Wood Stoves

We are proud to offer the highest quality woodstoves on the market.

Background

Wood is one of the oldest heat sources known to man, and has been used since the dawn of time. In the early 1700s, a most remarkable scientist and inventor, Benjamin Franklin (most famous for his discovery of electricity), realised that open fireplaces were smokey, inefficient, and ran the risk of setting homes on fire from sparks. He set about designing the very first wood stove - it used 4 times less wood and generated twice as much heat - a remarkable improvement! This improvement was due to reducing the airflow through the fire. This allowed higher temperatures, which caused the smoke (unburnt distillation products of the fire) to burn - providing higher efficiency and less smoke. It also reduced the amount of air drawn out of the house by the fire

Efficiency of open fires

The chimney effect caused by an open fire draws massive amounts of warm out out of the house - which means that an open fire has exceeding low efficiency. Studies in the USA have demonstrated that open fires have efficiencies of minus 15% to plus 10%. Yes, they can actually make your house colder!! The heat of the fire may convince you that the house is warmer, but large quantities of warm air are sucked up the chimney, to be replaced by cold air from outside. There is no doubt that open fires are polluting and low efficiency, and their use should be banned in the UK.

Efficiency of Wood Stoves.

Wood stoves are very efficient. Most woodstoves are around 85% efficient, with very little heat lost through the chimney. They are not quite as efficient as a modern condensing central heating boiler, but they have zero carbon footprint, as any carbon dioxide produced by a woodstove is simply reemitting carbon dioxide absorbed by trees during their lifetime. As long as the wood is from a sustainable wood source, there is no net increase in CO2 emission - making woodstoves a very environmentally-friendly heat source.

Exhaust emissions

People often associate wood fires with a lot of smoke, and certainly this is the case with open fires. Older woodstoves can produce a certain amount of smoke under certain conditions, but significant improvements have been made over the last decade in terms of smoke emission. Further improvements can be made by preheating the input air to the stove. Very few manufacturers have achieved this in their design, but the Fireview stoves offered by AES are considered the best available on the market in this respect. If the air entering the stove is preheated to 400F by passing the air through long preheat channels in the top of the stove, it will cause spontaneous combustion of any smoke - even if it is produced by wood that has just been added to the fire.