Patio heater, chimnea or fire pit?? (merged threads)

roma

Hi I would just like some advice as to which of the above you would recommend to buy for my garden for use on those chilly British summer evenings? and are any of them more enviromentally friendly than others?

Thanks

floyd

We have a fire pit which throws out a heck of alot of heat compared to a chimenea but can get smoky if there is a breeze. I would like a patio heater as they are cleaner to use but do cost more in fuel

nickj_2

if you use wood on your chimenea or firepit then they would be carbon neutral
plus a real fire looks better

gamston

i've a chimenea, there ok if you have a supply of wood,
looked at the fire boxes, but thought the smoke would come out so low that if you are sitting by it the smoke would hit you, at least the chimema chimney the smoke should be higher than your head when sitting down.

Gettin_me_own_back

We have a chimenea which I can only recommend. However we tend to go out there with a bottle of wine and the front of your body gets nice and warm, however unless you rotate yourself your back gets a bit cold. So we bought a patio heater as well, not so nice as the chimenea, and a bit over the top but it does the job.

pol76

I took the metal drum out of my old washing machine and them used the belt pully for the base
free,good to look at silver in color and due to hundreds of little wholes good heat flow

thecornflake

We've just got a cast iron Chimenea, and was wondering if it's ok to use those instant lighting bags of charcoal you have for BBQs in it? A few things on the web say intense fires are bad for them, and the bags go upquite quickly when first lit, but when we have the odd one left over I thought it would be quite a good thing to use and the charcoal should give off quite a lot of heat with very little smoke.

wyebird

I think it probably matters more with the ceramic ones than the cast iron ones. We have used charcoal in ours without a problem,

dandydeels

Go for a walk in the woods and collect some fallen twigs or go skip diving for odd scraps of timber (preferably without paint). Buying charcoal isn't moneysaving and I found that small chimenea's were a waste of time. They just don't give out appreciable heat. We bought a larger, industrial style, iron burner from a scrapyard and painted the outside with fire resistant black paint- you can have a good burn in it and you can actually feel the heat up to 3m away. When it is glowing red hot it's great to look at. All the ash goes on the compost heap.

Pink.

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thecornflake

Thanks for the replies.

We gave it a go last night, using soem newspaper, twigs from the garden and some of those heat logs you can buy. Worked pretty well and after about half an hour the temperature difference nearby was quite noticeable.

Keeping an eye out for skips etc...