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How to Reduce Your Gas Bill with a Wood Stove!

30 January 2013 12:10

Trying to reduce your gas bill is always a challenge! Especially if, like me, you have children, and you feel the cold. The student days of wearing a coat and mittens in the house no longer appeal to me, I want to be warm whatever the weather is like outside! But I also want to keep my fuel bills down, especially as gas prices seem to be increasing annually.

Of course there are the obvious things that you can do to decrease your gas bills. Insulating your house certainly is effective, as is running your hot water at a slightly lower temperature. Closing your curtains at dusk to prevent heat escaping through the window can help, as can opening the doors of rooms that get the sun and therefore are warmer. Then you can turn the thermostat down by 1°C (although that one has never really appealed to me, but is an option!) and ensure that furniture and your curtains don't prevent the heat from circulating.

We monitor our gas usage annually and look at how much it costs us. I know that this might seem a bit sad, but it certainly is helpful to see how small changes made can reduce your gas bill! However, the most significant contribution to reducing the cost of our gas bill has been our Woodwarm Fireview Slender wood stove. This is only a small woodburner, with a heat output of 6kW, but it has a 24kW boiler attached to it and this has reduced our gas bill by £70 per month! And we only have the fire going from 4pm in the afternoon until 11pm at night, and I confess that this isn't even on every day!

Admittedly there was the intial outlay to buy the wood stove and have it put in (although working for Bradley Stoves Sussex does have its advantages), and of course we do have to consider the cost of the fuel. However, having had the house extended and trees cut down we have had a bountiful supply of wood at no cost to ourselves as yet and the fire has transformed our lounge. The reason for installing a wood stove had nothing to do with fuel economy for me, it was purely aesthetics, but when I realised that the wood stove would run the underfloor heating for me it did bias my choice of stove (and Woodwarm stoves are extremely efficient when it comes to heating water).

So if you are looking at ways to reduce your gas bill then wood stove can be of use and once it is installed it is guaranteed to work efficiently for a significant number of years. At Bradley Stoves we have an enormous range of woodburners and multi-fuel stoves with boilers so why not look online or visit our showroom in Sussex for more advice.

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