Keep Your Home Warm This Winter With A Wood Burner

Modern wood burners are highly efficient and can reduce your heating bill dramatically; they also produce limited air pollution so benefit the environment.

Once you have a wood burner the running costs are relatively low, depending on the price of wood in your area, you can save up to £650 per year.

There are various types of wood-fuelled heating system; a boiler can be used instead of a standard gas or oil boiler to heat the radiators for the whole house. A stove heater is used to heat a single room and is usually used in conjunction with other heating systems.

Heaters also vary on their fuel. Pellets are easy to use and more controllable than logs. Pellet boilers can be used in a similar way as gas or oil boilers. Log-burning stoves and boilers have to be filled by hand, unlike many pellet burners that have automatic feeders. It will take a lot more logs to heat a whole house and therefore a lot more manual work. However, logs can be cheaper than pellets.

A single pellet stove can cost around £4,300 including installation. A wood-burning stove installed in a house with an existing chimney can cost between £1,350 and £3,750.

For boilers, an automatically fed pellet boiler for an average home costs between £14,000 and £19,000 including installation, flue, fuel store and VAT at 5%. Log boilers cost between £11,000 and £23,000. However, installation of these heating systems benefit from the government Green Deal whereby a homeowner can pay for energy efficiency improvements through savings on their energy bills.