Your stove, whoever it is made by is a precision-engineered combustion box. It will only perform properly it is supplied with the right Fuel.
Wood burning stoves
ONLY CLEAN DRY WOOD. Never use painted or treated wood. I was once called to a fire where the hearth area of an inglenook was ablaze. It transpired the house owner had new windows fitted and had saved the more than 100-year-old, painted multiple times, wooden window frames to burn on his stove. Burn they certainly did. Plus the paint melted and burnt running out of the Ash Pan area of the fire like molten lava. It was truly an amazing spectacle. Not in my house thank you.
All Wood should be clean dry and seasoned. By seasoned, we mean allowed to dry to a water content of less than 20%. I prefer 10 – 15% moisture. On some Stoves, a 20% moisture level will still dirty your glass.
Before you get any heat out of your wood-burning stove, you have to dry the water out of the wood. I don’t care who makes the stove when I hear “such and such stove is useless it gives off no heat” in 99.9% of cases it is not the stove but wet fuel.
Where can you get such dry wood? Nowhere really you have to store it yourself. You can buy Kiln-dried wood but quite often it will still benefit from a few months storage. I keep all my wood for two summers. I buy in early spring March/April and burn from the autumn in the following year.
Most wood burns well in stoves. The softer the wood (like pine) the quicker and hotter it burns. This is good for kindling and bringing a fire back to life. Hardwoods like oak have a longer slower burn. Make sure your logs are split as this will make them dry easier and burn better. Some hardwoods are almost fireproof if they are not split.
Burning coal on a multi-fuel stove
Don’t burn coal. Normal household coal contains tar, creosote, bitumen and gas. All very mucky stuff that gums up your stove and chimney very easily. Household coal is meant for open fires, where there is a big draft up the chimney to take it all away and drop it on your neighbours washing. Your stove is designed with a very small draft to keep the heat in your room. So the Tar and muck never make it out of your chimney, it just blocks it all up. It’s a mess hard to remove and it can catch fire very easily. All multi-fuel stoves require smokeless coal. None can burn household coal.
Always check with your coal merchant or the HETAS Web Site.
Always use a HETAS fitter. Remember this is a bomb fire in your living room.
Just call 01228 547098 for any help and advice.