The truth about woodburning stove

source : guardian.co.uk

A woman I know simply will not shut up about her new woodburning
stove. It's "fantastic", she says. You put on "one tiny log" and the
whole house is roasting for the rest of the day. It's the "best thing
she's ever bought".

Rubbish. I've had one for three and a bit winters, and if you're
thinking of joining the club you ought to know the other side of the
story.

1. A woodburner will heat your whole home only if that home is tiny
and heavily insulated. In my draughty, mountainous bit of the world,
where the temperature regularly hits -12C in winter, almost everyone
has a stove, a great big pile of logs to feed it, and a chunk of
forest to supply said woodpile. The first question locals ask when
visiting a strange house is: "How do you heat this place?" If the
answer is "wood", their second question is: "And what else?" My own
supposedly wood-fired shack is habitable only thanks to four electric
radiators and three paraffin heaters. And it's double-glazed.

2. You can't run a stove on the odd branch picked up while walking the
dog. Between December and March, you can easily get through 100
wheelbarrow loads of beech, oak or whatever. How much will it cost
ready-chopped? Imagine 300 blue Ikea bags filled with £50 notes.

3. Because most stoves will rarely burn unattended for more than four
hours, and because fire-lighting becomes a more tedious chore by the
day, your burner will dominate your life like a newborn baby. Every
time you get up to pee during the night you will have to chuck a few
more logs in, and if you don't get up during the night you will wake
up shivering. Whenever you leave the house, you fret that you will
return to a pile of ash that no amount of bellows-work will
resuscitate. And if you socialise with other woodburner owners,
evenings usually end by 11 with the words: "Oh my God, I've got to go
and feed the stove." If there's one thing worse than some Pollyanna
banging on about how much she loves her woodburner, it's a whole bunch
of grumps whingeing about how much they hate theirs.