I am sorry for asking so many questions, it seems like every time I am on her I am asking something else.

Anyway my DH and I are interested in a house That has a solid fuel burner in the Lounge that provides the central heating and hot water and a solid fuel Aga in the kitchen that also provides hot water.  On one hand I find it very appealing but I do have concerns about how energy efficient and cost efficient it is.  I don’t want to potentially be sat there freezing in bed because the central heating doesn’t work well off a stove or because it burns through fuel so quickly that we can’t afford enough.

Does anyone else have this set up? And how do you find it?  Also can you leave a solid fuel burner (with the doors shut) burning overnight or while you nip out or is it literally once it’s lit your tied to the house or that room if overnight? 

I have been deliberating over this for some time so any knowledge or shared experience would be amazing.

We have a multi fuel burner in the dining room (our living room really) which heats 7 radiators and the water. In the lounge we have an open fire

In terms of energy efficiency, it’s a bit like a car; it depends on the make, model and condition. We’re on our second wood burner because we were burning more than 8 tonnes of wood each season and even then the house wasn’t particularly warm.
We have a new model now which kind of ‘reburns’ the smoke to get every last drop of energy from it (it also means you can use it in a smokeless zone, which is utterly amazing). It certainly IS more efficient but I don’t know by how much as we’re not yet through the season. The water that comes out of the tap is almost at boiling point, we have a safety radiator and although the house never gets hot, it’s comfortable.

In terms of cost, it’s only cheap for us if we get access to free wood. If we have to buy it in, then forget it. A nice load of ash is £80 and that lasts 2-3 weeks depending on weather conditions and whether we keep the fire in at night time.

If you’ve got a source of fuel however, it’s brilliant. THis year all our wood has required our time and effort but no money, so I’m sitting here this year with free heating and hot water - bliss! Other years we’ve run out of wood and frozen our arses off by the end of Feb and it’s not nice…

So the upshot it, in my opinion, you need to find out more about the fire - how old is it, what is the BTU, how many radiators does it run, how big is it, how giv is the room it is in, what is the make and model. I think it’s nice with the Aga too because you could use that solely for water and use the solid fuel burner for heating. Also, is it multi fuel,  or a wood burner? I don’t like to do it, and probably should’n't admit it, being a greenie and all that LOL! BUT I have burned anthracite on ours when it’s been super cold; just to keep it in at night; otherwise the temp in the house drops down to 15 which is too cold for my comfort levels.

This probably hasn’t answered your question at all, but hopefully it’s given YOU some more questions to ask so you can make an informed decision.

Thank you, that’s really helpful and has given a good place to go forwards from and now I know what questions to start asking ect.

Hi Erimentha!

We have a 40 year old woodburner for our heating and hot water and love it!  The woodburner has a back boiler for hot water, although the tank also has an immersion heater which we mainly use in the summer.  It is also connected to 5 radiators which are for heating the bathroom downstairs and all of upstairs.  To be honest, it can only really manage to get 2 or 3 of these very hot, or all of them luke warm and when the pump is on for the radiators, we get no hot water.

We buy all of our wood at £200 per load and have maybe 5 or 6 loads a year (we like to keep warm).  We also have electric heaters for the bedrooms overnight.  Overall, it is about half of the cost of our previous house which had an oil fuelled combi-boiler.

Wood takes a bit more effort than other fuels, as the guy dumps it outside of our garage and I have to stack it inside the garage and then use our neighbour’s wheely bins to bring it into the house every few days (he was a farm worker all of his life and burns all of his rubbish!)  Then you have to light the fire (performed at 5am this time of year before the family descends) and maintain it through the day.  That anthracite sounds like a good idea starchild!

If we were ever to buy a house, we would definitely install a woodburner.  They are very cheap to maintain, or even replace compared to other boilers.  They produce a wonderful kind of heat and bring immense character to a room.  Importantly for young children (and spiders), they don’t make the air really dry like central heating, although they produce plenty of dust!  And they smell nice too!

I lived for a while in a house with an ancient solid fuel aga which provided all our hot water and heating.  It was a huge house so hard to heat but we did manage to get the radiators to warm in most of the rooms but only with the pump on (without this it only managed to heat a couple of rooms).  We only burnt coal on this as we could not find a good supply of wood at short notice (moved into the house in a very cold december!) .  If we piled the coal (anthracite -sp?) up it would easily keep going all night or all day.  It was not so easy to pile up the wood to keep it going all night, usually used a mixture of each, it may depend on the age of the stove as to how much you need to put in and the type of fuel.  I would make sure that the chimney has been swept recently particularly it coal has been burnt in it.  We were never short of hot water however.

We now have wood burner which heats our water and the rest of the house, not via radiators as our house is open plan, it is very efficient.  We have a free supply of wood which we have to go and collect but it has definately reduced our fuel bills.  Sometimes you can pick wood off cuts up for free from companies/folks who work with wood.

Have you been to see the house, is there someone living in it at the mo?  Did it feel cold when you went round, that maybe a good indication of what it is like, can you talk to the current tennants/owners (not sure if you are buying or renting).