A cold home is not much fun. You cannot sit around reading a book or watching TV if there is ice on the inside of your windows. It is also hard to sleep if you are shivering. Most modern homes are not like this: the majority of families are lucky enough to have central heating that comes on at the flick of a switch. However, as great as central heating is, nothing beats the glow of an open fire or log burning stove.
Stoves are nothing new. People have been heating their homes with log burning stoves for centuries and in northern Scandinavian countries, virtually every home has a stove in the living room. The reason for this is simple.
Waste Wood is Free Fuel
Log burning stoves burn wood and for people living in rural areas, logs and other bits of wood are readily available. Central heating relies on gas, oil or electricity, which have to be supplied to your home from an outside agency. This costs money and the cost of heating fuel is dependent on the global price of crude oil. Right now, crude oil is at an all-time low, but there is no guarantee it will stay like this forever, and once oil prices spike up, the cost of heating a home will go up too.
Logs and Kindling
It costs nothing to burn spare wood and logs cut from your property, although they will need to be stored for 12 months in a dry shed before they are suitable for burning. Once your logs are dry and suitable aged, they can be cut into kindling or used as heating fuel. You also have the option of buying firewood in from a specialist supplier such as Premier Firewood Company, which is useful if you want some larger logs to burn over winter and your logs are not yet ready. Timber off-cuts don’t need to be aged. They can be chopped up immediately and used as kindling. Any old bits of wood are suitable for this purpose – even unwanted wood furniture.
Create a Warm Vibe in Your Home
If you want to create a warm, cozy vibe in your living room, installing a log burner is the way to do it. Open fires are lovely, but they are not terribly efficient at heating a space. Most of the heat generated from an open fire disappears up the chimney, so although it looks fantastic, the room won’t be as hot.
Log burners are highly efficient at burning fuel. They give off a lot of heat and when turned onto a low setting, fuel lasts for hours. This means you can shut the log burner down and it will stay on all night. When you get up the following day, all you have to do is empty the ash pan and stoke the fire back up again.
Log burners are a real asset to a home and if you decide to sell your property one day, you can advertise your log burner as a selling point.
