Installing a woodstove in Scotland?

[Everything Mac]

Well chaps I am ashore. The wife and I have been busting our behinds getting the floorboards in the house sanded / prepped to be sanded. Oh sweet lord what a thankless task that is. We're both rather broken and we've still got a lot to do.

The wood stove arrived today. I've opted to get the liner fitted by the pro's - because quite frankly I'm utterly broken at the minute and the prospect of climbing up on the roof does not fill me with the joy it did a few weeks ago.

I'll be hooking up the stove myself then getting it all tested and signed off.

Cheers
Andy

 

[bobnewboy]

Better crack on with it......an example:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....-burning-stoves-do-new-rules-mean-heater/amp/

 

[Everything Mac]

Better crack on with it......an example:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www....-burning-stoves-do-new-rules-mean-heater/amp/

Ours is cleaner than the defra standard if the website is to be believed. (Saltfire ST-X5) so we'll be fine.

 

[Janne]

The grandfather principle should apply surely?
Install one currently approved today, and nobody can say anything if/when they introduce tighter rules?

Wood burners are a fantastic addition to a house. Worth ever penny!

 

[Robson Valley]

I think part of the concept is to teach people that you can get more heat from a modern efficient burner.
Another part is to cut the atmospheric load of crap microparticulates. Smoke from a chimney just isn't done any more.

What happens is that the suppliers pull the non-compliant wood stoves out of the market place.
Maybe you can find some ancient piece of log burning history but tight rules mean you might never get a permit to install it, today, tomorrow or for ever more.

My pellet stove makes no smoke. Unless it's -20C and you can see some water vapor condensate, you can't tell if it's running or not.
12(?) years ago, I gambled that furnace oil would never come down in price. I won the bet.
Even better, I installed the pellet stove. Keeps the whole house just as warm for 1/2 the cost. Half. 50%.
Pellets were $220/ton (2,000lbs) for years. Maybe 4 years ago, the price rose to $235/ton.
You get that as 50 x 40 lb bags, triple wrapped, on a pallet. I have room in the lower kitchen for 2 tons.

The result was that the cash savings paid the capital price of the stove in the first 3 winters.
Over the next 2 winters, I recovered all the costs for all the bits for my back-up solar power system.

The down side? You have to shut down and clean out maybe 1kg brown ash every 12-15 bags ( 480 - 600 lbs).
The hopper holds close to 100 lbs but still, you have to be there to keep feeding it.
I was away last winter for months at a time so had no choice at all but to run the oil furnace. Think I spent about $3,000.00.

Modern, high efficiency wood stoves pay for themselves. Quit the EU. Join an economic partnership with us.
You might get some real deals on Canadian wood stoves. We are experienced.
Newfoundland got 30 cm snow yesterday and more to come. Buried the daffodils.

 

[Janne]

You are correct, but the 'previous' models are very good too, and might be discounted!

To avoid smoke, plus tarred up glass, you need to use the proper tech. Each burner model is unique.
I am still learning the Jotull we got last year. To burn off the glass tarring, it needs the last logs to be placed close to the rear wall. High heat.

Wife is an expert in cleaning the glass though. Ash and water and newspaper.

 

[Robson Valley]

Modern pellet stoves have the fuel augered up from the bottom, same direction as the fuel air feed.
The exhaust gases are actually pulled out of the fire and pumped into the chimney.
Above all that is the heat exchanger with a big squirrel-cage blower to push out the heated air.

I actually measured the size of the running fire (70% pellet feed rate).
It was 2" from front to back and 5" wide. That's the total burning fire.
Blacksmith's forge sort of appearance to heat 2 x 1200 sqft floors of rooms..

I use stove glass door cleaner when I'm keen enough to do it.
Wipe on, wipe off. Done.

 

[Toddy]

The grandfather principle should apply surely?
Install one currently approved today, and nobody can say anything if/when they introduce tighter rules?

Wood burners are a fantastic addition to a house. Worth ever penny!

Doesn't work. If your car isn't up to standard you would be told to remove it from the road, why should burning an unclean stove be any different? It certainly wasn't a good excuse in the past when the towns clean air acts came into play.
Glasgow already has stringent rules about smoke, about what people can burn in domestic and industrial stoves, etc., and there's now a great deal of talk now about restrictions on the woodburners which by all accounts are now major air polluters.

I think anyone fitting a woodburning stove now really needs to take account of not just present regulations but has a blooming good awareness of just how tight those might become in the near future.

