Ooooh - new fire

We have bought and spent the day today installing our new fire in the living room.

It is a Panadero 'Dublin', and replaces our Yukon pot bellied stove.

There is a method to the expenditure so bear with me. We only have wood burners for heating, no mains gas here so no economic central heating, electric heating and heating oil is too expensive. Which means that to heat our house for the winter we have the Rayburn in the kitchen heating the two upstairs bedrooms with radiators, but they do not throw out that much heat because the majority of the output of the Rayburn goes into heating our hot water.

On the other side of the house we have a wood wire in the living room which has a flue running through our bedroom providing secondary heat. That leaves a fire in the bathroom.

What happens is with two fires to feed, the bathroom fire hardly ever gets lit, three fires is too much.

With a large amount of research and discussion we decided therefore to buy a fire to which we can fit a boiler and from which we can run a radiator to heat the bathroom.

Fires with boilers are available if you have lots of money, so this is a compromise, a fire with a large enough capacity to take a hand made stainless boiler. However that will have to be made and fitted next spring as now is not the time to start knocking chunks of wall around to run copper piping through.

In the meantime to make sure that the fire is OK we undertook the installation of it this morning. Which should have been a quick couple of hours of disconnecting the old flue, removing the stove, placing the new fire in situ, attaching the new bit of flue pipe and connecting it to the existing flue.

What actually happened was, when I grabbed the flue pipe sticking through the living room ceiling, my hand went through the back of it. When Bren pulled the flue pipe in the attic, half of it fell off, another of the joints had crumbled into the pipe. Rust rust rust and more rust.

Luckily when we bought the stove we bought a bit of flue with it because of the height difference and new elbow required so we had an additional metre of flue pipe to play with to try to reconnect and *cough* bodge in the new fire!

But finally it is in, and it works, and it looks good. It seems to throw out enough heat to run a boiler as well as keep a room warm, after all its highest KW rating is 12, but we are keeping it tamped down now that the first burn has finished stinking the house out.