Shropshire Building Supplies stock a range of logs (which are of mixed hard and soft wood and split ready for use on the fire), morning sticks and Heatlog UK – see our special offers page for seasonal offers.
Here is a range of wood types and a brief description of their qualities.
Ash: Considered one of the best burning woods with a steady flame and good heat output. It will burn when green, but not as well as when dry. Easy to saw and split.
Beech: Similar to Ash, but only burns fair when green. If it has a fault, it may shoot embers out a long way. It is easy to chop.
Birch: This has good heat output but burns quickly. The smell is also pleasant. It will burn unseasoned. Can cause gum deposits in chimney if used a lot. Rolled up pitch from bark makes a good firestarter and can be peeled from trees without damaging them.
Cedar: This is a great wood that puts out a lot of lasting heat. It produces a small flame, a nice scent and lots of crackle and pop. Great splitting wood. Good for cooking.
Douglas Fir: A poor fuel that produces little flame or heat.
Elm: A variable fuel with a high water content (140%) that may smoke violently and should be dried for two years for best results.You may need a faster burning wood to get elm going. A large log set on a fire before bed will burn until morning. Splitting can be difficult and should be done early on.
Horse Chestnut: A low quality firewood with a good flame and heating power but spits a lot.
Larch: Crackly, scented and fairly good for heat. It needs to be seasoned well and forms and oily soot in chimneys.
Maple: A good all round firewood.
Oak: Oak has a sparse flame and the smoke is acrid if not seasoned for two years after WINTER felling. Summer felled Oak takes YEARS to season well. Dry oak is excellent for heat, burning slowly and steadily until whole log collapses into cigar-like ash.
Pine species generally (including the Leylandii): Burns with a splendid flame, but apt to spit. Needs to be seasoned well and is another oily soot in chimney wood. Smells great and its resinous wood makes great kindling. Best used on an outdoor fire in the cold evening of a day in the garden.
Poplar: A terrible fuel that doesn’t burn well and produces a black choking smoke even when seasoned.
Spruce: A poor firewood that burns too quickly and with too many sparks.
Sycamore: Burns with a good flame, with moderate heat. Useless green.
Sweet Chestnut: Burns when seasoned but tends to spit continuously and excessively.
Thorn: One of the best firewoods. Burns slowly, with great heat and little smoke.
Yew: This burns slowly, with fierce heat. The scent is pleasant. Another carving favourite.
Guide to Solid Fuels.
Wood – two immense advantages – it is a renewable fuel and is considered to be greenhouse gas “neutral”. (see also our page on Environmental issues)
Pellets - Bio-fuel pellets made form wood (or occasionally grass) can be burned only on special-purpose automatic -feed stoves and boilers. They offer most of the environmental benefits of natural wood, with greatly improved convenience.
Peat or Turf – Peat is woody material which has semi-decomposed over about 1000 years. It is the earliest stage in the formation of coal. The nearly black moorland or bog peat should be dried and treated as for wood.
Lignite or Brown Coal - Lignite is a natural mineral, intermidiate between peat and coal, formed over about 4000 years. It lights easily and burns well, though some varieties produce very large quantities of ash. Apart from a small deposit in Ireland it is rarely encountered in the British Iles, but is commonplace in Central and Eastern Europe.
Bituminous Coal - This is raw, natural coal, from woody deposits of about 100million years ago. Inexpensive, easy to light and low in ash, it burns with great heat and an attractive flame. However, it makes tarry smoke which will tend to stain stove windows, and large volumes of flammable gas which make it difficult to control. It is the traditional fuel for Victorian bar-fronted fireplaces, where the very large ‘cobbles’ size would have been used. Modern appliances generally prefer the smaller ‘ trebles’ or ‘doubles’. Some types swell and become sticky when hot – use the poker to break it up.
Anthracite - This and the very similar DRY STEAM COAL are natural, smokeless, hard, shiny forms of coal formed at great depth over some 300 million years. Though difficult to light, they burn with great heat and last a very long time – up to 24 hours per fill even on the simplest stove. Chooose the ‘small nuts’ size for most stoves, or the tiny ‘peas’ ‘beans’ or ‘grains’ for specially designed automatic feed stoves and central-heating boilers. Although expensive per kg, anthracite is usually very economical in use.
Ovoids and Briquettes - these are compressed blocks of fuel, generally able to burn for long periods and remarkable for their consistency. ‘Homefire’ and ‘Phurnacite’ are smokeless types made from mineral materials, while other brands are made from wood, lignite, peat or housecoal.
Coke - is natural coal from which the smoke has been removed (the smoke is distilled to make, among other things, aspirin, creosote and ink). Hard metallurgical cokes (like Sunbrite) are extremely clean and long lasting, but rather bulky and can be very difficult to ignite.
Petroleum Coke – sold as ‘Petcoke’, ‘Longbeach’ and under various propriatory names, its made from oil residues. Its exceptional heat, high acid content and lack of protective ash mean that grate and firebar life will be drastically reduced, unless your fire has special chromium alloy bars. It is rarely sold unless mixed with another less reactive fuel.
Household Wastes - It is possible to burn small quantities of dry kitchen waste, such as bones, on most appliances, though paper is extraordinarily difficult to keep alight. Joinery waste can be a very good fuel, if free from coatings, but NOT MDF or chipboard. Most plastics give off toxic fumes when burned and remember that batteries and aerosols explode! NEVER use liquid fuels in any form.
