What’s Important When Buying A Wood Burner?

More and more Sussex homeowners are making the switch from oil, gas or electricity to log burners to heat their Brighton homes.  Biomass fuels, including logs and firewood, have increased in popularity as they are considered carbon-lean solutions for heating.  Many home owners searching for a more eco-centric outlook believe that installing a wood burning stove may greatly help them when it comes to achieving this aim.

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When deciding which kind of wood burner to buy, there are a few important factors to take into account quite apart from the aesthetic considerations.

1. The Size of the Worthing Wood Burner.

Log burners have different heat outputs which should be taken into consideration as the space to be warmed should be right for that burner.   A stove for heating an average sized room should be rated at about 4-5 kW, whilst a stove with 8kW rating will be better for a much larger space.  The age of the house, especially in historic towns like Chichester or Horsham, and any other energy-efficiency measures already in place may affect what wood burner you decide to purchase. E.g. a brand new house will only need a fraction of the stove’s overall output when compared to a much older house.

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2. Consider the efficiency of the Brighton stove.

 Current UK Building Regulations set a minimum efficiency level for all types of heating appliances.

A log burners efficiency is measured by the extent which the stove can extract heat from its fuel and then deliver it to the space it occupies.  This efficiency is then quoted as either net or gross. The difference between the two stated values depends on how the initial fuel content is to be calculated.  For a dry burner, the minimum accepted gross efficiency is 65%.  For a stove which incorporates a heating boiler, the minimum gross efficiency is 67%.

3.  Intermittent or Continuous Wood Burning Stove?

A continuous stove burning at full output will last for four hours without needing to added new fuel when burning a solid mineral fuel (coal), or 1.5 hours when burning wood.  When working at a low burning rate, such a stove will keep the fire going and not need to be revived for 10 hours when burning wood, which increases to 12 hours when burning coal.  Continuous stoves are used as a primary source of heat.  On the other hand, intermittent stoves have much shorter refuelling intervals of around 45 minutes for wood or an hour or so for coal.  These stoves are the more suitable when you wish to have just an evening fire or a secondary source of heating.

4.  Dry or Wet Stove?

Dry stoves just generate heat directly into the room they are in. The wood burner is attached to a flue which goes up the chimney.  Wet stoves have the addition of boilers attached to a water tank.  Such stoves generate part (or sometimes even all) of the Sussex household heat needed to supply hot water.  Wet stoves can also work in conjunction with solar power to provide an alternate energy in both the winter and summer.

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5. Wood fuel, multi fuel or solid fuel stove?

A wood fuel stove uses just firewood, or other types of solid biomass fuel.  It requires seasoned or unseasoned logs to work best.  A solid mineral fuel stove runs on fuels like coal, whilst a multi-fuel stove will use a combination of either wood or solid fuel.

So, after considering all of the above questions, you should now be in a good position to purchase a wood burning stove to suit your own particular needs.