Help with buying/installing a stove

Ectophile

If it's just a single room (assuming that it's not a huge banqueting hall), then a 5KW stove ought to do nicely. At that size, or below, there are no special ventilation requirements. Just watch out for nearby extractor fans that might suck the smoke back out of the stove into the room.

Your choices for (legal) fitting are either get a HETAS installer, or DIY - but you need to follow building regs part J and pay the local council's building control department to inspect your work and sign it off.

muckybutt

In a vast majority of makes, burning house coal on stoves....multi fuel or not, is not endorced by the manufacturer.

Certainly if you have a liner you dont want to be burning HH coal, unless you want it sweeping every three months.

Leif

highrisklowreturn wrote: »

Don't bother with signing it off the authorities are d icks.

That's fine if you don't want to sell your house, and you don't mind voiding your house insurance if there is a fire. And in the event of a fire or injury, you might be liable to prosecution.

Leif

shegar wrote: »

If I was you id buy some large lump house coal where you will get far more heat than burning wood .........

It will heat the one room nicely and you wont have to fork out thousands to buy/install a stove and all that goes with it..........:)

From a financial viewpoint that might be better even if the stove is more efficient, assuming it does warm the room. It will take a lot of time to burn £2,000 worth of coal.

One issue has always bothered me. I am assuming the OP has a fire consisting of the builder's opening and a wood grate. Why are open fires usually constructed with a firebrick? Is this just to create a constriction above the fire, hence increasing the draw?

Greenfires

That's the long and the short of it Leif - the fireback and a throat forming lintel at the front create a stronger pull and help to ensure that any smoke rising from the fire gets "caught"

highrisklowreturn

You're hearing sales speak on here - why would you need a liner because your chimney is old? Mucky has said that a cheap stove can be less efficient, sending more heat up the chimney. Now this is exactly what an open fire does compared to a stove. If your fire can withstand that extra heat at the moment, why would it need lined with less heat going up the chimney with a stove, and therefore reduced risk of degradation?

Don't believe what is said about cheap stoves. My Stanley Oisin is cheap and is apparently doing its job far better than the Aga quoted above.

As for building regs, health and safety - your home is your castle and if anyone inclduing the government tells you otherwise tell them where to go.

Really the obsession with this total crap in England is an absolute joke. As for not being able to sell your house or the invalidation of insurance claims that's just nonsense. Who on earth is going to walk into your home, looking to buy it, and say yes this is a perfect house at a keen price but stuff you I'm not buying as you didn't get yer cheapo chinese stove ticked off?

suisidevw

To the OP, you should get everything done under £2k, I had a Charnwood 'GOOD' British stove installed with liner etc including stove for approx £1400....

A._Badger

shegar wrote: »

If I was you id buy some large lump house coal where you will get far more heat than burning wood .........

It will heat the one room nicely and you wont have to fork out thousands to buy/install a stove and all that goes with it..........:)

Despite being a self-confessed stove fan, I think this makes a lot of sense.

Coal, properly burned, produces a lot more heat than wood, doesn't necessitate liners, three monthly visits from the sweeps, all the nonsense with HETAS and the increasingly overpriced lump of cast iron or steel that is starting to be the 'must have' lifestyle statement of the era.

If you really need a stove and it makes sense on a practical level, or if you have money st spare and just fancy one, that's fine. but, as shegar says, it will take a heck of a long while to amortise the cost of a stove on account of its greater efficiency.

hethmar

If you are only going to get occasional use from the stove then I would say it wont be economically sound for you. Do you have a free or low cost supply of good wood? If not, find out how much it is now costing locally as it has risen quite dramatically in the last few years as more people have installed wood burners.

Ignore highrisk, the clue is in his name.

If you are going to use smokeless fuels then it will probably be better to install solid liners rather than flexible.

Greenfires

It's a pity that forums like these where people come to look for advice usually have one or two members who insist on dishing out the bad variety, as it must make everything look very complicated to a newcomer who is trying to find their feet with a new subject. But being advised to simply ignore building regulations etc "because it's your house" is just stupid to be blunt.

Muckybutts advioce was correct regarding the likely need for a liner if you're fitting a stove - and as far as I'm aware he's not a fitter so he's not trying to flog anything. I'd also tend to agree with Badger and with hethmar. Fitting a stove is not a particularly cheap option if you use decent quality materials and then there's fuel to consider on top. Having said all that - a lot of my customers tell me they wish they'd had a stove in years ago - and most of them talk about turning down the GCH a few notches as a result - which is something we've done ourselves too. Now whether that saving on gas will outweigh the spend on fuel etc I couldn't honestly tell you. We have a stove and an open fire and only burn firewood briquettes - but the stove went in because we wanted one more than anything else - and we've never dissected the arrangement to see if it's paying for itself - we just enjoy it!