I am looking for an efficient woodburning stove for my lounge. I have come across industrial looking wood burning boilers that gasify the wood in a top chamber with the flames created underneath in a second chamber.
Is anybody aware of a high-tech design of cosmetically acceptable wood stove that perhaps burns the wood in such a way as to increase efficiency and reduce waste product?
Ideally I would like it to be thermostatically controlled.
Top of the range stoves (rather than woodburners) are Jotul and Morso. Jotul claim that their stoves are able to burn methanes in the flue gas particularly efficently - and that the effect is to release less greenhouse gases than if the wood was left to rot. A friend showed me a scheme the French governent was running to subsidise this type of stove because of it's green credentials.
There is one brand of stoves from the US that uses a catalyst (can't remember the name), but more than one person has told me they're problematic.
I've got a Jotul F600 and recommend it - though with hindsight I would have paid a little extra for the enamel finish.
Thanks for those leads. This was the one I would choose to fit my fireplace
The other high tech approach was using gasification of the wood, where the flames burn underneath the logs. Can't quite fgure how that works but their site is here fopr interest:
Tim wrote:
I am a great advocate of the wood burning stove and have one in my living room. A few points to observe. Forget about thermostats etc. Its impossible to be so precise as the heat output is dictated entirely by the amount of wood and the quality of the wood you burn. Obviously well seasoned timber will burn better than fresh timber which will leave much more ash behind. Ash logs will burn quicker than most others etc etc. Apple trees will give off a lovely aroma. Alder wood is almost impossible to burn. Oak is difficult also. You may have lots of dead elms which are great firewood. So you cant control these with instruments eventhough some will bullshit you that they can. If you mix the different types of wood they will burn much better. Also once you get a fire going, put a big log on and it will burn for many hours. At bedtime select a large log and close the doors and damper and in the morning you will come down to a warm room and a small fire still going on the bed of hot ash. Naturally it all depends on the weather how much heat you want and how large your room is. It is also dictated by how much you close the doors and open or close the damper. To start a fire, leave one door open a little and this produces a great draught to get it started. Once the fire gets going leave both doors open fully and its like sitting at an open fire. If it smokes, close one or both doors enough to cure it. We clean out the ashes about every three or four weeks. Burn the fire on the floor of the stove on a bed of ash rather than on a metal grid.
The most important thing to realise about that stove you showed in the pic is that it is free standing and not set into a fireplace. That maximises the heat output in the room. If you set it into the fireplace, you will lose a great deal of heat straight up the chimney. Put a sheet of metal in front of the opening, just set back from the edge and make a hole in the tin to run the flue horizontally into that sheet, thereby ensuring your burner is actually sitting in the room rather than in the fireplace. This keeps all the heat in the room.
There is a metal plate in mine just in front of the flue and this deflects the heat outwards and the fumes drift over it to the flue.
Best buy I ever made. It made my home livable because before that during the winter I had to retire to a smaller room because of the cold. Every home should have a wood burning stove, especially if you have a really large room. Its clean, its natural, its green, its cheap, its independant of oil or gas which may someday be turned off and its basically a brick lined metal box with two doors and a hole for the flue. the one you show is probably expensive because it is elaborate in design.
Hmm. This rather casts doubt on the remainder of your posting, since I have burned little else for the last couple of years.
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While woodstoves are many things, clean isn't one of them. They put out quite a bit of pollution, including some really narsty chemicals, compared to a gas fire. That said, they're still rather nice.
Since you have experienced little else only oak, then you would not be in a position to cast doubt, would you? Do you use a wood burning stove?
Umm not so, the phobia about burnign alder wood is that it attracts the occult (allegedly), it does however burn well.
Bullshit.
Some American states are likely to bring in pollution laws specifically to control wood burners. They chuck out huge amounts of pollution, are hugely inefficient and there's been a big increase in their use because of oil price rises. Lots of people have them , but formerly relied on oil when they realised the amount of work involved in feeding them. Bookmarked this recently;
Wood can be burned in a smokeless zone if the appliance (i.e. the stove or boiler) has an Exemption Certificate. Companies which manufacture stoves with Exemption Certificates include Clearview, Vermont Castings, Dovre, Dunsley Yorkshire Stoves, Morso and Jotul.
