Bestfire multifuel stoves?

murphydog999

There is a 5kw model I like the look of, but it's only £300 and I can't find any reviews on it.

Does anyone know the brand? If you can get a stove for £300 whats the difference between that and a £800 one?

suki1964

£500

Seriously though a £300 stove is going to be a Chinese import and usually they are pretty shoddy in both materials and workmanship. There are always exception to the rules though ( mines Chinese and is a wee belter and gets pretty reasonable reviews but was closer to £500)

A stove isn't going to be cheap. Buy the best you can afford. Some makes sell at big money second hand. I'm no expert as only have two stoves. But spend some time reading this forum and take note of the brands that crop up time again and start from there. And don't just go to one shop, shop around.

muckybutt

What Suki says :T

Although not very MSE buy the best stove you can comfortably afford, buying cheap isn't always the way to go.

Good stoves = Morso, Jotul, Clearview, Charnwood, AGA, Aarow and a few others.

Seanymph

http://www.machinemart.co.uk/shop/product/details/clarke-buckingham-cast-iron-stove

This one is brilliant (i've just put this on another thread!).

I have a Parkray for about £700 here in England, bought the cheap one for my French house and it is so much better that it's no comparison.

Price isn't a good indicator necessarily.

asharon

I like my Hunters

Oilburner

I hear what everyone is saying about cheaper chinese stoves but the bestfire 1s ive been looking at carry a 5 year warranty which even the more expensive 1s ive seen dont have. Surely that means they are worth the money???

thozza

murphydog999 wrote: »

There is a 5kw model I like the look of, but it's only £300 and I can't find any reviews on it.

Does anyone know the brand? If you can get a stove for £300 whats the difference between that and a £800 one?

There are some reviews for Bestfire stoves on Amazon, not sure how reliable these reviews are, but several are from verified purchasers.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Bestfire%20Stoves&index=kitchen-uk&search-type=ss

Greenfires

Stove warranties are often pretty meaningless to be honest. Usually only the stove body that's covered for starters, and then there'll be limitations to the warranty as well. According to a very good fitter I know, they tend to be used by manufacturers to flog them to people who just tend to compare numbers and then make a decision based on that.

With the best will in the world, a £300 stove isn't likely to be anything like a quality one. Yes, you'll find some good reviews for cheap stoves on the likes of whatstove - but in reality, these are often written by people who haven't had a quality stove to make a valid comparison. As a sweep I see an awful lot of stoves, and some of the cheap Chinese ones are garbage. Badly cast, badly built and little control over the fire. You'd probably lose any savings you made on the purchase price on buying extra fuel to feed it. My personal opinion is that in the case of stoves, it's usually true that you get what you pay for.

A._Badger

Greenfires wrote: »

My personal opinion is that in the case of stoves, it's usually true that you get what you pay for.

I think it's true, but only up to a point. In most areas, there comes a point where the law of diminishing returns sets in. Hi-Fi is a good example. A £100 system is going to be pretty poor. A £500 system is going to be a lot better, a £1,000 system better still. But as you increase the price, so each increment of performance starts to cost more and more. In the end you might be paying several hundred pounds for each percentage point of improvement - to a degree where only an audio fanatic could tell the difference anyway.

I think the same is true of stoves. Add in the brand snobbery factor which also inflates prices and you eventually find there is a middle ground where lurk the real value for money products.

Greenfires

Yeah sorry Badger - I was referring to "mainstream" stoves if you will. As a chap of fairly standard means, the arty creations costing several grand are beyond my budget, and not to my tatse either usually - so I automatically discount them.