With more and more people looking to alternative ways to heat their home and their water, we get asked a lot of questions about what the best alternative option is.

Outdoor wood boiler

Although fairly rare in the UK, some people in harder to reach areas make great use of outdoor wood boilers. You can load them with large firewood, circumventing the need for cutting larger pieces into smaller quarters that other stoves demand.

The size of the firewood you can load into an outdoor boiler differs between models, but you can generally expect to be able to load larger firewood than normal.

By being outdoors, all of the waste associated with firewood is kept out of your home. When you heat your home with a wood burning stove, every time you go outside to bring firewood inside, pieces of bark, dust and possibly creepy crawlies will fall onto your floor. The ash from the fire itself also accumulates after your fire has burned down, which you will have to spend time cleaning up.

Even by storing firewood in your house, you don’t instantly put it in your stove, meaning any insects such as termites can live in your stockpile, find their way into the rest of your home, and cause expensive damage to the infrastructure of the building.

With the fire not actually being inside your house it is much safer in the event that anything goes wrong. If anything serious goes wrong with the unit then the fire will most likely catch on the boiler and not spread to your home.

A good home temperature is easy to maintain with an outdoor wood boiler as they come equipped with a thermostat. Heating your hoe this way will prevent the air from becoming dry and won’t cause any toxic fumes and smoke to be released into your home as you would with a stove.

Always source your firewood and coal from a certified coal merchants in Stockport.