Does Your Stove Work For You?

 When many people think of a wood burning stove they imagine it heating only one area of the house. However with a little planning and initial disruption, your wood burning stove could heat the entire home, whilst saving a fortune on electric and gas.
Some stoves can be fitted with a back burner that means as you light your stove the hot water tank heats up, from the energy created and fills your radiators with eco fuel that keeps every room in the house toasty warm.
Although initially fitting a wood burning stove with a back boiler can be more disruptive than simply attaching a stove to a chimney, this is an ideal way to heat the home for less, and ensures you get the full benefit of all that heat without opening doors in the home to let the heat travel through.
Even the incredibly contemporary wood-burning stoves such as Firebelly (We found the best prices here) can be ordered and built with an optional back-boiler, and in the 18 different colours you're sure to be able to find a colour you love.
Before back boilers wood burning stoves were huge heavy things, that would be used for cooking, drying clothes, heating water and the home, however just because times have changed and we now rely on oil and gas, it doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from our ancestors.
Range Cookers, more commonly called Aga's after the brand that made them so successful, are strongly back in fashion, and whilst at the beginning of the twentieth century these were thrown out with the rubbish, now they cost a pretty penny and are a must have for any designer kitchen. Manufacturer's such as Broseley have created some stunning Range Cookers, that allow you to enjoy the warm glow as well as being able to do almost anything. Unlike the Aga's that have hidden everything behind heavy metal doors.
Your wood burning stove can perform the same jobs as an Aga, as there are now so many on the market with extras, that the past is coming into the future.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, scour antique shops and reclamation yards, they will have the old type of wood burning stove that can easily be transformed with an expert hand. These older stoves will have special compartments at the side- a single cast iron cupboard, where you can place slippers to warm or even leave bread to rise. This creates not only warmth in the home, but a delicious smell too, and makes sure that in these winter months there really is no place like our own abode.
If planning a home renovation and the kitchen or study adjoins the lounge, another idea for an open plan feel is to remove the wall where the wood burning stove will go. Some stoves will have glass on both sides, so each room can feel the benefit of the flames as they lick you into a state of relaxed happiness.
With all these features, there’s only one worry left when buying your wood burning stove, how to keep a stockpile of wood big enough! Try growing your own fast growing trees, some only take a year to grow, and as one is chopped down replace with another secure in the knowledge that you really are going green with your energy!

Heating a house with a wood burning boiler stove is an increasingly popular option in the UK

With Scottish Power putting their prices up and with the other big suppliers certain to follow. More and more people are turn ing back the clock, more and more people are returning to burning wood. Firewood is a secure and relatively cheap form of fuel and a wood burning stove provides a cosy focal point to any room. A back boiler wood burner stove gives your family plenty of hot water, as well as running a complete central heating system and by heating your home by burning wood as fuel, you are reducing your CO2 emissions.

A wood boiler stove is an appliance that can burn wood to create hot water. Some take the form of what you would recognise as a traditional wood burner whilst others look and work much more like a gas boiler.

There are various types and permutations of boiler for wood stoves available but they all do the same job - they transfer heat from the burning wood into water, which can then be piped where it is needed and used for heating or domestic hot water. In a traditional wood boiler stove the boiler is usually a simple metal box filled with water and with 2 or 4 tappings to allow you to attach your water pipes to it. These tappings are usually 1" BSP fittings. Usually these boilers replace the fire-bricks inside the firebox of the stove and are known as back boilers because the bulk of the boiler is at the back of the firebox.

Wood boiler stove heat output to water

Wood boiler stoves can come with a variety of rated boiler outputs from around 5,000 BTU to 90,000 BTU. Make sure to check whether the rated output is the maximum or nominal. The nominal output is the output at which the stove would normally be run and is of course lower than the maximum output. You would not drive a car at it's full speed all the time and a wood boiler stove is just the same. Also when sizing the boiler stove for your needs remember that you need to use the nominal heat output.

Central heating and hot water from a wood boiler stove

A boiler stove can be used to power your central heating system and to provide hot water as well. Designing such a heating and hot water system is relatively simple but you will need the help and advice of an experienced heating engineer.

Wood fired central heating

Here the wood boiler stove is connected to the house heating system, commonly radiators, and the heat from the burning wood is pumped around the house. If your house uses underfloor heating then you would connect your boiler stove to a hot water tank and then the underfloor heating would be connected to that.

Heating hot water with a wood burning boiler stove

One of the differences between a boiler stove and a conventional gas/oil boiler is that it takes time for the hot water coming from the stove boiler to get up to temperature. This means that you cannot simply take hot water directly from the stove boiler: you need to connect the boiler stove to a hot water tank. The water in the tank is heated by the stove and stored up for use when needed.

Unvented system

In an unvented system there is no header tank and the water in the pipes is under pressure. Modern heating systems run by gas boilers tend to be unvented (or pressurised). One give-away is that there is often a pressure gauge on the boiler measured in 'Bar'. When the water in a pressurised system expands the pressure in the system increases. Most stoves are not suitable to be directly linked up to a pressurised system because with a stove it is possible to boil the water in the boiler. However a vast majority of stoves supplied by authorised dealers can be linked directly to pressurised systems with the incorporation of an expansion vessel - which expands to cope with pressure increases, a pressure release valve, and a heat dump system with additional safety features.