Modern Wood Burners Sussex Style

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.

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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.

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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.

Modern Wood Burning Stoves Sussex

With the widespread concern about air pollution that developed at the end of the 20^th century, new designs were developed to reduce the wood burning stove emissions.   This led to a new range of stoves – highly efficient catalytic and non-catalytic airtight stoves that have now become increasingly popular, helping to eliminate emissions and increase heat transfer efficiency through the total combustion of the wood used as fuel.