A full list can be found at
Aidan wrote: > Some American states are likely to bring in pollution laws specifically
wood burning is the most natural fuel on the planet. In a wood burning stove, the fire is controlled so that it doesnt burn up too quickly. You say they chuck out huge amounts of pollution. Care to explain the pollutants? Surely oil fumes are a much greater pollutant. Actually to illustrate that, I once started a small petrol engine generator inside a house forgetting to site it outside the door and went upstairs for a few minutes. To my horror the house filled up in minutes with terrible fumes and that brought home to me the terrible pollution of millions of cars that pollute the heavens every minute of every day all over the planet. It was some time before the house was clear of the choking smell from the three or four minutes of that small engine. Is it any wonder then that the atmosphere is so polluted?
You say also that they are ineffieient. That perhaps is because they are stuck in someones chimney place rather than outside it and perhaps the users dont know how to control them, which takes a little thought, and once mastered leaves life with a wood burning stove very comfortable indeed. Dont knock it if you havent experienced one. I wouldnt trade it for all the oil in Arabia. As for feeding them, dont you have to feed every fire? Close the doors and they last for hours while an open fire would be dying in half an hour.
It's also bollocks..to generate any sort of heat is about a cubic meter of ash a month, in my experience.
INot a lot wrong with that - we use a couple of open fires and a 'highwayman' stove here..only one open fire is used consistently though.
The highwayman is definitely less draught inducing and more efficient than the open fire..we have it in our bedroom for days when we have the 'flu...its brilliant.
A good wood burner kicks out an easy kilowatt, and can be persuaded up to about 2-3. Our huge open fire is about 10KW, but a lot goes up the chimney..it takes ages to warm the room as mostly the first three hours its warming the brickwork around it. However it keeps the room hot all night afterwards. We tend to light it about 2pm in the winter, so that by 5pm its really well set up. It dies around 11pm which is a couple of hours before we hit the sack.
Ok is the best - dry oak.
We burn everythig here. PLum/blackthorn/hawthorn/maple/ash/sycamore/willow/poplar.
They are all different. I like em in order
oak ash maple sycamore willow poplar hawthorn blackthorn and the plums.
But any heat that comes more or less free is good heat.
BTW wood burning stoves are highly polluting. If every house in every town had one, they would be banned.
They produce tons of carcinogens.
The higher temp ones do MUCH better at that.
Yes, but they don't put out CO2 that hasn't already been taken out of the air..recently.
Otherwise, I totally agree.
However I LIKE the smell.
I wouldn't say they are inefficient. Once up to a decent combustion temp they are probably more efficient than a wet boiler actually, if the flue design is good.
Pollution is another mater though. Especially when first lit and cold. Lots of nasty stuff boils off wood - especially green wood.
Must try some. We could do with a few local spirits to liven up the dull winters.
Both burn well if dry.
Never burn MDF if you can help it though..never mind te occult..it stinks and is probably laced with a cocktail of chemicals that Saddam Hussein would have wet dreams over.
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Oh, I'm not knocking that bit, but there's a good deal of misunderstanding about how clean they are. Some modern stoves are very good at burning the flue gases but older/simpler stoves pour out hydrocarbons and things like...
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That's not really a fair comparison. You're trying to equate a small petrol engine with a total-loss lubrication system which is exhausting /into/ the house with a stove that's exhausting up a chimney. Anyway, I don't think anyone would say that small petrol engines are good either.
Wood smoke contains an amazing array of chemicals, many of them extremely nasty. It's one of the reasons people smoke food to preserve it, the bugs are killed by the heat but are prevented from reinfecting by the toxins on the surface.
Have a google for "woodburning stove" + pollution.
It could be that there is a confusion between Elder and Alder, totally different trees. Elder (usually only a small bush, biggest logs you'll get are only three or four inches diameter) really doesn't burn very well.
It needs a good hot fire to burn well but that's all.
Unburnt fuel, smoke, CO. Many woodburners are simply a steel container for a fire. Few have an thermal efficiency of above, or approaching,
50%. They work most efficiently if the wood is burned fast and the heat stored in a thermal store, by which I mean a water content of 1000+ litres. Reducing the air supply to control the burn rate will increase the amount of smoke produced. They cannot be compared with modern condensing oil or gas boilers in terms of efficiency.Yes. But you would have difficulty in finding a smoke plume from even one oil or gas boiler in your neighbourhood. Most wood/coal fire can usually be smelt or seen. If a large percentage of households suddenly start lighting wood burners, that they hadn't used in years, then you may have a problem.
Of course it did. If you'd lit a small wood fire in the middle of your kitchen, that would have filled the house with smoke and fumes as well.
I have There isn't as much oil left in Alaska as there once was.
OIl and gas are automatic, no effort involved. You don't have to go and fetch oil in buckets or hand pump it out of a well.
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