 

[Toddy]

RV, pellet stoves are an entirely different beast.
In the main we burn slow burning hardwoods here. An oak log will last all night long, ash is superb, etc.,
The stoves fitted into our homes are small, with a simple lined flue, they don't have hoppers and screw feeds, etc., they are simply the tidy version of an open fire.

http://www.scottishairquality.co.uk/laqm/smoke-control-areas

https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/ne...s-and-stoves-in-firing-line-for-air-pollution

Scottish Parliament....
"MSPs said the Government had already admitted the 1993 Clean Air Act, which regulates smoke control areas and rules around installing stoves, was not fit for purpose.

Under the existing laws, it is an offence to emit smoke from a chimney of any building within a smoke control area, unless the source “can be used for burning fuel other than authorised fuels without producing any smoke or a substantial quantity of smoke”, a clause which allows most stoves to be used.

Giving evidence to an inquiry by parliament’s Environment Climate Change and Land Reform Committee on air quality, Health Protection Scotland said they were “beginning to get concerned” about the contribution of stoves to air pollution.

But a lack of available data, including little idea on how many stoves were in use, meant the committee was unable to say if the stoves were “a serious contributing factor to harmful pollutants”. It did, however, say there was “a gap in regulations around the installation of wood burning stoves.”

 

[Janne]

Toddy, if you buy a new woodburner today, of a decent quality, a Jøtul for example, surely they are good enough to be approved under the new rules?

It is not only the burner that influences the smoke/particulate result, but woodtype, humidity of it, and technique.

Our latest one is a Jøtul 162C, and I can make it smoke like Titanic, or burn clean.
Oxygen flow.


The OP bought a Saltfire ST-X5 woodburner that is of the clean burn design. I am sure it will be approved under the newer regulations!

 

[Toddy]

One would hope so, but I doubt they'll permit 'grandfather'd' in if a stove does not comply.

We live close together in the main, it means that our pollution is concentrated, but we only have to travel ten minutes and we're in open countryside.
It does have it's advantages, but the concentrated pollution is a long term health hazard unless dealt with effectively.
Basically if we can record high particulate levels then we'll try to do something about it.

M

 

[Janne]

I remember some statistics from research done by a Uni in Sweden a couple of decades ago.
It is healthier to live in the countryside and be an average smoker than live in a city and be a non smoker.
Researched showed that smokers in cities had a huge risk for lung cancer, and the country bumpkins that smoke had a fairly low risk.
As I was basically a country bumpkin I was ok to smoke.
( that was my reasoning I was ok to smoke when non smoking wife nagged me to stop . )

Remember a few years ago when the governments wanted us to buy Diesel oil fuelled cars?
How it was better for the environment?

And look now.

 

[Janne]

Wood fires/ burners:

Will they ban making a wood fire in an open fireplace? Combustion in those are uncontrollable compared to an enclosed burner. More smoke.

I have no experience burning coal.

 

[Toddy]

There are already measures that restrict what you can burn in open fireplaces in the towns and cities. I live near enough Glasgow that I know how restrictive it was when it came in, and how it was reported and chased up and folks penalised over it, but it has made an enormous difference to the pollution levels for the entire region not just the city.
The city is no longer black, the rain is no longer filthy water, folks don't choke to death in smog, and children don't die of a dozen different respitary diseases either.
Smokeless fuel became de rigeur, no wood, no paper, no household debris, etc., Now most houses don't have open fires at all, but suddenly woodburners are fashionable and it's showing to be a particulate pollution problem that needs addressing....in some areas.

M

 

[Janne]

The lung disease would be Tuberculosis. Rife in the old days. Curable in the early stages from around 1955, easily curable from late 1970’s.
I remember the filth and smell in former Easten Europe. They used low grade coal, lignite as it is called.
Basically aged peat, a precursor of proper coal.

When we took the train to see my grandpatents, we had to bathe after. The steam trains spewed out huge clouds of nastiness.

Open fireplaces were very popular in Scandiland after ww2 until the 70’s, where we started installing a kind of insert stoves there. Not only cleaner, but they gave out far more heat.

I look forward to hear from the OP how his installation turned out!

