This is for you Gattina!

I like them too Rose xxx

They are delightful! Thank you for going to the trouble of putting this picture up for me. You don't often get free gifts that pretty. I'll tell you, Rose, if they were sitting on our mantelpiece above the woodburner, they'd be black; Those stoves may look very nice and romantic, and throw out a beautiful heat, but they make a lot of work and mess, and I have to dust everything, including the walls, every day.

Are his cheeks rosy from the warmth or is he blushing???????

Have you seen that smile on his face, LL? He's obviously incredibly happy to be sitting next to such a pretty girl.

But the little girl's got no nose! "How does she smell ? ............................"

I know what you mean, Gattina. Our solid fuel fire in the other room has glass doors but every time the doors are opened to clean the fire in a morning( its an all night burner) the smoke comes into the room! We have open book shelves in this room, floor to ceiling. Big mistake, as the edges of the books get covered in dust. The only good thing I will say about this heating is that , although coal is expensive now, we only have a one off payment as hubby fills the coal bunker every summer when it is a bit cheaper and this is are only big bill. No gas at all here!

I never even noticed that, Sue! Perhaps its because I moved him nearer the girl while I took the picture! l

Oops! I just realised you said that as well , Gattina! lol.

I hope you haven`t separated them Rose, one needs to be with loved ones ,LOL........

I had one of these stoves years ago. It probably needs a new cowl of some kind on the top of the chimney to draw the air up more strongly. Some of them are like little windmills.
Or open the living room door when you are cleaning it out, to create more draught into the fire box.
You shouldnt be having all that dust.

How soppy are you, Sue! hahaa!

Thanks Dianne, but we have a cowl and we always leave the window open and kitchen door while cleaning out the fire. As its an all night burner and is the central heating as well, its left on all winter and my hubby thinks it should be left to go out occassionally and then he has to scrape the fire walls down. Its a long job, but when we are having a cold spell and this house being detached with no cavity walls, it goes cold very quickly. Needless to say, we don't let the fire out at all! We have our chimney cleaned every year , but this doesn't make any difference! Its something that we tend to put up with!

Its finding a way to force air up through the stove to take the dust up the chimney.
I wonder if running a cylinder vacuum cleaner backwards ( when the air comes out of the back ) would do the trick.
Or a fan.
There must be a way.
My son works for a compressed air company, I will ask him when he comes in.

Thanks Dianne, I appreciate that. We have always had trouble with this chimney and the people who are supposed to look after this house( as its rented ) don't know anything about solid fuel , which is why my hubby cleans it out himself and pays to have a "proper" chimney sweep as it was never done properly by them.

Getting chimneys swept here, where everyone has narrow-flued woodburners, is an absolute extravagant nightmare - they are always swept from the roof downwards, which means the sweep has to go out of the loft skylight (if you have one) and tramp about on the delicate old coppi tiles, lots of which get broken and then have to be replaced at great cost. They are supposed to wear safety harnesses or put up scaffolding too, but I've never heard of it being done by the book! If we could, we'd do it ourselves, but then we'd have no certificate to hand the fire service in the event of a chimney fire!!! :o((( We just try never to burn fir tree logs, which make a lot of resin and coat the flue with a sticky, inflammable coating. Why is life so complicated?

Oh dear, Gattina , and all I did was to take a photo of my fireplace! Lol.
Do you have to pay for the damage then? I'll never yearn for a log burner ever again!

They are really very nice, Rose, but do come with problems that you don't tend to hear about.

I think I'll stick to what we've got, Gattina! Better the devil you know ! Lol

Nice cute blog Rose. We cook on a coal Esse. It does create a lot of dust but I love it. We have oil fired central heating which is no bother unless we have one of the quite frequent power cuts. We have considered buying a different fuel cooker but its so cosy and visitors think its the height of luxury and it is on 24/7 for most of the year. I baked 36 banana muffins this morning no bother at all. I bought too many bananas which we did not manage to eat.

I tell you, if I ever get to live in a house with a town gas supply, I'd swap my woodburners for gas-fired stoves any day! Yes, you'd be subject to power cuts, but think how much cleaner they'd be, and you wouldn't have all the faff and dust of emptying the ash out every day, and you wouldn't have to store and stack and haul great piles of logs around the whole time.

I've never heard of a coal Esse, Scotsgran. It sounds really warm and cosy. We get a fair amount of dust ( only when we are cleaning it) with our solid fuel , but it keeps the house warm and we don't get huge electric bills and have no gas on the site either.
Just incase you see this Dianne Bulley, when we came back from our son's home after Christmas, hubby really cleaned it out well, including chipping away at the fire walls and it is now smoke free again.

Sometimes Gattina , I wish we did have gas though , as its much cleaner and you can just put it on at the click of a switch! But, on the plus side, once we have bought the coal in the summer ( cheaper then) , thats all we have to pay out on heating!

I think if all you good folk in the UK heard what our total fuel bills are out here, you'd never moan about costs ever again. I don't think you realise quite how well off you are. Mind you, on the plus side, we pay virtually nothing in council tax, so it's swings and roundabaouts!

I think , here Gattina , the dearest fuel is oil!

If we had access to town gas it would be much cheaper, but LPG, which many country properties have, with subterranean storage is fearsomely expensive, as I guess it probably is in the UK. There's no way we could afford to centrally heat our house using it, hence the woodburners. I can't think of anyone here who uses oil instead. Maybe it's just not available. We worked out that we are spending about 25-30% of our income just on gas, electricity and firewood, and many people would find our house unacceptably cold in the winter months, not to say freezing.

That is an awful lot of money. Have you got some land where you could grow trees for coppicing. It can provide firwewood and not be unmanageable.

Halfway up your hill Gattina would maybe be a case for wind power or even solar, we looked into it here but the costs far outweigh the savings

All the land around our house is either used to grow fodder or firewood, Scotsgran, but our land isn't extensive enough to make it feasible. Apart from that, you need a license to fell trees of any kind, and they cost a lot.

Coppicing does mean leaving the trees after you prune them to harvest your branches so you would not be felling them because they never grow into trees. But you would need a fair bit of land.