Wood Burning Stove - Is it really worth it?

wukfit

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help...

My family and I have recently (December last year) moved into our 'forever' house - a large 1920s semi with big rooms/high ceilings.

We knew the heating bill would be larger, but not as much as it actually is - so I've been looking into ways of saving on the heating bills.

I've ended up at wood burning stoves. I've had 3 quotes to fit one into an existing fireplace and not one of the HETAS engineers can seem to agree on whether we will save money on our GCH or not.

The room it would be going into is 8.7m x 4m x 2.7m which calculates to needing a 6.7 KW stove, one half is carpeted the other is bare floorboards (originally two rooms) the only outside wall is mostly taken up by a large double glazed bay window.

The house is solid brick walls (so no cavity insulation) and the floor is suspended.

The three quotes (make fireplace good, flue & liner, stove) are roughly:

1. Woodwarm Fireview 6KW, said it would easily heat the downstairs and make the whole house much warmer and would make significant savings on the GCH (Cost approx. £3500)

2. Aga Little Wenlock 4.7KW or similar, said no point going over 5KW because of the need to have outside vent, plus Aga's info stated that they tested stove at 7.4 KW??? - but would only be capable of heating one half of room. (Cost approx. £2700)

3. Town & Country Rosedale 7.5KW, said would easily heat room and would make the downstairs warmer but as the house was so big it was unlikely to have much affect on the upstairs (Cost approx £2200)


So my question is, for an outlay of several thousand pounds plus buying good quality kiln dried wood at £150 per m3 is a wood burner really going to save me money?

If anyone has experience of running one in a similar house I would be very grateful for their opinion.

Cheers,
WF

suisidevw

£150m3?!??! JEEEEEEEEEPERS! That's a lot of wonger. I don't know how much your gas bill is, but I can't see you saving anything with the initial outlay and the wood!

A._Badger

wukfit wrote: »

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help...

My family and I have recently (December last year) moved into our 'forever' house - a large 1920s semi with big rooms/high ceilings.


WF

How long is 'forever'? Only you can do the maths comparing the claimed savings against your gas bill over the number of years before something wears out and needs replacing (probably the liner, in this case).

The one thing I would say is be very cautious about wood. It rises in price, just like all fuels, and the current myth being peddled to the aspirational middle class is that wood heating is 'green' and 'cheap'.

Ignoring the former (it's a debatable point) the latter is certainly untrue. Wood isn't cheap and getting a reliable supply of well seasoned timber can be troublesome. It is also cumbersome to store and hard work to chop. Then there can be 'issues' with the varying quality of wood and the fact that stoves need lighting and tending while chimneys need sweeping - twice at year at least, with wood.

I say this as a (partial) wood user, not to put you off, but to be completely honest about its disadvantages, which are so rarely mentioned by stove retailers and lifetstyle magazines.

In its favour, it looks and smells wonderful when it burns and it restores the heart to a home which is usually robbed of it by central heating.

I don't have mains gas and even if I did, I would still have a stove (though I would never buy a wood-only one when you can get a multifuel burner for the same money). But I wouldn't expect to save money against mains gas fuelled central heating. I'd do it because it's nicer to live with.

My hunch is no, you won't save money - and even if you did it would take years to amortise the installation costs. But your home would be nicer to live in.

Hope that's at least a little help.

wukfit

@suisidevw Yeah, that's what I'm beginning to think...

@A. Badger Thanks for the reply. Forever = 20+ years (until the kids have left home). And yeah, the "Wood" burner would be a multi-fuel stove - but I agree, the numbers just don't seem to stack up... it's the same as the "wonderful" and planet saving Solar PV £15k up front and 15+ years before you've broken even... as to the disadvantages, I could put up with them if there was a saving to be had.

If someone could post figures for a before and after yearly gas bill, then cost of running the stove then I could make an informed decision - but at the moment it's like the shops/suppliers saying "give us a few thousand quid and it might heat your home... but it might not." The £150 m3 is Kiln dried - but I can also get a tonne of wood for £80 but I'd have to season it myself.

It would appear I have three options:

1. Do nothing and put up with the extra £50 a month and swallow any (imminent) price rises.
2. Make our home more thermally efficient
3. Put more heat into our home

I didn't think #1 is the right option, #2 appeared to be the most expensive e.g. cladding the exterior (£10k+), replacing the HW & GCH system which is old and not particularly efficient (£3k+).... as for #3 I've looked at solar PV, solar thermal, Air Source Heat Pump...

savemoney

I live in a 1920 semi with solid walls and have a multi stove burner it can kick out up to 8Kw. Wood as said goes up, as does coal. Its probably worth it if you have a free source of wood or use LPG/oil for example. I have a large garage where store wood along 75% of the wall costs £130 which should last from oct-march IF I am careful. I still use GCH as it does kick out enough to heat the whole house, the heat tends to stay in one or two rooms and boy can it be hot.

