Wood burning stoves. Love them or hate them???

[moominsmummy]

We are having an extension built that will be our lounge. DH wants a wood burning stove - I was thinking of a wall mounted gas fire as

• we have a baby and a 4 year old so worry about the dangers

• DH is disabled and I have enough to do without chopping/storing wood and cleaning out the embers

are wood burning stoves worth the hassle??

Am looking forward to getting one, tbh. We have an open fire, which is lovely, and a BabyDan hearthguard around it. Where we live you order wood ready chopped and dried - does need somewhere to be stored. I think stoves are pretty efficient, so much less to clean out than an open fire. And you're more insulated from rising gas prices, and if you get wood from a good sustainable source they're pretty environmentally friendly, I think.

Our woodburner is way easier to manage than an open fire. They are easy to light and you only need to clean them about (by removing the drawer full of ash) about once in about a month. It is our only source of heat so I am glad it is efficient. We buy our wood ready chopped and it is delivered by lorry to the shed.

love it - not much cleaning out at all, as habbibu said, stoves are efficient and there's not much ash left over. Ours is on for hours every day and I empty the ash box every 4 days or so.
We get chopped wood delivered, you do need a log shelter but that's all.

We use our stove as the main heating for the entire house (5 bed) - £160 worth of wood should hopefully see us through the winter. Not bad, considering what we'd pay for heating oil.

Ah habb, if we didn't live about 40,000 miles apart you could have ours on a long-term loan. Our new(ish) house has capped chimneys and we can't afford to get it all sorted out (new flue and lining for chimney would be big moolah). So it sits there looking decorative.

moomin - haven't had a gas fire for years so can't really compare the two. Our stove didn't generate a whole lot of heat, unless you were sitting right in front of it - we used to have the radiators on at the same time in cold weather. You can get ready-chopped logs quite easily and keep them in the shed, or anywhere dry really. Making up the fire itself is either a pleasure or a chore depending on how pushed for time you are. They don't need a lot of cleaning - in fact DP used to insist that you're supposed to leave a good layer of ash at the bottom to make it work properly (although he is very lazy about cleaning so that might have been a strategic untruth).

DS1 was about 18 months when we first started using ours and we never had any trouble with it - he seemed to cotton on very quickly that it was extremely hot and not to be messed about with.

the ash layer thing is true

Thanks constance I have been wondering for some years now.

How come yours are all so good at heating then? Our heat seemed to go straight up the chimney.

We had a register plate fitted to block the rest of the chimney and prevent the heat escaping. Also we bought a woodburner that was slighly bigger than needed for the size of the room - 8kw.

Wood burners are easy to look after, a bit of black grate polish now and then and a soapy cloth on the glass when its cold. Good for heating but someimes when I come down in the morning the room smells of smoke as I leave the door open sometimes so that it doesnt burn away so quickly. The worst thing is getting the wood and storing it in a dry place but an open fire is worth the effort, nothing can beat it on a cold day.

ps children can be taught to stay away, we had a fireguard and gs who is also disabled had no problems with it, he loves to help light it, he is a proper pyromaniac!

I love ours but we have electric storage heaters as the alternative, if you look around you can get wood fairly cheaply... (£15 a tonne of uncut oak staves where I live).

We lived in a house with a gas fire, traditional looking fake iykwim, it was very expensive to run, didn't give off much heat.

Very little mess, very easy to light (unlike an open fire), gives off a lot of heat for the fuel being burned so seems very efficient.

We have this soapstone stove - it traps most of the heat and gives it off slowly over 24 hours like a giant radiator - v. nice.

We're going to install a second, smaller one in another part of the house this winter.

I have one in my house in Cornwall, but unfortunately not in the rental we are in in Brussels. I miss my woodburner - coming down the stairs and feeling the heat hit you half you down is great.

We had one before ds, and had a fireguard made. He survived from birth until we moved when he was 10 without getting burned, so it is possible.

We had wood delivered, or went and got it ourselves and as long as it was dry, it was fine. Go for it - you won't regret it.