New stove

Hi, Bruce here, this time with a long post.

More than two years ago we decided to upgrade our home heating. An open fireplace in the lounge room, and a cast-iron slow-combustion stove in the adjacent kitchen/family room, were our main sources of heat.

Although open fires are romantic, cosy, hypnotic, and delightful, they have many problems. They are inefficient, with >80% of the heat going up the chimney; they are polluting, producing both greenhouse emissions and particulates; and they burn wood that would otherwise be wildlife habitat. Once when I was cutting a fallen log, a small bat flew out and was immediately chased, caught and eaten by a pair of nankeen kestrels — it was distressing to watch. Finally, the wood is often sourced hundreds of kilometres away, so there is an added greenhouse cost in the transport used.

We had an additional problem with the open fireplace in our lounge room. If it was lit when the slow-combustion stove was operating, the air, smoke and heat going up the chimney created such a strong draft that it sucked hot air out of the kitchen/family room, and dispatched that up the chimney too. We could actually see the temperature in the kitchen falling soon after the fireplace was lit in the lounge. The draught was so strong that the folding doors connecting the rooms would sometimes fling open and the heat would rush out of the kitchen.

At the same time as we were getting frustrated by our heating problems, my Christmas trees were getting out of hand. I had planted too many and, with plenty of competition, now had many trees too big to sell. I didn’t want them just to grow into a sterile monoculture. We decided to replace the open fireplace with a slow combustion stove, but I was keen to use the pines as the wood source.

Not surprisingly, Australian combustion stoves are designed to burn hardwood (ie eucalypts). It wasn’t clear whether we could burn pine (softwood) in these stoves. Some suppliers said ‘No’, because the build up of resin in the chimney from burning pine was a fire hazard (ie the flue could catch alight), whereas others said it was OK, providing the pine wood was well cured.

Finally, we heard that a company in Armidale imports soft wood burning stoves from New Zealand. To cut a long and frustrating story short, we managed to get one of these and install it in the open fireplace exactly two years ago. It was an immediate success — the unit is efficient and, because the fireplace is now sealed, the heat doesn’t disappear up the chimney.

However, we now had a new problem (or at least I did, Hilary has many talents, but wood-cutting is not one of them). To keep our two stoves supplied with wood I had to cut softwood for the new stove and hardwood for the old one, which created a lot of work. Given the success of the new stove, the logical solution was to replace the old hardwood unit with a softwood one.

We procrastinated for about a year, in part because it seemed a big, and hence expensive, job. Our hardwood stove had a rear flue that went through an internal brick wall into the laundry before going up through ceiling and roof. Replacing it would mean removing the flue, repairing the resulting holes and cutting new holes. The prospect of dealing with the inefficient mob in Armidale was also off putting.

Eventually, lack of a hardwood supply made the decision for us. This time we contacted the NZ manufacturer directly and imported the stove. Paul Sintes of Ethos Stoves in Christchurch could not have been more helpful, providing quick responses to my many queries (16 emails at last count!), and our second softwood stove is now installed. It is very efficient, heating the large family/kitchen area much faster than the hardwood unit it replaced. An added bonus is that you can see the wood burning through the glass door, providing a pleasing open-fire effect.

The unit has other benefits as well. Ethos stoves are ultra low emission woodfires, and Paul Sintes won an environmental award from the Clean Air Society of Australia and New Zealand for their design. I don’t normally give plugs, but given the excellent service and product quality, I will make an exception in this case. Check out www.ethosfires.com for more details.

But why go to all this trouble? Why not just install electric or gas central heating?

The answer is that using wood sourced from a sustainably managed woodlot (ie our own pine plantation) is the most environmentally friendly way to heat your home. The emissions produced by burning the wood are offset by the emissions sequestered by the growing trees. This is especially true if the woodlot is nearby, meaning that there are no transport emissions. So that’s it from me, hot but not bothered!

Comments

[Julie]

Hello Bruce,

This is a question relating to food miles rather than heating. Do you know if any of the breads that you can buy from the supermarket--- the type in plastic bags, which are called "toast" in Germany--- are baked locally?

Julie.