Our Personal Experience of Living with a Wood Burning Stove
By Andy the stuff doer
This Guide and Analysis is for anyone looking to purchase a wood burning stove. My views are totally independent and give a balanced opinion of the realities based on personal experience. It’s the kind of information that manufacturers and suppliers don’t focus on.
If you are thinking about buying a wood burner or multi fuel stove then this is worth a read.
We’ve been runing a stove now for over 2 years. From our experience, I’ve reviewed and analysed the choice we made to Live with a Wood Burning Stove.
I’ve tried to answer the question. Is Living with a Wood Burning Stove worth it?
Looking at the money side, the environment aspects and the lifestyle change in some detail leads me to answer “YES it’s worth it”.
Have a read through and see if you agree with my conclusions. Please leave me any comments, suggestions or queries.
<< Read - Wood Burning Stove – Is it Worth it?>> Includes my wood burning stove running costs.
And.. Feel free to link to the article if you think others out there may find it interesting.
Thanks,
Andy
Wood burning stoves have some big plus points, they are carbon neutral, will still work during power cuts and of course they look great. Not as easy or clean as a modern gas boiler, but to be honest they dont take a huge amount of work to operate. It encourages you to reduce the amount of fuel you use as well – sometimes its easier to put a jumper on than light the fire.
There is a bit of a technique to getting them burning just right, but its not too hard to master. Getting the right logs is essential, nicely seasoned logs will burn better without too much smoke.
Hi Andy,
I’ve spent the last half-hours reading through all this and I just wanted to say thank you for providing such an excellent (FREE TO READ!) resource on this subject!
I know where to look now should I ever decide to go down this route and I also know where to direct family and friends for all the relevant information.
You’re dead right though – draft-proofing and insulating is essential before making any such change.
Have a good Christmas and all the best for the New Year!
Olly.
Thanks Olly, I hope it prove to useful.
ALC, Good Points
Hi Andy,
Do you plan on doing an article on affordable draft-proofing for homes? It’s something we’re thinking about as I keep tripping over the towels my mum’s placing at the bottom of the doors!!
It would definitely be interesting and would fit in with your advice on wood burning stoves.
Olly.
Olly, Good suggestion, I’ve written up the draught proofing on our front door. Could give you some ideas to get rid of the towels < on the cheap door draughtproofing>
Hi Andy,
Just read your page on Draught Proofing (sorry, I couldn’t see a link for adding comments there?). I really like your cheap solution, which remains hidden while the door is closed.
Only issue I can imagine (where you groove the door) is that, if the door swells in width during wet weather, it would be a right bugger trying to plane the edges down… (Unless you own a rebate plane!) Did you glue the strip in place? Could it be screwed in for easier removal or adjustment?
I’ll definitely have to give that a try, some time. Do you think it would work as-well on an outward-opening exterior door?
Our back door is only single-glazed, which also lets a lot of cold air through. Do you know if there’s anything that can be fitted to the inside of the glazing to reduce these draughts?
(One day, I will get around to making an oak door to replace it…)
Olly.
Hi Olly, No appolgies required, my fault for not putting the link in.
I’ve transfered your comments over to here
Cheers Andy
I’ve just read through your sash window blog and am now waiting for details of the detailed plans in whatever form they may take. Please add me to the list of interested peeps.
Thanks Roger,
I’ve got to start cracking on with with it. I’ll be in touch when Iv’e made some progress.
Cheers Andy
We have just had fitted a stovax riva 55 log burner and so far its been brilliant. Lights really easily and logs burn down to nothing with no fuss. Glass ashes up and cleans itself depending on how hot the fire is. With regard to running costs we have no gas in our village so we probably save money on alternative methods.
Thanks Jon, It sounds like you’re in for a treat this winter. Having no mains gas, I guess your alternatives would be electric, bottled gas, oil or coal. If that’s the case then wood burning could certainly be the cheaper alternative.
If you get chance, let us know how it works out for you.
Cheers Andy
Reading this has been most enjoyable. I live in a 3 bed detached with good loft and cavity insulation and k glass double glazing. I have oil fired central heating and 1000 litres lasts around 9 months. Normally this cost around £360-£380 to fill my tank.
This year it worked out wrong and I have just paid £600, a price that frightens me, as I am about to retire!
So I have decided on a twin approach for the future.
