Stoves are a waste of money!

shugy

Stoves are a waste of money is what im getting advised from a few different people. @ have said you either get heat in the room or your rads are going to heat all over the house. You cant get both. YEs you might get some heat in the living room if you want all your rads heated but your not going to have a nice comfortable heat along with pumping rads all over the house.

Getting advise like this, im not to keen on buying a new stove along with upgrading my insulation to external. I was hoping to upgrade from an open fire to a stove thatll heat my living room, rads in my 2400sq ft dormer but now im not to sure.

mod- please dont move this to the stove thread because itll get lost in it like many other posts on there.

...And Justice

Thinking of getting a stove myself, all my workmates and friends that got them think they're great.

Galego

shugy wrote: »

Stoves are a waste of money is what im getting advised from a few different people. @ have said you either get heat in the room or your rads are going to heat all over the house. You cant get both. YEs you might get some heat in the living room if you want all your rads heated but your not going to have a nice comfortable heat along with pumping rads all over the house.

Getting advise like this, im not to keen on buying a new stove along with upgrading my insulation to external. I was hoping to upgrade from an open fire to a stove thatll heat my living room, rads in my 2400sq ft dormer but now im not to sure.

mod- please dont move this to the stove thread because itll get lost in it like many other posts on there.

I have a stove and heats the room alright, I didn't want a back boiler. Whether or not they are any good to you depends on your life style and the cost of whatever you burn.

With heating oil being so cheap at the moment and new houses being much better isolated, you could spend as little as 300 eur a year in heating your house with a condensed boiler.

I think some people think they are more efficient than what they really are.

shugy

Galego wrote: »

I have a stove and heats the room alright, I didn't want a back boiler. Whether or not they are any good to you depends on your life style and the cost of whatever you burn.

With heating oil being so cheap at the moment and new houses being much better isolated, you could spend as little as 300 eur a year in heating your house with a condensed boiler.

I think some people think they are more efficient than what they really are.

I was hoping to upgrade because oil wont be always as cheap! give it a few years and itll be back up again and i want to be prepared for it but was hoping a stove would heat both the room and rads all over the house!

DGOBS

IMHO:

Solid fuel is expensive, if you install a 20 or 30kw wet-stove, then you have to put 20-30kw of fuel in it.
So unless you got free/cheap solid fuel, then it's not worth it.

A dry-stove to heat a single room that's most occupied is a good investment to replace an open fire, as it will reduce your fuel cost vs the open fire.

gctest50

Waste of time unless you've a forest -

http://www.seai.ie/Publications/Statistics_Publications/Fuel_Cost_Comparison/Domestic-Fuel-Cost-Comparisons.pdf


The open fire to dry stove upgrade would save a lot and be nice




.

NIMAN

Your post is slightly misleading OP.
I have a stove in my living room, and it's heats the room as well as the house.

Depending on whether you load it with turf, wood or coal it can get the radiators medium, warm or hot.

Plus it really heats the room it's in.

So whoever told you you can't have both is incorrect.

screamer

Exactly I have a stove that heats the room and the water and rads. You need to buy a big drive not a small thing and it needs to be installed properly. As many stoves are retro fitted into homes I think a lot are not installed fully and the heat from them is not used as effectively as it should be.
TBH solid fuel is expensive at the moment compared to oil but the residual heat we have from our stove keeps the room it's in warm till 4pm the next day. You'd not have that with oil.

SAMTALK

I have a bungalow roughly the same size and have a stove in sitting room. We also have a stanley in kitchen. The stove would have to be fairly big to heat room rads and water. When I have the two lighting at the same time we get great heat and sitting room gets very warm

But like all stoves/solid fuel you have to keep it topped up with fuel to get best results.

I had a friend who didnt find stove good but when I saw the small bit of fuel she was putting on I wasnt a bit surprised

Outkast_IRE

If the stove is sized correctly for the application it will be perfectly good for heating the room / house or both.

As was mentioned in other posts if you think you are going to heat your house by throwing a few logs into a large stove you are sorely mistaken. I have found that if you expect to heat the house/rads with a stove then coal is what most people end up fueling it with.

Personally i dont like coal, its a dirty fuel. Give me a properly sized stove to heat the room and kiln dried hardwood to heat it and i would be happy out.

Also OP if you are doing an external insulation upgrade, and your house ends up being well insulated and easy to heat you wont be running your oil boiler as much as before anyway. Depending on the load you could potentially easily change to air source heat pump if the cost of oil went through the roof in the future.

John T Carroll

gctest50 wrote: »

Waste of time unless you've a forest -

http://www.seai.ie/Publications/Statistics_Publications/Fuel_Cost_Comparison/Domestic-Fuel-Cost-Comparisons.pdf


The open fire to dry stove upgrade would save a lot and be nice




.

SAMTALK wrote: »

But like all stoves/solid fuel you have to keep it topped up with fuel to get best results.

I had a friend who didnt find stove good but when I saw the small bit of fuel she was putting on I wasnt a bit surprised

From the top post it would appear that coal has a gross calorific value of 8.27 Kwh/Kg and wood around 4.25 Kwh/Kg. If one had a 20 KW stove operating at 75% efficiency and at full output then one would have to fire it at a rate of 3.2 kgs/hr (coal) and 6.3 kgs/hr wood. Obviously you wouldnt fire at full output all the time, if one assumes that once the house/hot water is up to temperature then around 5 Kwh/hr would keep most houses very cosy, the numbers then become 0.81 kgs/hr (coal) and 1.57 kgs/hr wood.

A friend of mine has a 20 Kw Blacksmith Forge (8 kw to room & 12 Kw to water, I think) and he uses coal almost exclusively and he told me he uses 2 X 40 kgs per week. He has the same type of house as mine and on an energy basis consumes almost exactly the same as my standard efficiency Firebird 70/90 does.
Just spoke to him there and he said that the 8 KW is far too much for his room even if when burning the minimum amount of fuel which isn't really surprising when most normal rooms will probably only require 400 watts to 750 watts (0.4 Kw to 0.75 KW) to keep up to temperature after the heating up period.
Insert boiler stoves give a far lower room output, for example, just to quote one, the Henley Achill 21 KW (insert) gives 2.5 KW to 4.5 KW to room and 16.5KW to water, the Henley Druid 21 KW (Boiler,NON Insert) gives 6KW to room and 15 Kw to water. So its pretty obvious that its very important to get the room output as close as possible to its actual heating needs.

kerryjack

Ya stoves with back boilers are not a good idea we had a small non boiler stove in kitchen use to trough out some heat put in a big back boiler stove and it needs a lot of coal could easily burn 40 kgs a day obviously we don't use it now we use oil as its cheaper

John T Carroll

kerryjack wrote: »

Ya stoves with back boilers are not a good idea we had a small non boiler stove in kitchen use to trough out some heat put in a big back boiler stove and it needs a lot of coal could easily burn 40 kgs a day obviously we don't use it now we use oil as its cheaper

Yes, at the moment, depending on stove/oil fired boiler efficiencies, I reckon coal is 35% to 40% more expensive than oil but it was only fairly recently that oil was around 50% more expensive than coal. I would suggest firing up that solid fuel stove now and then because I'd very surprised if the trend doesnt reverse again sometime in the future.