How the two differ in kind
A stove is a point source. It radiates into the room it stands in and warms the air around it, and everything beyond that room is heated by whatever convection finds its way through a doorway. That distribution is uncontrolled: the room with the stove reaches a temperature people will leave, long before a bedroom upstairs notices anything. Central heating exists precisely to distribute, with a controlled emitter in each room and a thermostat deciding.
The sizing consequence is the opposite of intuition. A stove sized for the coldest night will spend most of the season producing far more heat than the room wants, so it gets throttled — the air supply closed down to slow the burn. That is not a low setting; it is INCOMPLETE COMBUSTION. Unburnt volatiles condense in the flue as tar and creosote, the glass blackens, the particulate emissions rise sharply, and the deposit that builds up in the chimney is what chimney fires are made of. A correctly sized stove runs hot and open for most of its life.
The third fact is about air. A stove burning needs combustion air, and it takes it from the room unless it has been given its own supply. In a reasonably airtight house that puts it in competition with every extract fan, and the loser can be the flue — which is to say the combustion products come into the room instead of going up. A dedicated external air supply removes the competition, which is why it is standard on modern installations and why an old stove in a newly draught-proofed house is a case worth checking.
The factors that actually differ
Show
| Wood-burning stove | Central heating system | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the heat goes | Into the room it is in, radiantly and convectively. Everywhere else depends on open doors and luck. | Wherever there is an emitter, controlled per room, with the distribution designed rather than incidental. |
| Sizing error that matters | Oversizing, which forces throttling — tar, creosote, blackened glass, particulates and a chimney deposit. Smaller is usually better. | Oversizing too, but the penalty is short cycling and lost efficiency rather than a fire risk. |
| Attention required | Continuous. Lighting, refuelling, ash, and being present. It does not warm a house you are returning to. | None. A thermostat and an annual service. |
| Combustion air | Taken from the room unless a dedicated supply is fitted — and in an airtight house it competes with extract fans, with spillage as the failure. | A sealed or balanced-flue appliance is indifferent; an open-flued boiler has the same issue and the same remedy. |
| Fuel | Handled, stored, split, stacked and dried. Seasoned to under about twenty per cent moisture, or half the energy goes into boiling the water in it. | Delivered by pipe or by tanker, metered, and requiring nothing of you. |
| Behaviour in a power cut | Works. It is the reason many households keep one. | Stops — every modern system needs power for controls, pumps and fans, whatever it burns. |
| Maintenance | Annual sweeping at minimum, more often on heavy use, plus rope seals, glass and baffle plates. | An annual service and a boiler that will eventually be replaced. |
| Shape of the cost | Moderate to install with a flue, then a running cost that depends entirely on whether the wood is bought or gathered. Bought seasoned logs are not obviously cheap. | Higher to install as a system, then a metered running cost with no labour attached. |
Which one, and when
Choose wood-burning stove when…
- There is a cheap or free fuel supply and somewhere dry to season and store it.
- The heat is wanted in one room — a living space used in the evenings — rather than throughout.
- Resilience matters: a heat source that works when the power does not.
- The room is the problem, not the house: a cold living room in an otherwise adequately heated building.
Choose central heating system when…
- The whole building has to be warm, including rooms nobody is in and at times nobody is home.
- Nobody wants to handle fuel, ash and a fire on a winter evening as a condition of being warm.
- The house is airtight and heavily extracted, where an open appliance is a combustion-safety question.
- Air quality is a concern — locally regulated, or simply a household with someone whose lungs object.
Now run your own numbers
This page holds no prices on purpose — a national average is wrong for almost every real project. Quantify both options with your dimensions and your local quotes.
Frequently asked questions
- What size stove should I buy?
- Smaller than the showroom will suggest, and the reason is combustion rather than comfort. Size it for the room at a typical winter condition rather than the coldest night, because the stove will spend the overwhelming majority of the season at that typical condition and only a handful of evenings at the extreme. An oversized stove is throttled for most of its life, and throttling means incomplete burning: tar and creosote condensing in the flue, blackened glass, sharply higher particulate emissions, and a chimney deposit that is the precursor to a chimney fire. A slightly undersized stove run hard and open is cleaner, more efficient, and pleasanter to live with than an oversized one run shut down. On the two or three coldest evenings, put on a jumper.
- Why does my stove glass go black?
- Almost always one of two things, and frequently both. Burning too slowly — throttled air, a stove too big for the room — so combustion is incomplete and the volatiles condense on the coolest surface, which is the glass. Or wet wood, which spends the fire's energy boiling water instead of burning, keeps the firebox cool and produces the same result. The test is simple: a stove run hot and open on properly seasoned wood keeps its own glass clear, because the airwash across it is hot enough to burn the deposit off. Persistent blackening is therefore a diagnostic rather than a cleaning problem, and it is telling you the same thing the flue is accumulating.
- How dry does the wood actually need to be?
- Under about twenty per cent moisture content, and the difference between that and freshly felled wood is not marginal. Green wood can be half water by mass, and that water absorbs a large share of the fire's energy turning into steam before any useful heat reaches the room — so the same volume of wood delivers substantially less, burns cooler, and produces the incomplete combustion that tars the flue. Seasoning means split, stacked off the ground, covered on top and open at the sides, for a year or two depending on species and climate. A moisture meter on a freshly split face costs very little and settles the argument with the supplier, which is worth more than any figure on this page.
- Can a stove heat the whole house?
- Rarely, and the attempts are what produce the oversizing problem. Heat moves from the stove room by convection through doorways and up stairs, which means it heats the upstairs landing enthusiastically and the far bedroom hardly at all, while the stove room itself runs several degrees above anywhere anyone wants to sit. The exceptions are small open-plan buildings and stoves with a back boiler plumbed into a heating system, which is a different appliance and a different installation. For most houses the honest framing is that a stove is a supplement — it heats the room it is in, and it takes some load off the central heating while it is running.
- Do I need a dedicated air supply?
- In any reasonably airtight building, yes, and increasingly it is required rather than recommended. A stove burning draws air continuously, and if it is taking it from the room it is competing with every extract fan, cooker hood and tumble dryer in the house. