If, like my family, you live in a rural location, with no grid mains gas, then you will be heating your house with either oil, electric or gas.
Last May (2021) we filled our oil tank at the cost of 42pence a litre. Reasonable cost, but as a newcomer to the world of off-grid heating, I was told that it was expensive! Wind it forward 10 months, for the same oil, I’m expected to pay around £1.80 per litre. From £420 to £1800 for a thousand litres, to heat the same home, is utterly crippling.
We, unlike some unlucky home owners, managed to secure an order a few months back for 63pence, so are still three quarters full- but we have turned down the thermostat and added a few more layers of clothing!
One of the first things we did once we filled the tank, when we first moved in to the property, was to install two wood burning stoves. As I sit tapping away at my laptop, I’m in the kitchen, where a few logs in our wood burner are heating the entire room comfortably, spilling out into some other areas of the home. What we have found is that these primitive forms of heating have dramatically reduced our oil consumption.
Room heaters, whether gas or solid fuel, are considered secondary forms of heating, but in our home, they are taking first place.
What we love about modern log burners is the slow speed in which they burn through the logs, unlike older stoves, or the chimney warmers of open fires.
Back in 2012 Charnwood Stoves Marketing Director, Ced Wells was quoted as saying that a wood burner takes just five weeks to start paying for itself. He went on to say “With more rises in gas, electricity and oil prices, people are looking at ways to cut their bills. Every home’s different but we’re told a wood burner can save up to 30% on fuel bills. Overall, homeowners see a wood burner as an investment.”
That was 9 years ago!!! And fuel was apparently expensive then?!
In our home we went one step further, installing a Welsh built chilli Penguin log burner with a glass fronted oven. With LPG bottled gas fuelling our oven hob, and expensive electricity driving the ovens, we turn to our faithful wood heated oven, that now, not only gives us sufficient room heating, cooks our dinner most evenings.
With Log burners now meeting the new Eco-Design rules of reduced particulates, using wood to heat part of your home, has become a green alternative. But better still, and perhaps far more prominent today, its cutting costs, and giving you a return on your initial investment.
