People have always burnt wood and wood burning stoves of one sort or another have been used in homes in places like Chichester, Worthing, Brighton and Sussex for a long time. Here we take a look at how such wood burners have evolved and been helping to heat homes and cook food throughout Sussex.
The Original Wood Burner - Campfires
Though they
don’t really qualify as a Sussex wood-burning stove, campfires have been
keeping in used Sussex towns like Brighton and Worthing for many thousands of
years.
Nowadays we
mostly use campfires for when we out the great outdoors fun.
The Open Fireplace
Open fireplaces
are always popular as they provide a really homely feeling and romantic
atmosphere. They can be a pain to start, although practice makes it much
easier. They can be expensive to clean,
and on occasions can be quite often smoky – so much so that some areas of
Sussex can restrict the use of open fireplaces to curb pollution.
When it
comes to heating the house, open fireplaces are actually quite inefficient because
they have a habit of sucking warm air out of a room and sending it up the
chimney. They’re also poor at converting the heat from wood burning in the
hearth to move around the house.
In order to
improve the efficiency of wood burning fireplaces, some people install an
additional heat exchanger.
An Early Classic - The Franklin Wood Burning Stove
This type of
wood burning stove has a U-shaped flue that draws the hot gases from the
firebox into a hollow baffle. This heats up cool air that is drawn into the
baffle, sending it out into the room through vents at the top of the stove.
Potbelly Stoves
Cast-iron
potbelly stoves are named after the round bulge in their mid. They first appeared in homes around the 1860s
and quickly became a standard wood burning stove in train stations, kitchens
and hunting lodges throughout Sussex and Brighton.
Their great
advantage was being a multi-fuel stove able to burn coal or wood, the fully
enclosed firebox generates a lot of heat and many of the more modern models
feature a flat cooking top so they can also be used to heat water and food.
Traditional Cook Stove
Early on in the
nineteenth century stove manufacturers began experimenting with wood burning
cooking stoves. These designs reached
their peak early in the twentieth century, with one of the popular models in the
US came from the Canadian manufacturer the Findlay Bros.
With a large
cast-iron hot surface and an enamelled oven, the stove cooked food, hearted up
water, and warmed homes very efficiently for the time. Though people are still using these old
stoves they comment that they are burning a lot of wood.
The Masonry Stove
While
potbelly and airtight stoves are most efficient when producing heat from long, gently
smouldering fires, masonry stoves rely on faster burning, hot fires that burn much
cleaner thereby producing far less emissions.
Airtight Wood Burning Stoves
The design
of potbelly stoves meant they had leaky seams that let in so much air a fire
could burn out in just a couple of hours, and then be cold within three or four
hours. The newer design of airtight wood
burning stoves stay hotter for far longer by the use of openings to control the
airflow, and thus the rate of burn. Once
the wood burning well, the openings can be closed off almost completely,
allowing the hot embers to glow hot for eight hours or even more. But there is
a downside to the slower burn – these wood burning stoves mean more smoke which
is more polluting.
