Wood stove not heating our room

Fatbadger_2

Hi - I'm hoping someone with experience of wood stoves will be able to advise on why our new stove is so rubbish at doing its job! It does take the edge off the cold, but it does not heat the room. Our room is approx 77 cubic metres. The installer chose a Eco Ideal Eco2 model, which has an output of 4 kw nominal (meaning???) Or 3.5 to 7 kw max (how calculated???). Our house is a 1930s semi and not modernised so single glased windows etc but it is not drafty and is in good repair. We're using kiln dried wood which burns very well. I've also tried smokless brickettes and they seem to work betted as the wood is burnt to ash within 30 mins. The flue temp when at full chat is about 300F or 150C...

Does anyone know why this is not heating the room?

At £2k I am quite disappointed as I thought I'd be able to just heat one room and switch off the heating more often.;)

thozza

From the calculator on the Hunter Stoves website, they recommend that a room of 77 cubic meters needs 5.5kW, so your stove should be OK, but you will probably need to run it reasonably hot with its nominal output being 4kW

From the flue temperatures quoted, the fire does not seem to be running particularly hot. I run our stove (an Aga Little Wenlock 4.7kW) at around 200 degC in a room slightly smaller than yours. It takes about 45 minutes to reach steady temperature, but after about 1.5 hrs will have the room roasting if we have the door closed. You will need to keep feeding the stove to keep the temperature up. You can safely run a stove a bit hotter than 200 degC, maybe try this and see if the output improves.

savemoney

We run ours around 180c-220c. We have up to 8kWh Franco Belge Savoy Mk1. We live in a late 1920's semi and its quite warm in the room around 22c-24c when run on full burning wood briquettes. Verdo do some of the best wood briquettes available at home bargains for under £3.

We also have a 3 prong ecoair (calfire) stove fan to help push air around. no idea of room size but we have a medium size dining room with extension and double folding doors which open into living room. Also small kitchen other side of dining room.

Briquettes give of far more heat than wood but not as much as coal

Swipe

Put more fuel on, give it more air and run it hotter. Get it up to about 500F and then let it drop down and you'll be toasty.

Fatbadger_2

Thanks very much for the advice. I will try and get the temp up to 200 deg C then. One more thing, the logs are burnt up withing 30 mins so this seems like a very expensive way to heat a room... is that correct? I mean I like the look and feel but if I ran it every evening it would go through a lot of £££££s in wood.
Also, it seems to give out more heat with the door open (i.e like my open fire which does heat our other room very well) but I thought that defeats the object??? :eek:

ariba10

How much of the stovepipe is in the room?

When I had a stove in my shed, most of the heat came from the exposed flue.

michaelgordon

You should never have the door open all the heat will escape.

I have a firfox 5 in a 3x3x3m room and it can get really hot i once had it upto 35c in the room. Genreally get the room upto about 28 this takes 2-3 hours depending on the outside temp and stop burning at this point except for the really cold days when i need to run longer.

Im presuming you have got the fire going well with kindling first and then closed off the main air intake. I get mine to about 300-350F then start putting fuel on star with a couple of briquettes just to get the stove properly hot which will raise the temp to 400-500f and once back to 300f i put another log or briquette on and generally run my stove this way until the room is upto temp

What size are the logs you putting on? I have as a guess 30cm x 30cm x 15cm and these last about 40 - 50 mins before they burn away. For me briquettes last about the same time

matelodave

My room is around the same size and we've got a free standing pedestal stove (ie not wodged into a fireplace) so there is also around 4-5ft of flue to help radiate heat into the room.

My calcs reckon I needed a 5-6kw stove for my room so I'd guess you've got to run yours pretty hard to get the heat out, especially if it's in a fireplace as well. Perhaps an Ecofan would help circulate the heat a bit better

Ours is a Medip Churchill 6 pedestal with convection panels. We get through 2-3 Verdo logs (Home Bargains is the place to get them) plus some ordinary firewood and we get our room up to about 25 degrees or more. The dining room, through an open archway, adds another 30 cu.m and we leave the doors open to the hall & kitchen so the heat circulates quite well.

We light it at around 6 in the evening and the last wood (usually a Verdo) goes on at about 8:30ish and the heater is still too hot to touch at 10:30

We try to keep the flue temperature at about 200 degrees C (400f)

thozza

Fatbadger wrote: »

Thanks very much for the advice. I will try and get the temp up to 200 deg C then. One more thing, the logs are burnt up withing 30 mins so this seems like a very expensive way to heat a room... is that correct? I mean I like the look and feel but if I ran it every evening it would go through a lot of £££££s in wood.
Also, it seems to give out more heat with the door open (i.e like my open fire which does heat our other room very well) but I thought that defeats the object??? :eek:

I think your stove is a DEFRA smoke approved stove (as is ours) this means that no matter what you do, you cannot completely cut down on the air getting into the stove, even with both the primary & secondary controls fully shut, this is to ensure that the stove never emits smoke, as they are designed for smokeless zones. A side effect of this is that feeding logs to the stove is a bit like feeding buns to an elephant, so logs lasting 30 minutes is probably what you can expect.

The stove must always be operated with the door shut, never open.

prunus

A bit late but you should understand how wood burns best in a stove. There should be no draught up through the wood from the bottom of the stove. The wood should burn from the top down.

Draught up from the bottom of the stove is for coal.

prezzacc

I also am quite new to Log burners. Have a stovax with a 5.5 output.

Ive NEARLY learnt my logburner, how to get it hot and keep it going without wasting wood, and thats after a couple months ! It really does seem to be an art form.

I now do similar to others have stated. Tiny firelighter, kindling built around it jenga style! Give that 5-10 min, throw a little more kindling on to get up to temp Around 300F, i then put some pallet style planks on, get a good glowing red base. Sometimes for a quick fire this is hot enough. If not about 45-hour in, i load up the Verdo heat logs other talk about. They are good! I have to split them as they are too big for my burner. They last around 50-60 minutes each for me.

I still struggle to keep above 350F sometimes i think thats as i have such a small firebox.

Hope you get the heat you want soon!