Firelogs? Coal? Briquettes? Logs? Or wha'? (2 Viewers)

pissypants

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You want an open fire for the winter, but what's your preferred medium?
I've been trying firelogs - those sort of compressed woodchip looking things. Handy enough, they throw out a lot of heat, but they're hard enough to light and keep going, and burn pretty fast. On the up side, they burn down to virtually nothing, so are an easy cleanup. What's your preference for a toasty winter hearth?


AAAAAH!




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+1

I bought a load of wood from a local forest crowd last year,
what I'm picturing

fairyprocessionfinal_3.jpg
 
If I've wet wood (*smirks*) I bring in a few days' worth to the house and leave it on the hearth next to the stove, it's usually enough to dry it out to the point where it's not going to seriously affect your fire. I sometimes buy a bale of those eco-logs and they put out a lot of heat, usually I put half of one in at a time to keep the fire going.
 
I actually use really wet wood to throw on at night while going to bed so it smoulders away through the night and the place is warm in the morning*

*it is by modern standards not a large a house.
 
A lot of talk of wet wood being dreadful for the environment


the non jokey version from a few years back

 
A lot of talk of wet wood being dreadful for the environment
It is. My excuse is that I legit live in the absolute sticks though, all our wood is harvested from fallen trees in the back feild, which are replacing themselves at a rate I'm not totally keeping up with and the central heating is gas fired, which is supposed to be phased out soon for being horrific. Long term i'd like to move to one of those heat exchange systems that just use electricity and maybe a flannel shirt and coonskin hat combo. I do wonder a bit about the axis of
greener heating for oldish house to see out ann post
or
new build green to pass on as probably a bit substandard to the hypothetical kids.
Defo need a plan to move it off the gas for good in any case.
 
you would need your chimney swept if you're burning wet wood a lot.
we have a small room heater stove, we've bought three bags of kiln dried stuff from mulch.ie over the years, but we also had a good bit of leylandii i chopped down and let season for two years.
we're lucky - we have a 6' x 6' x 6' woodshed (possibly originally built as a coal bunker) at the back of the house, so we can store plenty under shelter.
on top of the woodshed is the remains of a cherry tree from my neighbour's garden which had to come down because it was diseased, and she also has a self-sown ash which has to come down which i'm also eyeing up.
 
Yah we got it cleaned and checked back in September, god knows when it was last cleaned. I figure we'll need to get the whole flue redone over the next few years.

How decent is your woodshed at keeping mould off the wood? Or does it just all fall off once it's seasoned? I mean, most of Ireland is pretty damp at the best of times and today my gaff is in a cloud.
 
How decent is your woodshed at keeping mould off the wood? Or does it just all fall off once it's seasoned? I mean, most of Ireland is pretty damp at the best of times and today my gaff is in a cloud.
never really had a problem with mould; there's no door on it but the doorway faces away from the prevailing wind so it's well ventilated without allowing rain in.

my wife complains to me that i store a lot of my wood for turning in there, so sometimes when she pulls a nice looking log out she has to check with me if it's for turning or burning.
 
hmm, I'll have to find a decent way of keeping things dry in Kerry up a hill beside the sea.

lol

Just take a spin around and see what the people with the coonskin hats are doing.

Also I hate to say it but

In the world of chopping wood, moving crap around in light to medium rain, ambling about in general..

A flatcat is a very practical and well thought out piece of clothing.
 
We found our stove to be too hot, after we'd rebuilt and insulated part of the room, so we bought a half sheet of vermiculite board and made little walls out of it, to line the little metal walls inside the stove, so we have a smaller working grate size. It hasn't seemed to lower the heat output at all, even though we use less fuel now to begin with and can let it start to die out a little earlier. I'd recommend it. It's like a firebrick but you can cut it to any size so very handy for the stove.
 
and the central heating is gas fired, which is supposed to be phased out soon for being horrific.
Really?

Your gas fired central heating, or gas fired heating in general?

I've been living in apartments for so long now I'm almost completely running off leaching heat from the gaff below me. This is somethign I'll have to recalibrate to I suppose :-/
 
from what i can see, there was talk of them extending the smoky coal ban (which applies to urban areas) nationwide.
but what happened was at least one of the three main coal distributors (one of which is actually based in ireland) went 'nuh-huh, you can't do that, we'll sue if you ban smoky coal and don't address smoky peat or wood, because unseasoned wood is smoky, etc.'

so the government as a way of kicking the can down the road decided 'well, maybe we'll actually do that so', and floated the idea knowing it'd die an *instant* death, but i have heard rumblings again occasionally about it. because there are valid concerns about burning damp or unseasoned wood (and the only good thing about turf in any way is the smell), the EPA would like to see its use stopped. particulate matter is quite high from its use.

people who burn seasoned hardwood (e.g. me), would be a bit annoyed about this. as far as i'm concerned, done right, it's an environmentally friendly way of doing it. as mentioned, i'm seasoning a load of cherry at the moment which came from about 20m from where i'm sitting, and burning it means i'm burning less gas. the wood would have ended up as CO2 within a few years regardless.
 

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