 

[Toddy]

I think we got a lot luckier about the quality of our coal. Hard crisp shiny black stuff. It burned hot and bright, but you could (and still can here, in the village when someone lights a coal fire later on in the year when none have burned for a while) smell the coal burning....and going by how often the lums needed cleaning, they weren't that smokeless.
If you had a washing hung out and it rained, the washing needed redone because it'd come in covered in grey streaks. The rain really was that dirty. It's not now

I think Andy'll see that his stove is a sound job, properly sited and fitted and fueled

M

 

[Robson Valley]

Part of this is UK history, too. Low grade coal is such that it has a fairly high sulfur content. Smoldering sooty coal fires were pumping out sulfur dioxide.
Now all you needed was a thermal inversion and a pea-soup for for a poisonous mist of sulfuric acid not to mention the foul photochemical smog that vehicles contributed to.
When was that? Back in the early 1960's?

Toddy is correct. Air pollution is a regional issue not just for densely packed population centers.

The 3 pulp mills in Prince George BC produce more that 4,500 air-dried tons of chemical conifer wood pulp per day. Per Day.
They used to use a chemical bleaching process which generated more than just a little hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide.
Any thermal inversion in winter and those choking gases flowed along the Fraser River valley for 75 miles, all the way to Quesnel.
Now they use hydrogen peroxide and the pulp mill stink is just about non-existent.

 

[Janne]

Once you get a nice woodburner, you always want one. It is the second thing I do when we arrive at our house in Norway.

That is one of the negative aspects living in the Caribbean, we can not have a wood burner. AC would go ballistic.


Those woodburner programs for your pc/ tv are naff. I know, I bought one.

 

[Janne]

Robson V, air pollution is global. The airstreams move the crap all around the globe. Even if we think it is clean, our air gets dirtier and dirtier each year.
Countries like China and India produce huge, huge amounts of airborne pollution.
We can not tell them what they should do. We polluted too when we developed.
(And we still pollute!)

You can not go from a bicycle to the latest design of a hybrid car.
You buy a 2 stroke moped or mc first.

 

[Everything Mac]

I'm really not sure where the last couple of weeks have gone but I am back on a rig again so they must have gone somewhere.

The pros came, saw, conquered in about half an hour then buggered off without so much as a backward glance. They had a bit of a job fitting the liner as the chimney doubled back on itself slightly but all went well in the end. - I'd had the chimney swept a couple of days beforehand which helped.

All I have to do now is lay the tiles that will be on the hearth. Tidy up the opening of the fireplace and fit a closure/ register plate for the stove pipe to pass through. Then install the stove itself... all 90kg of it.

Oh yeah we had to get the lounge replastered as well which was a bit of a faff. Should have got them to do it the first time but I thought it looked ok. Ah well sorted now.

We managed to sand 90% of the house in the time we had rented the kit. All of the rooms were done but we didn't get round to doing the hall ways, which is a bit of a pain and at the same time a blessing as we were UTTERLY F..... knackered. The halls are both very small and actually gave us some floor space to put all the junk while the rest of the floors were being varnished. We opted for varnish rather than oil with the idea it might be a bit more hard-wearing.


The next big job was the tiny bathroom floor.

So we decided to have floor tiles in the bathroom. Fair enough you might think, but you can't just tile onto wooden floorboards as any flex will likely result in a broken tile.
The obvious solution is to rip up the floorboards, lay down plywood and tile on that. But supposedly that's not the done thing and a layer of cement board should be used as well.

So, 18mm plywood, adhesive, 12mm cement board, more adhesive and then tiles? Resulting in a big step up to the tiled surface from the floorboards. That wouldn't do at all.

So, ripped out the floor boards down to the joists. Built a sub frame of supports so that a layer of plywood would sit flush with the top of the joists themselves then cut and fit panels of plywood to fit in between each joist. I was actually forced to do the bathroom in two halves as not having the use of the toilet while we sanded would have totally robbed me of my sanity.
Once the sub floor was in and secure I put in the layer of cement board on top. Tiling the floor was basically a doddle as the wife did almost all the work for me. I mixed adhesive and cut the tiles around pipes etc. And they were almost completely flush with the level of the floor boards so I was well chuffed with myself.

No photos of the sub floor construction as I was a swearing sweaty mess but I'll stick up some of the finished floor.

I did manage to do a row of wall tiles wrong, pulled them off the wall and buggered the plasterboard underneath. I had to cut the chunk out with an oscillating multitool (fantastic bit of kit) and fit a new piece of board but that went ok.



All in all we're getting there chaps. Lots left to do but there is glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

I've only got to:
Fit the bathroom, toilet, sink, shower, bath.
Install the hearth and wood burner
Replace the side boards in the kitchen + tile around them
Sort out what's left of the hearth in the main bedroom
sort the downstairs hall way
move in
Sleep.


All the best
Andy