Suffolk firewood suppliers - Wood Burning Solutions.

Burning Wood efficiently

Firewood is a remarkably efficient fuel, for domestic supply firewood works out as the cheapest form of fuel (based on price per kWh). It is almost half the price of mains gas and one fifth the price of heating your home using electricity.

The cost of commercially sourced firewood covers the packaging and delivery as well as the expense of maintaining the woodland where the wood is grown. Although a wood burning stove, boiler or range cooker can use pretty much anything that will burn for a fuel, there are good reasons to only burn properly seasoned firewood. All of our stoves are designed to work at optimum efficiency in burning wood. This means that you get the most heat from your wood, and the very hot temperatures at which it burns means that there is minimal pollution produced.

Paper or processed wood products (chipboard, MDF, etc) don't burn at the right temperature and can leave a nasty residue inside the firebox and flue. This residue can reduce the efficiency of your stove, the flue gases don't retain their heat and travel through the flue as they should. This means that debris from the burnt fuel can lodge in the flue and cause potentially hazardous blockages.

Green Wood

The other most commonly mis-used fuel is green wood. Green wood refers to any wood which has not been properly seasoned. Seasoning really just refers to removing the excess moisture from the wood. When properly seasoned, fire wood will have less than 25% of its weight made up from water. Green wood will typically be 60-75% water.

Drawbacks of green wood as fire wood:

Burning green wood has two major draw backs. Water is an excellent thermal conductor, it absorbs much of the energy from the heat from the fire. Rather than this heat being used to warm your home, it is used to convert the water into steam. This then has a knock on effect in reducing the temperature of the fire in the stove (it may sound odd, but it's true) and this will reduce the efficiency of the burn, creating more pollution.

The other hazard from burning green wood is the fact that you will end up with creosote coating the interior of the stove.