Product Guide

Wood-fuelled stoves

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Wood-fuelled (biomass) stoves burn wood pellets, chips or logs to provide warmth in a single room. Usually, the stove isn’t connected to your radiators, but it may produce hot water using a back boiler. Therefore, a wood-fuelled stove is typically installed in addition to another form of heating.

Fitting your wood-fuelled stove with a back boiler improves the useful output of your stove by providing water heating as well as room heating. Most back boilers will be able to provide all of your hot water needs every day that the stove is used.

Stoves will need manually topping up with fuel - at least once per day with a pellet stove, and more regularly with a log stove.

Heating with wood can be a cheaper option than heating with oil, gas or electricity. In addition, wood firing does not release any additional CO₂ (greenhouse gas) into the atmosphere because the CO₂ was taken from the air when the trees grew. Assuming you purchase your wood fuel from well-managed forests, wood-fuel can be a sustainable option.

Tiny particles in smoke can be damaging to our health. Burning wet wood can result in more than twice the amount of smoke emissions than from seasoned/dry wood. Pellets are supplied dry, but must be stored in dry storage – a garage or shed is ideal. Logwood may be supplied dry or wet, and if wet, will need to be seasoned (dried out) for at least a year before burning.

Any boiler or stove installed in a clean air zone must be an approved high efficiency low emission model, and burn only approved seasoned logs with low moisture content. However, it’s really important that in any wood-fuelled system you use, you burn only seasoned/dry wood, and avoid burning waste materials, or any scrap or wet wood.

You can use our checklist below to help determine whether a wood-fuelled stove could be a good option for you.

• You enjoy a real fire, and would like a stove in your home.
• You have space to store fuel, e.g. at least a few pallets’ worth of pellets, or ideally more space.
• You are able and prepared for the manual work – filling at least once a day for a pellet stove and more regularly for a log stove.

There are many designs of stoves available to suit your décor. Our site highlights the most energy efficient stoves in their category. Our Selection Criteria details the minimum standards the products must meet in order to display on our site, including further information about efficiency.