Woodburner vs central heating

You have to be wary making broad claims about the relative costs of different ways of heating a home. It’s not a clear-cut and simple equation. But here’s a take on the question:

The core fallacy in the way we modern people try to stay warm at home is that air temperature and the sensation of feeling warm are only loosely correlated. You can sunbathe in the Alps in January on a clear day, when the ambient temperature is sub-zero. You can feel shivery under a jungle canopy where the mercury rarely dips below 30.

The clue is in our biology.

Humans have evolved to love radiant heat. There’s a reason the world’s oldest organised religion worshipped fire, and that many others worshipped the sun. We’ve been sitting around fires after dusk for over 400,000 years.

It thus seems slightly ridiculous that the main way we heat our homes is by burning enormous quantities of gas to raise the average air temperature in every room by a few degrees. We do this by pumping gallons of temporarily-heated water around a closed circuit. That’s the reality in 74% of British households, where gas central heating is the only form of heating.

On the face of it, and we’ve written about this elsewhere, there’s a superficial logic to using gas. By price per kW in the UK, it is by some margin the cheapest source for domestic heating. You can find the cost per kWh on your gas bill.

There’s no direct equivalent metric for wood as a fuel, but a rough heuristic is that a seasoned one-kilogram log will create approximately a kilowatt of heat, which under ideal conditions will be released over the course of about an hour in your efficient, modern stove.

If you can be bothered, you can weigh a typical log from your most recent delivery, then count the logs and work out a pretty good back-of-envelope equivalent cost to your gas kWh price.

The equivalent log will almost certainly be more expensive, possibly two to four times as expensive.

However, over the course of an evening, you might burn ten or twelve logs on your stove, and if you’ve come home cold and wet, the intense radiant heat will drive the chill out of your bones in minutes. Once you’re warmed through, you’re less likely to even notice the lower air temperature in the rest of the house.

Very few of our customers get rid of their central heating. But many of them find themselves using it less and less and find that they’re spending far less money on keeping warm.

If you’d like to discuss the possibilities for keeping warm with a stove in your home, get in touch with us at New Forest Fires.