Remove 58% efficient gas fire and replace with 82% efficient wood burning stove?

richardc1983 wrote: »

This is starting to be our thinking, do we use the existing gas fire which still works absolutely fine?

Of course. I doubt replacing it with even the more efficient gas one will recoup your cost in its lifetime.

Wood is good for supplementing a heating system. Not replacing it. You particularly find those on oil fired boilers look to have a burner to keep the costs down. It can allow you to not having the heating until later in the season or later in the evening. It can allow you to turn some radiators right down. However, it is not good really suitable for a complete replacement of gas.

For example, our radiators fired up this morning but I am going to be working in one room today and it's chilly. So, the wood burner is on for that room rather than waste firing up the radiators for the whole house.

richardc1983 wrote: »

But surely would be cheaper to run the rad in the room your in and turn the others off?

We would use it as a feature piece but is it worth paying out for changing a gas fire to wood burner. It would be supplementary.

No. I work from home. So, that would mean turning off around 20 radiators at the start of the day and then turning them back on again at the end of the day. Plus, the room with the thermostat (where there are no TRVs) happens to be the largest room with the two biggest radiators. So, they would be on all the time as well. Plus, that room has the most used doorway to the house and is opened pretty much once every hour or two during the day making heating that room in the daytime largely pointless.

We have three burners in the house. Around 3pm I will put the last log on the fire in the room I am working from as that will see me through to the end of the working day. At that time, I will also fire up the hallway burner which is the best of the three as it has significant airflow to multiple rooms. That allows us to have the main heating fire up later and it also means that about 9 radiators will not come on much at all. So, it reduces oil use. We have gone from using around 3500 litres a year to 2100 litres with the burners. Which is about £700 in savings. If we were buying wood, that would eat up around £400 of that. However, we are self-sufficient in wood.

How the heat flows from a burner will very much depend on your house layout. Some will find a burner only heats the room it is in. Others will have heat flow into multiple rooms. The latter makes a difference to your bills. The former is more about ambience/feature/lifestyle. Although some people may live mostly in one room and not need other parts of the house heated until close to bedtime and early morning. So, there is potential for it to be cost-effective with the right living/working style.

If you are looking at cost efficiency, it's unlikely to recover its initial outlay unless your house type and living/working style is of a particular type. In our case, if I was purely looking at cost efficiency, then spending the money on insultation improvements would have been far more beneficial. However, if you are looking at ambience, lifestyle enhancing/cosiness, then the cost may well be worth it. We are remote with fields all around with big old fashioned windows that get weather battered and on a wet autumn/cold winters day, the fire burning away is more relaxing than gas/electrical heating.