I also collect wood (pallets) and chop some up for kindling. It can be a pain at times going to garage in mid of winter to fill log basket up, the basket can provide logs for late afternoon to late evening.

If I am honest I dont think its a good investment due to costs of burner, install and chimney liner.

It is nice having it once its going though no doubt about that, far better than a open fire which I also have but dont use in main living room

deano72_2

i live in 1930s pad & installed a woodburner when i done the house up before moving in so i cant say if it has saved me money,but i try to use either the burner or ch but not together unless its freezing outside,so i guess it will save you gas if you was to do the same.who knows what the price of gas will be in the nxt 15 yrs,but it wont be cheep.
the woodern floors are all nice & lovly on the eye but makes the house feel cold.you need to seal all the floorboard joints & any gaps as it can get abit drafty or even put big rugs or carpet down.
iv gathered wood/logs this year but is very labour intensive which will save me the best part of £300 on logs
the key is to insulate what u can.how about plasterboarding & celetex (insulation) the inside of the external walls if poss,you will loose a little bit of internal space but hell of lot cheaper than cladding.
so my guess would be it wont probably be worth it as your only paying to heat the street some more

YORKSHIRELASS

We put one in before we moved into our house so I cant compare before and after heating costs.

But I can definitely say that a wood burning stove is not worth a huge investment. Yes they are lovely for the cosmetic effect and they are useful in spring and autumn when you dont really need the heating on but they only heat the room they are in.

I have read threads on here where people say they can use a woodburner to heat a whole house. We have experimented with different ways of using it and you either must have a very small house or be using huge quantities of fuel on the stove.

You also need a lot of wood to keep a burner going for a long time and it needs to be decent well seasoned wood to work really well. We have a multifuel stove and coal works well - but decent coal is expensive nowadays.

I wish I had the answer. We have oil fired central heating which costs about £900 a year and our electricity is about £700. I do know we could insulate our house better - we could do with new windows - but dont have the ready cash available for this at the moment.

mbga9pgf

Go dual fuel - the minute they start turning off coal fired power stations later this decade, the price of coal will collapse.

Russ123_2

The truth is there is no cheap way to heat a home, unless you are lucky enough to have access to free fuel.

I recently bought 250kilo of best house coal, even with 'summer prices' this still cost me £73 - since 2008 coal prices have become ridiculous and like with everything else it'll only keep going up.

A few years ago it made sense to light the openfire and 'live' in the rooms it heated (i own an old 1860s labourers cottage) using the CH sparingly to take the chill out of the house - but not any more. Even kindling seems to have become an expensive commodity and before anyone asks, i refuse to use logs on an openfire .....the heat output doesn't compare with coal + storing logs poses its own problems

I was actually considering dragging myself kicking and screaming into the 21st century and buying one of these hot air guns (grenadier electric firelighter) anyone got one?

howardtog

If you are buying logs (which move in line with the price of other fuels) it will never be worth it in monetary terms.You only save money at the margin ie the days when you put the stove on instead of the CH and most days when you can run the CH for less time and switch off radiators downstairs because of the stoves heat.
If your logs are free(ie you dont buy them) you still have some costs...time and transport collecting them,cost of tools chainsaw et cetera.Of course your time may be free.
You also have to tend a stove and pay to have the chimney swept.
Moreover a stove only really heats the room it is in. In your scenario Id go for the 5KW option and avoid having a vent...youve plenty of draughts Im sure.
However the room the stove is in would become the house focal point.You would be very warm indeed and the CH would still heat the bedrooms/bathrooms.
So I would view a stove paradoxically as a luxury, a nice to have which depending on its fuel input cost will make a reasonable saving per year and possibly give payback over 20 years.It also gives a fallback in the event of power failures et cetera.
If funds are tight keep the capital cost or use elsewhere eg loft insulation.
Our stove is wonderful but even with free logs and rising fuel costs I calculate a minimum 10 year payback period.But there are few things to beat sitting around it toasting yourself on a wet cold winters night.

A._Badger

Russ123 wrote: »

I was actually considering dragging myself kicking and screaming into the 21st century and buying one of these hot air guns (grenadier electric firelighter) anyone got one?

Yes - and it's one of the best things I've ever bought. After years of fiddling around with useless Zip-style firelighters, paper, sticks and all the rest, about four years ago I finally bit the bullet, paid a small fortune for a Grenadier and haven't regretted it. It will even quite quickly light notoriously difficult to get started smokeless fuels like Maxibrite and Taybrite.

Sadly, I was not paid for this unsolicited advertisement!