Decided to give up on gas and electricity!!

Checuba

I recently moved from London to North East Scotland, to a house with chimnies - 10 pots to be precise! Don't know if everyone's aware, there is an alternative way to heat your home - if you have chimnies - wood burning stoves. I'm fitting three two downstairs and one up. each small stove churns out up to 6kw of heat and can heat your water too. The heat is adjustable through a vent slider/knob. The initial installation, though not cheap (£5000 in my case), will reap rewards within two years. If I'm really tight, I can collect driftwood off the beach for no cost, failing that, I have the choice of wood shaving briquettes, wood chips, logs, anthracite, or peat to burn - most wood comes from sustainable forests, so it's a green energy. And if you have a large stove fitted that has a feeder - feeding it with chips, you can get a grant of 1/3 cost in Scotland!! I only have gas to a kitchen hob, which barely registers gas - probably because I don't cook alot!! BUT my electricity is costing £250 per month!!! RIDICULOUS and unaffordable, as I have had to heat from convector heaters..... Without those and having the stoves will be a godsend. Plenty of websites andvertising them - just Google and put in wood burning stoves or similar:)

Ian

Mikeyorks

Gosh .. you are enthusiastic !!

Just moved from a farmhouse where we had installed 'wood burners' 18 years ago - and had Econ 7 storage radiators for background heating. The wood burners were great - but there are pitfalls?

First. If you have a back boiler in one of them - to heat your water - it will dramatically reduce the heating into the room. By at least 50%. So don't put the boiler into the one that you use to heat your main living area.

Secondly. Put in multi-fuels, not pure wood burners (suspect you are - as you mention anthracite?), as they are much more versatile. And a mix of coal 'doubles' burned in conjunction with wood - usually gives the greatest heat.

Finally. The wood you burn needs to be 'seasoned'. That is not the same as it being 'dry' - which is the other requirement. It ideally needs to be hardwood - and stored outside in all the elements - over at least one winter period. That knocks the sap out of it - otherwise it will go up your chimneys - and create tar and a real fire hazard. The driftwood sounds great - as that will have been well de-sapped (seasoned wood is a nice grey colour - as is most driftwood?) and all you need to do is cut / dry it.

Anthracite - I found to be far from ideal. It needs a lot of air to burn well and is an absolute nightmare to get burning from cold. Use the much cheaper 'washed coal doubles' (but previous threads suggest it's not quite so cheap in your area). Burn in conjunction with seasoned wood - it's pretty good.

Have a look at this thread as well ?
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=1886549#post1886549

dippy-dora_2

Sounds nice and cosy but re the driftwood - you arent really allowed to take it so don't get caught!

There are a lot of coal fires round where i live and this gives hot water too but the ex minors have stopped getting free coal so are having to go onto gas now.

frosty

We had a stanley wood burning stove fitted in our house when we lived out in the wilds,it was advertised in the local paper for £100.00,we had it fitted and we ran 9 double radiators off it.They can be a bit messy to use but they kept the house cosy in the winter, why do you need 3 wood burning fires?(just curious),the one we had was like a rayburn so you could cook on it as well,they take a bit of getting used to,it can be very annoying when you have been out at work all day to come home and find the stoves gone out and the kids are starving and want their supper.In the end we decided to buy a gas cooker that ran on LPG gas(£20.00 in the paper)and used it as a backup,a large gas cylinder would last us about 6 months, so it was cheap to run.When the weather was really bad we used to leave the oven door open to heat the room up if the stove had gone out.