Demand for Woodburning is BOOMING!

Thursday 23 December 2010

From the Daily Telegraph:

With the return of Arctic conditions and the threat of fuel rationing reported this week, alternatives to oil and gas are becoming ever more attractive options when heating our homes.

Rob Penn has had to get out to swing his axe into the coppiced hazel trunks that feed his wood-burning stove. “It hasn’t gone out for two solid weeks,” says Rob, who lives with his wife, Vicky, and three children 10, eight and six, in the Black Mountains just north of Abergavenny. “Before we go to bed we let it burn down, cover the embers with ashes and then with a good sharp blow in the morning, it reignites.”

Rob enjoys chopping his own wood, coppiced from the two and a half acres around his home. “I take great pleasure from the routine of it, from the felling to cutting it to lengths before getting it onto the wood pile. It’s enormously satisfying to see a winter’s supply stacked up and ready – although I fear that this winter, like the last, we will run out before spring,” he says.

With the arrival of snow and sub-zero temperatures during the run-up to Christmas, and many of us beginning to quail at the thought of our next quarterly heating bills, thousands are turning to alternative sources of heating. Wood, renewable and carbon neutral, is becoming increasingly popular.

“There has been an explosion in demand for our services as tens of thousands of people are installing wood-burning stoves and opening up their fireplaces,” says Martin Glynn, president of the National Association of Chimney Sweeps. “A combination of rising fuel prices, the desire to be green and worries about the safety of existing chimneys has meant that sweeps have been frantically busy in the past few weeks.”

Read the full article here