Top 10 tips for Reducing Your Heating Costs by Installing a Wood Burning Stove

On freezing winter days like the ones we have managed to almost dodge completely this winter, could there anything nicer than coming in from the cold and curling up in front of a wood-burning stove? Aside from the romantic vision of cups of hot chocolate in front of a glowing stove, did you know that installing a wood-burning stove could potentially reduce your energy bills?

Even with the recent gas and electricity price cuts that have been announced by some of the biggest energy suppliers this week (following their steep price rises last year), it is definitely worth considering alternative forms of home heating to reduce your energy costs and over-reliance on gas and electricity.

So, to give us the low-down on wood-burning stoves and how to maximise our heating whilst minimising our energy bills, the chaps at gr8fires have shared their top 10 tips, plus we have an exclusive offer for all Queen of Easy Green™ readers, see below.

Top 10 tips for Reducing Your Heating Costs by Installing a Wood Burning Stove

1.     Install a wood-burning stove
That’s the inevitable starting point for saving money with a wood-burning stove. This will reduce your heating costs by cutting your reliance on central heating. You can turn off the radiators in rooms that you don’t need to keep warm and use the stove as your main source of heat.
2.     Choose the right stove
Picking the best stove for your needs is essential in helping you to save money. If you don’t fit a stove with a heat output suited to the room, it will reduce your chances of cutting your heating costs. Opting for a more expensive model with a greater output to heat a larger room will pay for the price difference in no time at all.
3.     Consider a wood-burning boiler stove
Installing a boiler stove is one way of further cutting your heating bills. You can use the heat generated by your stove to also heat the water in your home. The dual use of your stove means you can cut your central heating costs even further.
4.     Use properly seasoned wood
The type of wood you use has a huge impact on the efficiency of your stove. Using seasoned wood -which has been cut, split and left to air for at least a year – is the best way to minimise your heating costs. Seasoned wood contains far less moisture, burns more efficiently and heats your home more quickly than freshly cut wood. Use a log store to allow your wood to season and to help you build up a supply that should last you all winter.

5.     Control your stove’s air supply properly
Both the bottom (primary) and top (secondary) air vents should be open when you light your stove. Once the fire is burning well, you should be able to close the primary vent and control the fire using only the secondary vent for a more efficient burn.
6.     Get your chimney swept regularly
As a minimum you should get your chimney swept annually before you start using the stove regularly. Ideally, it should be swept every three to four month when the stove is in regular use.
7.     Use dry kindling to start the fire
Using small pieces of wood to get the fire going will heat your stove more quickly and, as a result, your room will start heat more efficiently once you add logs. The sooner your stove is up to temperature, the sooner the convection process can have an impact on the rest of the room.
8.     Use free wood
One of the best aspects of installing a stove is that you can easily find a supply of free fuel. From saving friends and family from a trip to the tip to salvaging fallen trees from your nearest forest (with the landowner’s permission), there are plenty of opportunities to heat your home for free.
9.     Don’t be tempted to throw another log into the stove. Once you have loaded the stove with logs, don’t continually top up your stove as they burn. Wait until all the logs have been burnt to glowing embers before reloading the stove. Continually adding more wood is considerably less efficient.
10.  Keep the door closed
It is a simple tip, but one that causes unnecessary confusion for many stove users. Once the stove is lit, the door should be closed. This increases the efficiency of the burn by up to 60 per cent.

The Woodfuel Cycle

In a bid to help both customers and retailers better understand and appreciate woodland management and firewood production, Hereford based firewood producer, Certainly Wood has just launched it's first YouTube video.
Entitled The Woodfuel Cycle, the four and a half minute video chronicles the journey from forest to stove and every stage in between.
Commenting on the video, Managing Director Nic Snell said: "This medium provides us with the perfect way to show our customers what goes into the production of firewood and offers an insight into the sacle of our operation in jsut a few minutes. It is a brilliant way to bring the process to life. We hope the video will help those retailers who have not had a chance to visit us and better understand the process. They can also use it in their showrooms and link to it via their websites to promote the importance of burning kiln dried logs"
Certainly Wood are planning to launch more videos throughout the year focusing on specific aspects of the business.

There's More To Logs Than Simply Cutting Down A Tree

Increased demand for wood burning appliances has not only resulted in increased demand for logs but has also raised some concerns about the quality and availability of this very popular energy source. With the help of the experts we take a closer look into what's involved in producing logs.

