Hew House - Solid Fuel Cooker Lifestyle

radiibenos

We've moved house earlier this year into a 4 bed detached. Built in the 70's, the previous owners have done some improvements to it. It's the best insulated house I've lived in and there's a solid fuel Stanley cooker installed in the kitchen that also provides hot water and central heating.

It's our first winter in the house and very much like the idea of having continual warmth in the house and using little to no gas, especially on the weekends when we're in most of the time. However, as me and my partner are both working, I'm left wondering whether it is worth not paying for gas and paying for coal instead.

I can think of three possible usage scenarios:
1) We have the cooker burning coal all the time. We put it to slumber when we go to bed, restart it in the morning, put it back to slumber before we both leave for work then relight in the evenings.
2) Let the fire die the night before a working day and restart it in the evening but let it run continuously through the weekend.
3) Only run the cooker on the weekends.
We were also considering using logs for extra bursts of heat if we needed to cook with the intention of trying to run the coal for longer at lower temperatures.

We've only had some short trial runs before as we've not had a stock of coal in yet but each time I start a fire from scratch, I seem to have to use a lot of coal. The most recent test was the past Saturday when I started with 2x25kg bags of smokeless coal and used it all up restarting the fire when I got home from work this evening (Monday). We did try cooking on the Sunday though that needed the oven at around 200ºC for a long time.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Ben

Cardew

Your solid fuel Stanley boiler provides central heating, and it appears that you also have gas central heating. Presumably both boilers provide heat to the the same radiators and HW tank? and use something like a Dunsley neutraliser to combine the systems??


If reducing costs is your aim, I cannot see that using solid fuel will be cheaper than gas. Being out all day at work, you just need to set gas heating to come on, say, 30 minutes before you arrive home - to a warm house.



25Kg of solid fuel costs around £15 so using two bags(£30) from Sat to Monday, during a very mild November period would appear to confirm the point made in the paragraph above.

radiibenos

Yes, we do have a gas boiler and a Heating Innovations H2 panel that switches to the cooker when that is lit.

It sure is looking like replacing gas with coal at any part of the week won't cost effective but I was wondering if my inexperience with the appliance was causing it to be inefficient. When I got it going, it was hot enough to heat the water but it didn't feel like it ever got up to its optimal temperature. It would take an age to heat a kettle of water for tea let alone get a pan hot enough to cook a steak. Do I need to get it hotter when lighting it or does it build up heat over time?

matelodave

A quick shufti at the Stanley instructions reckons it requires around 4.5kg of coal an hour which is around 25kg in a five hour day - sounds like a lot of effort and cost for not a lot of gain.