pretty mucky / wet wood (we get it from a tree surgeon in the family free so beggars can't be choosers) - some wood definitely burns more cleanly than others!

We also have this type of burner - see photo (a stock one, not our house hahaha) with glass all round three sides... so it's a lot more glass than usual to potentially smoke up, and it's a real pain to clean as you can't just 'open the doors' - the glass frame sort of releases and slides forward, but you've got to scrub it from over and above to get to the inside. When it is clean it looks amazing - much more like a real fire than the more contained style - but it really does get dirty all the time (mostly our wood supply I guess). We're very seasoned fire makers - open fires and wood burners all our lives.

I do know they are environmentally bad and it is definitely worth thinking that through. But ultimately none of us here is a saint all the time - and if you want to get one, get it now before you can't!

[Ricco12]

@Fragrantandfoolish

Electric cars are no better for the environment... A report by the European Environment Agency highlights that emissions from battery electric vehicle production are generally higher than those created by building an internal combustion-engined (ICE) vehicle. 
One study suggests that CO2 emissions from electric car production are 59% higher than those for the production of ICE vehicles.2
The greater emissions largely come from the battery manufacturing process.

We have two choices to heat our home oil or wood. Our oil heating spews fumes out into the garden from the vent ..just because you don't see it or smell it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Burning fossil fuel really doesn't trump wood I'm afraid.

[Fragrantandfoolish]

We quite often end up using pretty mucky / wet wood (we get it from a tree surgeon in the family free so beggars can't be choosers) - some wood definitely burns more cleanly than others

wet wood will just clog up your chimney flue and burner, it leaves behind tar/creosote and will put you at significant risk of a chimney fire. It also releases really dangerous particles into the air . Both in your home and outside,

It’s also Illegal from this year to burn it in your home. From feb 21 it become illegal to sell it and from 23 it becomes illegal to actually burn it in your home.

unless you are literally freezing and have absolutely no other choice then honestly you really shouldn’t burn wet wood. You should start building up a store and season it first. Then use it on rotation.

[MintJulia]

@wherethewaterisdarker

Errm sorry to be a killjoy, but aren't the downsides that woodburners are incredibly bad for your health, hideous for the environment, and are imminently going to be made illegal?? I mean I love a wood-fire as much as the next person, but these factors definitely put me off!

They can't make them illegal in all places with no gas main. What else would we use? Oil? Coal? They're fossil fuels so much worse.

Old houses don't have under floor heating and storage heaters don't suit a lot of people's life styles.

[bellac11]

When you get given wood you need to season it by storing it for a couple of years, ideally in a sunny spot.

Please get a moisture meter, you should burn wood under 15% moisture, if its not low enough, wait some time

We have free wood for a couple of years now and we have seasoned it ourselves in wood stores and are now at 15% moisture down from 40%

[Fragrantandfoolish]

Jus a little correction it’s actually 20% for seasoned wood. Not 15.

[EstherHazy]

@Fragrantandfoolish I think @bellac11 was just saying what their wood was (nice and dry), not the legal requirement of 20%.

We do season as much as poss, do get the fireplace annually cleaned and serviced- we know when wood isn't great, it's not in our interest to use it like that! But there are times we use wetter stuff than ideal - I couldn't tell you what measurements but we do have/use a measurer (just I don't do it myself). Occasionally we just get through the piles faster than expected or the wood is just a bit rubbish and dirty, or it gets rained on when we've moved it our back door from the sheds in winter. That kinda thing. But we're not going straight from the tree into the fire :)

[Fragrantandfoolish]

They can't make them illegal in all places with no gas main. What else would we use? Oil? Coal? They're fossil fuels so much worse

the poster is wrong, don’t worry. The very old stoves might be, but the government, put put a statement last month saying they have no plans to ban, at least in England, anywhere.

wirh the correctly sealed stoves and the right fuel there is no real risk to humans, cooking is worse. An open fire in someone’s house is a real risk.

Plus they don’t have the resources to enforce it. Nor the funds to be able to give folks grants to remove and replace where they are low income and rely on it for heat or water.