1. Double my oil storage to 2500 litres (so I can always buy in the summer)
2. Buy a multi-fuel stove, so no matter what the oil price goes to I will have at least one warm room.
Thanks again.
Thanks Graham, With those kind of prices for heating oil a wood burner certainly makes sense economically. It’ll keep you active during retirement as well!
You’ll be able to heat more than one room with a multi-fule stove. If your insulation and draft proofing is good and you leave the internal doors open, the heat will spread through the whole house.
All the best with it and happy, warm, retirement
Andy
Hi.
Lovely artical.
We have installed log cooker with back boiler, connected to thermal store, which also has solar in for sunny days.
We also have x2 other wood stoves in other rooms, if we want we can run the back boiler to the radiators (this tends to dump and then you ahev no hot water, so timings of showers have to be thought about!)
We get the wood mainly for free, we are ex tree surgeons so have connections!
If you have to pay for wood not much price difference. i would say. We haev a condensing boiler which auotmatically tops up if we can’t be bothered, looking at the prices now we are going to have to be more bothered!!!
Glad we did it but it is more messy than a gas fire.
Thanks Sue,
Ah! those all important connections. We have free sustainable supply of our own now, but I have to do the cutting, chopping and transporting. It makes me realise the effort that goes in to producing logs for burning.
The heatstore + solar sounds great. We went for a combi a few years back so no tank. I never though at the time tanks would come back in fashion. I still keep thinking of ways to circulate the heat from our stove to the other ground floor rooms. A back boiler and heat exchanger might come someday.
Thanks for your comments
Andy
Its not just the cost, many customers want independence from the utility companies. The russians have allredy cut off Europe,s energy supply, twice, Gas and oil can only bo up
I have a wood stove which runs – when needed – one one load of wood £90 for a hwole winter!
Hi Rod, Thanks for your comment. In the full set of articles on the iDoStuff website I mention “You can cock a snoop at the price of gas, power cuts, monthly direct debits, security of supply etc.” I’ve written about all the aspects I could think of. Have a read through, I’m sure you’ll find a lot that you agree with.
Cheers Andy
Great read Andy – your site is informative and helpful, especially for projects that I have limited experience with! I have written a post on my blog detailing my experience when we decided a wood burning stove was the way to go, we reached many of the same conclusions! You can read it here http://www.frugalsoul.co.uk/2012/01/05/fire-your-imagination-with-a-wood-burning-stove/
Thanks,
Nikki
Great post Nikki, its certainly worth a read.
Hi
What a great source of information – I’m currently in the middle of looking at replacing our open coal fire (linked to hot water) with a multifuel stove, We have just moved into our new home and find its a cold house to heat (large 4 bed sandstone house) we have used £750 worth of oil in 3 months!! We have no idea what type of stove to go for boiler stove v room heater stove only. I would like to have the boiler stove although there are not many on the market that can accomodate our size of property, but I would like to be less reliant on oil and if there should be a power cut I would still have a source of heating and hot water!! Any further advise would be great.
Hi Allyson, Your situation is quite complex and the solution would depend on your budget. A stove with a back boiler could suplement your you central heating but it needs to be done with a heat exchanger of some sort to combine the output with the oil fired system. A heat store system (big hot tank) would probably be the current recommend method. This however would also need an electric supply to pump the water unless a plumber could work out a gravity feed system. ( so no good in a power cut).
I would be tempted to go for the “room heater” only option for low cost and simplicity. The heat from this will knock down the oil bill and if you can distribute enough hot air around your house the oil fired system might not need switching on. But this wouldn’t give you hot water, unless a pan on the stove will be enough to get by with.
Bio mass / wood pellet boilers would be able to supply all the heat you need but wouldn’t be a replacement in a fireplace, you might want to look at what grants and payments are available for fitting and using these.
Please dont forget to do all you can first with insulation and draught proofing (but keep the house breathing).
Hope this helps, even if just a little.
Andy
Often overlooked here is the cost of the Flue liner. You should typically budget around £300-£400 for a typical household using a woodburner (more if you want to burn coal, as you’ll need 904 grade liner).
Thanks Mike it’s alway good to hear from experts in business especially when the coments are relevent like yours ( I do get loads of spamy rubbish). I’ll look favourably on any more insights you might have. There might be mutual tie in with my current resoration job that’s in line for two stove instalations.