Retrofit modern house with wood-burning stove - possible?

[markzoom]

Check out

for new cast iron stoves (starting at £85) and flues. M.K.

[Pete C]

Stoves are more practical as the ash drops into a pan for emptying, and with a spare pan they can be used in rotation to save carrying a hop pan through the house or putting hot ashes in the bin. Also AFAIK wood ash is quite good for the garden.

Stoves can be reasonably cheap too for smaller ones or buying second hand can be a good way to get a lot of stove for the money.

I'd look into using a plain steel stove pipe which could be double skinned where it passes through floors and walls. 'Gas barrel' pipe from a steel stockholder is fairly inexpensive and can be had in a range of thicknesses.

Best to collect in spring then dry it out under cover for winter. Even if only used for part of heating or in mild weather it will help keep bills down. A 'maul' makes splitting logs quite easy, especially if they're dry.

cheers, Pete.

[Andy Dingley]

Get something better if you're going to be using it regularly and would like it to last. My welded steel stoves last longer than those cheap cast iron decorators.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Good prices, if a little plain.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Our open wood burning gartes need emoptying of ash about once a month in winter, by which time we have a bin bag full.

The stove needs emtyoing every cole of sdays.

Why? because its siomply got less room for the ash.

A chainsaw is indeed all one needs.

Ther is no need to store under cover either. Not the whole logpile.

We take he very old landrover down to teh pile, cut enough for a week, and leave it in the land rover. Best mobile woodstore I know.

its dry enough - about 2 days worth copmes in and is stacked by teh fire whih dries it out in no time.

Wood burning though is voracious on logs. Far more volume of wood required than e.g. coal.

[Mike]

We've got a wood full of the stuff and still use oil. Collecting enough wood to actually heat a house would be a full time job. Using a trailer you would need a load every other day. A lot of work.

[Pete C]

For splitting firewood? Nothing like splitting well seasoned logs with a maul on a crisp winter morning with a large mug of tea (to drink thatis!)

I tried that but the bugs under the damp bark would get uncomfortable and seek alternative accomodation :)

cheers, Pete.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. It is. You get would typically through at least a ton a week in winter.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yup, but they soon die of lack of wet wood to hide under.

[MM]

Yes, something like that would suit me fine. Incredibly cheap, too.

MM

[Mike]

Mind you, if MM wants to collect it from our wood in exchange for leaving a percentage at our door ... :-)

[MM]

I wouldn't get through anything like a ton a week, even in the deepest winter! Fair enough if you've got a mansion to heat. I haven't.

MM

[Mike]

Remember a wood-burning stove is only about 15% efficient (30% if it's got a back boiler) so you use a lot more than you think.

[sylva]

Please define efficiency in this context, I think my Jotul will get about 70% of the heat into the room if the combustion is good but of course it gets a negligible amount into other downstairs rooms.

Open fires are much worse as they entrain a lot of dilution air, the fire effectively acts as a pump dumping warm room air up the flue.

I can see only three ways the energy released from the wood can be go in a closed stove, into the room, up the chimney as sensible heat and up the chimney as products of incomplete combustion. With air controlled to give a 50% excess, a hot fire and dry wood I can see no reason for the low figures you quote. With damp wood and a smouldering fire then easily 70% of the fuel value can be lost in the flue gas.

AJH

[tom patton]

[MM]

This is 'grate' news, Tom! I knew it was going to be cheaper than relying on oil and gas from supplies that might suddenly get very expensive indeed. Three days collecting wood could easily be turned into a kind of jaunt so that it becomes less of a chore. And your store is not all that large if it holds enough wood for a year's worth of fires.

No, I wouldn't never just steal timber without asking the farmer who owns it. Although your bottle of whisky seems like a bit of a steal! Still, if the farmer's happy, who's complaining?

You have fired me up again!

MM

[Holly in France]

Groan :-)

This is a good point I think. We heat a biggish four-bedroom stone house and the adjoining gite solely with woodburners. We spend a week at Xmas/New Year and maybe a couple of weeks in the summer in the woods. We have about

10 hectares of woods on steepish land, much of which is on the ground after the big storm here in Dec 99. It's a whole family activity, not much of a chore at all. We save the good oak trunks for joists/boards and cut up the rest for firewood. We are lucky to have an old 4WD tractor with winch and trailer and a MF35 with a transport box and a hydraulic log-splitter. The time spent includes alot of clearing undergrowth and burning (winter only) the tops. We cut the wood to 1m lengths, split it and stack it for a year or so outside and then a year or so inside, depending on the time of year it is cut. Wood from further away is loaded onto the big trailer and the more accessible stuff the children collect with the little tractor and the transport box. I guess we get through about 50 cubic metres of wood per year, considerably more than Tom! If one took into account the money one could earn elsewhere it might well be cheaper to buy the oil/gas, or even just to buy the wood, but for us it's a case of 'a change is as good as a rest' and the woods are such a mess that we need to clear them out anyway. If you had much to do, a little tractor with transport box and splitter might be worth thinking about??

YMMV though, you would have to try it and see.

Hope I haven't dampened the fire :-)

[sylva]

I am similarly equipped and can extract the fuel equivalent of

15.5MWhrs(t), about the contents of 14,000 litres of oil, daily with the consumption of 25ltres of gas oil, as long as some other poor soul has cut it to 2.5m lengths first ;-).

AJH

[The Natural Philosopher]

With oil prices what they are, growing e.g. willow or poplar for fuel is not such a far fetched idea.

Or take out a call warrant on oil prices..

[sylva]

Modern machines will enable two men to exceed 100m^3/day and one firm I work for regularly whole tree chips 90m^3/day with one machine, for sending to the power station.

Not at all, it happens, the thing is to have made contingencies for safely extracting it. I always carry two saws but in fact find a sharp axe is often most effective. Plastic wedges are also a boon.

AJH