I think some folks read the research on dangers and don’t differentiate between old stoves, fuel types etc , but no there is no plans to even review banning, never mind banning

[Dollyparton3]

We live in a large 4 bed detached house with 3 floors and good insulation, when the gas prices rose this year we bit the bullet and had a log burner installed to replace the naff gas fire in our lounge. It cost us £6k but we went for a fancy Nordic one with glass on all sides.

I wish we'd done it sooner! We light it around 3-4 ish in the afternoon and it chucks out enough heat to rise into the bedrooms and heat the ground floor. As a result we only have the heating on in the morning.

We buy logs in bulk and although they cost us £275 a large load our log man stacks them included in that price. I'd much rather give out money to a local business than British Gas and out heating bills have dropped significantly this year.

The gamechanger for us was buying one of the magnetic temperature gauges that sits on the flue, if that's at optimum temperature there's hardly any ash and no brown glass. New log burners have a clean air system that circulates air in the burner to help with this as well

[Beebumble2]

We’ve just put our second one in a different room. This time we went for multi fuel, as the smokeless fuel burns more slowly, glows and we top up with a log or two. The heat it produces is astounding, GCH off and internal doors open.
It cost £3000 to install in the old open fire chimney. There were no building complications as the hearth was already large enough.
You do need a HETAS engineer to install it for safety. Get a moisture metre to make sure the wood you burn is dry enough.

[Twochildrenpluspointfour]

We quite often end up using pretty mucky / wet wood (we get it from a tree surgeon in the family free so beggars can't be choosers) - some wood definitely burns more cleanly than others!

You should never burn wet wood.

[bellac11]

@Fragrantandfoolish

Jus a little correction it’s actually 20% for seasoned wood. Not 15.

Ideally it should be as dry as possible, 15% is good to aim for, I dont like it any higher. We have excellent soot according to our chimney sweep and very little of it too.

[Silverlog]

Please do not get a log burner. I am sick to death of the number of my neighbours who've put one in. The air is super-polluted now in the evenings. It stinks!

[DogInATent]

Getting a multifuel stove was one of our best investments in the home.

If you have access to fresh wood then you will need a woodstore to keep it in for a couple of years to season. We run of a mix of offcuts/scrap wood, seasoned logs and smokeless fuel (ecoal). We've been able to run this winter with the gas central heating turned down a couple of degrees and shortened hours in the day by using the stove to heat the living area.

[Rosula]

@wherethewaterisdarker

Errm sorry to be a killjoy, but aren't the downsides that woodburners are incredibly bad for your health, hideous for the environment, and are imminently going to be made illegal?? I mean I love a wood-fire as much as the next person, but these factors definitely put me off!

The government is never going to make them illegal, there are too many places where they are pretty essential for various reasons. They may however widen the areas where they're not allowed, especially in towns.

[Diyextension]

“It’s also Illegal from this year to burn it in your home. From feb 21 it become illegal to sell it and from 23 it becomes illegal to actually burn it in your home.“

who is actually going to police this ? Is someone going to poke a moisture meter into it just as your about to put it into your stove ? It’s also illegal to burn (smoke) drugs ( heroin ) in your home but I’m sure plenty of people do it.

[bellac11]

Yes it worries me that these people who believe they're choking to death because their neighbour has a wood burner are going to be reporting people left right and centre, how do you prove you're burning good stuff.

[Fragrantandfoolish]

I think it’s quite easy to spot and report and no if it’s a false report… they can video the black acrid smoke from your chimney, also a chimney sweep would be able to tell if it was dry wood being burned or seasoned wood when a chimney was swept. So the council can check if reported. Wet wood makes a real mess of both the appliance and the flue.

if you sweep our chimney you would know immediately it was seasoned wood. You’d also see by our log stores. Of which we have three. Where the wood is rotated until use. Any filming of our chimney would show very little to no smoke when it’s on. It’s the moisture that produces the soot and smoke when it’s burnt.

so you can tell very easily if someone is burning wet or seasoned wood.