As the efficiencies of woodstoves are increasing to meet the new requirements for EcoDesign in 2022, it has never been more important to ensure that you burn the right fuel. The efficiency of your stove is only as good as the wood burned on it in reality. You may be buying a woodburning stove to become more environmentally friendly or perhaps looking to replace an older, less efficient woodstove with a new SIA EcoDesign Ready model as this will be less harmful to the environment. All of this is pointless though unless you ensure you are burning the correct fuel.

The launch of the Ready to Burn scheme has been a great help to the consumer over recent months as this means that when shopping for logs, you can see in an instant if the Ready to Burn logo is on the bag or on your supplier’s website meaning that you know that these logs are able to be burned immediately as they have less than 20% moisture content which is the required level for use on stoves. If your supplier of logs doesn’t offer this scheme, it is important that you check the moisture content of your logs with a moisture meter. If you are buying logs with more than 20% moisture content then we recommend that these are stored in your log store until they become drier and the moisture content reduces to below 20%. To burn logs with more than 20% moisture content will mean that you burn more fuel to get the same amount of heat so it is wasteful, the glass will discolour, the flue will get clogged up with tar which could in turn invalidate the warranty of your flue and could cause a chimney fire. You will also have to introduce more air into the stove to keep the logs alight which will reduce the efficiency of the stove. More importantly though, the pollution expelled into the atmosphere will be higher so this negates any good you sought to achieve in the first place.

You may not realise how crucial it is to burn the correct fuel on your highly efficient stove but the two factors go hand in hand and one without the other, isn’t providing the benefit to the environment you had hoped to make when you purchased your highly efficient woodburning stove.