Log burner worth it?

PennyForThem_2

Alnat1 said:

Consider if someone is happy to get up an hour earlier in the morning, clean out the stove from the previous day, relight it and clear up the mess from cleaning it, so the room is warm and ready when others need it.

LOL - Really???  Takes 5-10 minutes at outside to empty ash tray, load newspaper, firelighter, twigs and a log or two.  Light match and with a modern well installed burner - ignition!  (Perfectionist will not use firelighter.)

And a hoover -NOT for clearing ash out of tray (don't even think it unless you want to ruin your hoover) but for dust which with a modern wood burning stove is minimal.

If you are a perfectionist you can oil and polish and clean to Ideal Home standards which will take longer that 10 minutes.

Cold Wood ash (NOT coal ash) is good for compost heaps

PennyForThem_2

And go here:
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/lpg-heating-oil-solid-other-fuels

Alnat1

How long for room to heat up?

I was thinking 20 minutes to sort the stove, 40 minutes to warm up room = 1 hour

silverwhistle

There seem to be a number of misconceptions about the effort involved in having a wood burner. For me it's mainly in the sourcing (read 'scrounging'), sawing, splitting, stacking and seasoning.. No need for me to go to the gym. :-)

With a pure wood burner used every day I only clear out ashes once every couple of weeks - no effort at all, and making sure when I vacuum that the area around the stove is done.  Burn cleanly and I rarely need a sweep: last year the sweep told me not to call the following year. As they don't charge for a simple inspection they got fed up of visiting and having nothing to do.

In a large village I keep an ear open for the sound of chain saws, particularly after autumn gales. Most of my scrounged stuff has been within a couple of hundred yards of home. In a city you may be less successful.

I purchased an air filter for the lounge along with a particulate meter. It goes red fairly often when I'm cooking but red only twice last year from the stove a few feet away when I got my fuelling wrong and once had a bit of a blow back.

Effician

wittynamegoeshere said:

Also your neighbours will hate you.  Not because they're jealous, but because you're making their lives extremely unpleasant and harming their health.

Not in our experience.

Martin_the_Unjust

We have a wood burner (and love it) the in-laws, who live in a very similar property don’t, looking at how much they pay for gas and electric and comparing it to our costs for gas, electric and seasoned wood there is nothing in it.

jrawle

I was going to say please don't do it, because of the pollution. I live in an area where a number of neighbours have wood burners, and it can be quite unpleasant. I have to run an air purifier at times to reduce the PM2.5 concentration in my home. Think of the neighbours, as well as the health of your toddler daughter.

There are clearly a lot of wood burner users/fans posting here, but no my comment isn't driven by jealously. I have a wood burner installed in my house by the previous owners, which I won't use. And no, I haven't complained to any neighbours because they are not doing anything currently illegal, and I have an otherwise good relationship. (It's not usually obvious who is using a stove anyway.)

wittynamegoeshere

We also have an unused stove, can't wait to get rid of it together with the massive draught that comes from it.  It looks like it's closed up, but there are loads of vents under the front edges.  The first winter here was very cold, then I worked out it was full of holes and stuffed a load of foam into them, it made a massive difference and proved just how much heat it was removing from the building.

A house will never be energy efficient while there's a hole in the living room that goes straight out of the roof.  Plus there should be an air inlet vent elsewhere in the room to allow air in, making it even worse.

jrawle

wittynamegoeshere said:

We also have an unused stove, can't wait to get rid of it together with the massive draught that comes from it.  It looks like it's closed up, but there are loads of vents under the front edges.  The first winter here was very cold, then I worked out it was full of holes and stuffed a load of foam into them, it made a massive difference and proved just how much heat it was removing from the building.

A house will never be energy efficient while there's a hole in the living room that goes straight out of the roof.  Plus there should be an air inlet vent elsewhere in the room to allow air in, making it even worse.

Yes, it does make the room draughty. Mine it set into a fireplace. I've thought about stuffing an old duvet around and in front of it, then hiding it behind a decorative board or fire screen. I'm just worried about damp if there is no ventilation through the flue. Admittedly, I would keep it installed and uncover it if I sell the house as it may add value for some buyers; perhaps that makes my a hypocrite, although main reason for not removing it is the cost, given that it weighs 100kg and I'd have to pay someone to remove/dispose of it.

Mstty

We live in a what I would term "proper village" most don't have gas but oil and a lot are all electric and prettybmuch everyone has a log/multi stove or open fire either.historically or backup to losing electricity.

The fields smell like manure and we have people in the village at 100 years old.

I don't think the fires they have (and what they burn) has done them any harm.

As for us with our air source heat pump our fireplace looks lovely and is used for aesthetics as a primary, secondarily for loss of electricity to provide heat and somewhere to boil and kettle and heat up some food and thirdly for very cold nights(we haven't had any of those in the last year)

Looking at the price of logs (we have some seasoning but only been collected 6 months ago) it won't be efficient for us with an ASHP to burn logs and only heat one room as we aren't cutting back that far.