If you’re looking for a stove or a cooker for your country retreat, you can quickly find yourself lost among the various types of products offered by manufacturers. The main difference between types of stoves, however, is the type of fuel they use. It’s the main factor that determines whether what you pick is the most practical, green and economical way of heating up your home.

Wood burnersgive you all of that, with a stylish twist. After all, nothing says “rustic” more than an old-fashioned wood burner basking the room in a cozy light of rapidly oxygenating renewable fuel. Well, there’s one thing that can make this picture more pastoral – you can always chop up firewood for yourself and by yourself. Imagine: chopping logs on a sunny morning and not worrying about fuel costs. Now try imagining the same for gas or oil stoves or cookers. Doesn’t really work, does it? Even though wood burning stovesand wood burning cookers use chopped trees for oil, they’re actually more eco-friendly and less polluting than, say, coal or gas. A by-product of operating of wood burning stovesand wood burning cookersis ash, which is a great green fertilizer for your garden.

Your wood burner is so green it’s practically a part of the circle of life, as you chop down a tree (or dismantle an old wooden shed), feed the wood to your stove and then fertilize the garden with ash. Of course, if it’s not really your thing, you can just buy conveniently packaged and cheap firewood, fill the burning stove or cooker right up, and enjoy the ease of operation, convenience, low costs, and a cozy flame.

Seems like wood burning stovesand wood burning cookers have no bad sides, doesn’t it. Unfortunately, it’s not really that way. While it’s true that wood burners have a number of significant pluses (the fuel costs range from low to zero, it’s greener than green, more stylish than your average oil or gas burner, provides fertilizer and can actually increase the selling price of your home when you’re moving on), it comes with several problems as well. The two most significant problems that owners of wood burners face are ash and temperature control. Ash is a product of burning wood, and while it does have a number of uses, most notably as an odor control agent and a fertilizer, it can present a bit of a problem. It’s very light and it easily smuts everything it touches.

You have to be prepared to regularly empty the ash (and if you’re not careful, it will get on your clothes, on the floor, on the walls, on the furniture -- everywhere) and clean both the stove and the chimney. Of course, you can hire a chimney sweep for that, but that doesn’t really fit into the “economic” image of wood burning stoves and wood burning cookers this article created. The other issue is that wood burners can be harder to control than gas, oil or electricity burners. They’re slower to heat up, but once they do, they’re hotter than the alternatives, and they’re also slower to cool down. With a bit of practice, however, you will find that the pluses of wood burners far outweigh the minuses.
If you’re looking for a stove or a cooker for your house and want to find something that will be stylish, economical, practical and eco-friendly, consider wood burning stoves http://www.stovebase.co.uk/stoves/wood-burning-stoves.html or wood burning cookers http://www.stovebase.co.uk/range-cookers/wood-burning.html. They offer all of that and a little more.