Wood burner / open fire

I have a very large but very draughty Victorian terraced house. It has central heating and a gas fire in the front room but it's always cold.
The good thing is the front room and dining room, both 4.5m x 5.5 m with a ceiling height of 2.8m, have class 1 chimneys and were open fires. I want to put a wood burner in the dinig room fireplace. The chimney opening has been blocked with a bit of wood but other than that it's not been tampered with. The hearth is tiled right the way back so it looks like a stove of some sort may have already been there.
Can I just put a woodburner in the hole and fire it up? Is there more to it than that? There are no smoke fee zones here.

 

You need to fit a flue for the woodburner

 

Chimney sweeps know all about chimney's. Get one round for a sweep and ask away. Mine was a fountain of knowledge.
I have a large draughty 1850's house which eats gas and is cold unless I light a fire as well so I know where you're coming from. I have just open fires though.

 

No leaks = no liner according to this
http://www.woodburningstoveslimited.com/index.php?action=cms.lining_56

 

A wood burning stove wont run right without a flu

 

If it does need lining id go to nearest ductwork manufacturer/ installer or better still if you have a mate whose a duct erector and get it their, it will be much cheaper than going thru wood burner firms etc. Not hard to fit as flexible just tie rope on it and drop down chimney and pull ;D Paradox is right they work better with flue and if you can fit wind direction cowl stops smoke blow back :

 

Our woodburner goes straight into an open chimney via a foot of flue , I've sealed around the chimney opening and flue with cement board , ours work well as long as there's an air flow for the fire to draw via an inlet if that makes sense

 

Our wood burner runs fine without a flue. Most installers won't put one in without to cover their arses, so just put it in yourself. Check the rules on hearth size, you need around 300 mm from the opening to the front of the hearth, and clearances around the stove. You will need a closing plate to fill the chmney gap, which should be steel. Make a template in hardboard and get a fabricator to make you something up, including an access hole for sweeping the chimney.

Don't worry about smokeless zones - a lot of stoves now are certified smokeless and burn very efficiently (80%+). There really is no visible smoke once it's up to temperature. The disadvantage is that they don't burn that well on a low load. If you turn the air intake down, once the temperature inside, drops the combustion process loses efficiency and heat output plumets.

Stick to sub 5kW (I think that's the figure, but any supplier will be able to tell you) and you don't need additional room ventilation. If you are lucky enough to have a fireplace on an outside wall, I would look at a stove that can take an outisde air feed from the rear, then you won't be sucking cold air into the house to feed the stove.

Lots of makes out there, have a look at efficiency ratings and smokeless certification, then look at what fits best and looks nicest in the hole that you have available. We have 2 Esse stoves - one is conventional on a hearth and the other is inset into the old open fireback due to space restrictions.

 

We have a regular brick chimney ( original on an edwardian house) and the HETAS engineer fitted a woodburner straight into it with just the 1m flue pipe. He did check the chimney first for leaks so I would definately get a chimney sweep to look at it.

I thought the law was now that if you fit the burner yourself you must still get it checked and certified by a HETAS engineer.

 

No clay liner, just a square stone/brick chimney straight up, house is 300years old , probably best to as a chimney sweep or a plumber , perhaps baghead would know?

 

I'm an engineer. I did a risk assessment of my chimney and after sweeping it in 1994, didn't sweep it again until 2010. When I did - one carrier bag of soot is all. Someone once had a chimney fire so now everyone needs to have there chimney swept every year. Rubbish!

Somneone who lived in a house where the mortar had fallen out between the bricks once died of carbon monoxide poisoning so now we all need liners right up the chimney.

Take no notice, study your chimney and make your own mind up. A lot of this legislation is a mixture of arse covering and making jobs from thin air to keep the unemployment figures down. Personally I have common sense which seems to cover most things. And I don't like being told what to do. 8)