Hemlock
Dec 6th, 2008, 08:23 PM
We've just had woodburning central heating put in. The woodburner heats water and all the radiators in the house.
We thought it might help anyone considering being brave and getting rid of the gas to tell you about our woodburner trials and tribulations!
Not having had an open fire since the 1980's we had forgotten how to light the damn thing and one particularly cold afternoon I spent 2 hours totally frustrated not being able to light the burner.
Solution: a couple of firelighters crumbled, a couple of handfuls of dry kindling, a flame thrower (kitchen variety for fancy finishes on food).
Light firelighters with flame thrower - fire goes up like a rocket. Light the initial fire right in the middle of the woodburner right under the flue - once the flue is heated up it will help the air circulation in the burner and make the flames go higher and the wood catch quicker. Add more wood little and often until you have a decent hot bed and then stick a log on. leaving the door a cm or two ajar will fire the flames if the log won't catch.
Woodburning central heating system with thermal store requires an hour or so of fierce burning to heat up the water in the tank before putting on the radiators, once the water is hot so will the radiators be hot - makes sense really. the fiercer the flame, the hotter the radiators.
We had to order wood for our first winter as we hadn't started gathering it yet and didn't know which wood was best. Round here it costs around £70 a cubic meter for logs and another £50 for around 15 large bags of kindling, that's a lot of money because we can easily go through £70 of wood in a month if we have the burner and radiators going all day. Also as you can imagine log sellers do not necessarily give you good logs, you often get a batch of crappy burners that just don't produce enough heat to really get the radiators going well.
Our only solution was to start getting our own logs NOW in order to season them for a year in the garden (green wood ruins the woodburner). That is not allowed round here as all the forests in the area are owned by the forestry commision who like to sell their logs for top money and do not allow you to take any wood at all - even gleanings, nonetheless me and Corum would sneak in at night and run off with fallen branches and the like which was pretty exhausting and not to mention hernia making.
Well we have made an amazing discovery, a few minutes down the road is a hawthorn and blackthorn wood not managed by the forestry commision but common land and not only is the wood very easy to harvest as it is all small twiggy branches that are very easy to break into pieces or cut with a simple pair of loppers (loads of naturally fallen branches all over the ground) but the wood is incredible, even unseasoned it burns like the clappers and the house has NEVER been so incredibly hot. All we have to do is sling a load of windfalls in a small trailer of a weekend and we have enough wood for the entire week all totally free! Every hedgrow round here consists of blackthorn and hawthorne and there is a never ending free supply and no more lugging huge logs about, even the thickest blackthorn log is easily cut up with a handsaw.
Result! Top heat, easy gathering everywhere locally and totally free hot house :D No seasoning and even wet blackthorn and hawthorn burns like the clappers.
We'll do some big log gathering but to be honest there is no need. We found this little rhyme on the scout website which is a handy guide for what wood to look for:
"These hardwoods burn well and slowly,
Ash, beech, hawthorn, oak and holly,
Softwoods burn quick and fine,
Birch, fir, hazel. larch and pine,
Elm and willow you'll regret, Chesnut green and sycamore wet!
Happy and cheap burning:smile:
We thought it might help anyone considering being brave and getting rid of the gas to tell you about our woodburner trials and tribulations!
Not having had an open fire since the 1980's we had forgotten how to light the damn thing and one particularly cold afternoon I spent 2 hours totally frustrated not being able to light the burner.
Solution: a couple of firelighters crumbled, a couple of handfuls of dry kindling, a flame thrower (kitchen variety for fancy finishes on food).
Light firelighters with flame thrower - fire goes up like a rocket. Light the initial fire right in the middle of the woodburner right under the flue - once the flue is heated up it will help the air circulation in the burner and make the flames go higher and the wood catch quicker. Add more wood little and often until you have a decent hot bed and then stick a log on. leaving the door a cm or two ajar will fire the flames if the log won't catch.
Woodburning central heating system with thermal store requires an hour or so of fierce burning to heat up the water in the tank before putting on the radiators, once the water is hot so will the radiators be hot - makes sense really. the fiercer the flame, the hotter the radiators.
We had to order wood for our first winter as we hadn't started gathering it yet and didn't know which wood was best. Round here it costs around £70 a cubic meter for logs and another £50 for around 15 large bags of kindling, that's a lot of money because we can easily go through £70 of wood in a month if we have the burner and radiators going all day. Also as you can imagine log sellers do not necessarily give you good logs, you often get a batch of crappy burners that just don't produce enough heat to really get the radiators going well.
Our only solution was to start getting our own logs NOW in order to season them for a year in the garden (green wood ruins the woodburner). That is not allowed round here as all the forests in the area are owned by the forestry commision who like to sell their logs for top money and do not allow you to take any wood at all - even gleanings, nonetheless me and Corum would sneak in at night and run off with fallen branches and the like which was pretty exhausting and not to mention hernia making.
Well we have made an amazing discovery, a few minutes down the road is a hawthorn and blackthorn wood not managed by the forestry commision but common land and not only is the wood very easy to harvest as it is all small twiggy branches that are very easy to break into pieces or cut with a simple pair of loppers (loads of naturally fallen branches all over the ground) but the wood is incredible, even unseasoned it burns like the clappers and the house has NEVER been so incredibly hot. All we have to do is sling a load of windfalls in a small trailer of a weekend and we have enough wood for the entire week all totally free! Every hedgrow round here consists of blackthorn and hawthorne and there is a never ending free supply and no more lugging huge logs about, even the thickest blackthorn log is easily cut up with a handsaw.
Result! Top heat, easy gathering everywhere locally and totally free hot house :D No seasoning and even wet blackthorn and hawthorn burns like the clappers.
We'll do some big log gathering but to be honest there is no need. We found this little rhyme on the scout website which is a handy guide for what wood to look for:
"These hardwoods burn well and slowly,
Ash, beech, hawthorn, oak and holly,
Softwoods burn quick and fine,
Birch, fir, hazel. larch and pine,
Elm and willow you'll regret, Chesnut green and sycamore wet!
Happy and cheap burning:smile: