What can you burn on your open fire

Moneysava_wannaB

Ben84 wrote: »

Are you sure wood is cheaper per kWh than gas? There is a large lack of information about the cost per kWh from solid fuel. The cost per kWh that I've worked in every case so far (with the exception of free wood which seems very limited in supply) has found it to be more expensive than gas, sometimes quite significantly. Open fires are also very inefficient, much less than gas appliances, so the actual cost of a kWh of heating to the house using wood or coal in an open fire is normally very expensive. So, from this my suggestion that gas is a good cheap thing to burn was entirely serious. From what I've calculated it might not even be unreasonable to say the OP might save money by plugging in an electric fire instead.

But what if there's no gas, I know not everyone has it. There are clean burn wood stoves available - some are suitable for smokeless zones even, so they do burn the wood cleanly. They're also much more efficient. There's also fuel oil, electric, LPG, passive solar, heat pumps/geothermal, district heating and many other options to explore. Open fires and poorly designed stoves are bottom of the pile for smoke emissions and fuel efficiency, there's really many good reasons to avoid using them.

My last house had gas and spent £1104 and year on gas(before price increases of last 2 years)
Now last winter I spent £240 on wood for 2 wood burners, I only used my lpg combi for DHW only which costs about £10 a month using it for heating would cost £300+ a month in winter so really no option there!
You'd like living where I do there are 4 cottages and 3 of us have woodburners running 24/7.

Ben84

P-J-D wrote: »

Well within a mile radius I do have one human neighbour, several hundred neighbours with four legs and wooly jumpers on. Per the original question I'm sensitive to health issues and how they affect others, however one must survive.

If you have to look within a mile radius to find neighbors then my point about considering how much smoke affects people in the houses around you is from the sounds of it not too relevant to you. It needed raising though, the replies suggesting you can burn *anything* which I took to mean a list including the really noxious smoke producing stuff like painted wood/particle board/plastic coated wood and MDF, followed by the suggestion that you don't even need to pause and consider the smoke's effect on neighbors were just, frankly, bad responses.

So, no issue with you or your question. I just have strong opinions about some of the responses here as they make absolutely no mention of situation or encourage reasonable consideration for other people.

Anyway, if there's no gas, there's still alternatives, including an efficient stove instead of an open fire. They can produce significantly more heat for each bit of wood you burn and make greatly less smoke too.

Ben84

Moneysava_wannaB wrote: »

My last house had gas and spent £1104 and year on gas(before price increases of last 2 years)
Now last winter I spent £240 on wood for 2 wood burners, I only used my lpg combi for DHW only which costs about £10 a month using it for heating would cost £300+ a month in winter so really no option there!
You'd like living where I do there are 4 cottages and 3 of us have woodburners running 24/7.

I see your point, but it's a dubious comparison. It was an entirely different house during a different winter. You were also probably using a large gas boiler rated at 20-something kilowatt, then swapped to a wood burner that's more likely 3-6 kilowatt?

Central heating can be deceptive and burn through lots of fuel because it's all too easy to run it for long amounts of time with no perception of how much gas you're burning or how many radiators you're heating in rooms you're not even using, plus it keeps running at the same high output all night as you don't need to stay up feeding it gas. Most people's heating is also set with a time-switch to switch on regardless if they're at home or not or even feeling cold for set times each day and it's usually just left to keep clicking around and burning gas. I bet your wood stove doesn't start feasting on the logs while you're round the neighbours :P All of this adds up to a lot more fuel, but it doesn't inevitably make wood cheaper per kWh. Main point though, these high bills aren't the result of gas being costly per unit, it is in fact very cheap compared to everything else in most situations, they're simply the result of it being very easy to consume. In most cases swapping a big whole house gas boiler to a few kW gas fire and using it with manual rather than automatic controls would yield similar large savings too.

So, do you know roughly what your wood costs per kWh? This is something a lot of people often aren't sure about and tend to assume it's good. I'm less convinced that it is often cheaper. If you're not sure we can work out the costs with some rough approximations if you have some units of weight/volume, price and type of wood?

Moneysava_wannaB

Ben84 wrote: »

I see your point, but it's a dubious comparison. It was an entirely different house during a different winter. You were also probably using a large gas boiler rated at 20-something kilowatt, then swapped to a wood burner that's more likely 3-6 kilowatt?

Central heating can be deceptive and burn through lots of fuel because it's all too easy to run it for long amounts of time with no perception of how much gas you're burning or how many radiators you're heating in rooms you're not even using, plus it keeps running at the same high output all night as you don't need to stay up feeding it gas. Most people's heating is also set with a time-switch to switch on regardless if they're at home or not or even feeling cold for set times each day and it's usually just left to keep clicking around and burning gas. I bet your wood stove doesn't start feasting on the logs while you're round the neighbours :P All of this adds up to a lot more fuel, but it doesn't inevitably make wood cheaper per kWh. Main point though, these high bills aren't the result of gas being costly per unit, it is in fact very cheap compared to everything else in most situations, they're simply the result of it being very easy to consume. In most cases swapping a big whole house gas boiler to a few kW gas fire and using it with manual rather than automatic controls would yield similar large savings too.

So, do you know roughly what your wood costs per kWh? This is something a lot of people often aren't sure about and tend to assume it's good. I'm less convinced that it is often cheaper. If you're not sure we can work out the costs with some rough approximations if you have some units of weight/volume, price and type of wood?

At my current house I was spending 100£'s a month using a 95% efficient lpg boiler and the room temp was only 20c and bedrooms set to 18c(timed), the heating was on from 7am till 10pm(for wife and kids).
Now with using just one 8kw woodburner 90% efficient room temp 22c up to 25c.
That was costing me £0.02kwh for wood based on £40 m3

Ben84

Moneysava_wannaB wrote: »

At my current house I was spending 100£'s a month using a 95% efficient lpg boiler and the room temp was only 20c and bedrooms set to 18c(timed), the heating was on from 7am till 10pm(for wife and kids).
Now with using just one 8kw woodburner 90% efficient room temp 22c up to 25c.
That was costing me £0.02kwh for wood based on £40 m3

Thanks for this, it's interesting to see roughly what people are spending on a kWh from solid fuel. Your wood does appear to be very cheap per cubic metre. Is it delivered as part of that cost? This is the first time I've seen a figure per kWh that's less than somewhere around 4p per kWh.

Greenfires

highrisklowreturn wrote: »

All of which goes to prove you can burn everything and anything in them. I went on the cs30 chainsaw course the other week and apparently, according to the instructors, under H/E law, I need to complete several other course before I can legal fell a tree. These courses would costs circa another 3k in total and for what? How many people do you hear about killing themselves with chainsaws every year in the UK, two or three?

I'm getting a stove soon and all this sh 1 t about don't burn unseasoned wood 'cause you'll get a chimney fire, it's total balls, what are the odds of it happening for the extra costs involved?

There are over 10,000 chimney fires in the UK every year - and most are caused by people with the same attitude you have unfortunately!

As well as risks with chimney fires, blocked flues, tar coming through bedroom walls, you're also getting very little energy out of unseasoned wood - as most of it is used in driving off the moisture.

Andy

highrisklowreturn

10,000, I would hope for more, this can only be progressive