Fuel quality is pretty much taken for granted. Although our gas bills carry some techical details of the energy coming down the pipe, few people take any notice. It's exactly the same for electricity and oil, we've got used to high quality energy and no longer take any notice of it.

Wood on the other hand is all together different. There are over 10,000 tree species in the world and more that 100 in the UK (only 33 of these are native). These generally divide into hard woods and soft woods, hardwoods native to the UK include Ash, Beech, Elm, Maple and the mighty Oak with Yew, Scots Pine and Juniper among the softwoods.

In short, if you're going to burn wood you have a wide selection to choose from and as we're about to tell you, an even wider choice of quality.

As natural living organisms, trees drink and retain a very large amount of ground water absorbed through their roots and obviously fire and water do not mix. The tree, or more correctly the moisture content of a tree varies with it's species and maturity and is greatest when a living tree is cut down. When left to do it's own thing, the tree will start to dry out, but that would take a very long time.

Sawing a tree into smaller pieces and splitting the resulting logs with dramatically increase the surface area of the wood and reduce the drying time considerably. Artificially drying (or kiln drying) accelerates the process quite considerably but it is not just a matter of applying heat... Theoretically, the maximum amount of energy that could be released from burning wood will occur when the moisture content is 0% but this means the wood would disintegrate and be useless to use in a stove or fire.

As Nic Snell of Certainly Wood explains, "It is really a relatively simple economic balance. Drying uses energy which must be balanced against the heat gain from burning 'dried' wood. We believe that logs for wood burning appliances should have a moisture content of between 15% and 25%. At this level, combustion is excellent and any remaining moisture is quickly driven off by the heat intensity.

In comparison, wood with a moisture content between 15% and 25% produces four and a half times as much heat as freshly cut wood. Putting this another way, 10kg of dried wood would produce 45kW where as the same amount of fresh wood would only produce 10kW of heat.

And this moisture content issue is the main problem regarding quality of wood for stoves and fires, visit any garage or DIY shop and you're almost guarenteed to see nets of wood for sale on the forecourt or by the main entrance but in most cases if you ask where the wood is sourced from and the moisture content you may not get an answer. Obviously some of this wood may be of high quality and may well have been kiln dried or at least well seasoned, but all of that work is undone if the wood is left outside in the weather so the wood can absorb any and all rain or dew that settles on it, and this combined with any that is freshly cut makes this wood very wet and totally unsuitable for a stove or fire.

For example, watch what happens next time you see roadworks that involve the felling of a tree. Either a shredder is brought in and everything is shredded and reduced to being buried in the ground. Or a group of men normally armed with chainsaws and traditionally in a white van appear, cut the wood and disappear again. They normally take the wood back to a yard where it is split and netted and then on the market within a couple of days! This results in a very low quality wood that will release very little energy and can do some quite considerable damage to stoves, chimneys, flues or even the environment!
Although just a small fraction of the wood felled in the UK is used for fuel the equipment used to sustain just a small, but rapidly expanding market is quite substantial. One company, well hidden amongst farmland and orchards boasts a site occupying over three acres, all devoted to turning trees into kiln dried wood logs.

Large Quantities of harvested hardwood is being continuosly deliveryed to the site and stacked with precision that would probably beat most Supermarket shelves! These 'trees' are often up to 45cm in diameter and as king as 3 metres! They are then cut to lenghts of abouve 250mm and split into up to 16 segments. The machine that does this job uses pure brute force to split the logs, using up to 4 tonnes of pressure to get the job done!

These logs are then transferred to the drying operation where brute force is replaced by technical prowess and knowledge as the drying system comes into force.

The wood is then transferred into the drying kilns, in reality most of these will be ex-shipping containers that have been adapted and modified with all the hardware and safety equipment that the drying operation demands.

Getting the wood down to the correct moisture content has been refined and is now more science than guesswork, early experiments show that when taken too far the wood could spontaneously combust so all the drying kilns contain sensitive equipment to tackle any problem should it arise, which may even come to flooding the container itself with water!

Reducing the moisture content to between 15% and 25% takes approximately 32 hours per container, rather dramatically this reduces the volume of the wood by 20%. Add this to the cutting of kindling and storage for the finished dry woods and you quickly realise that there is more the firewood than just cutting down a tree!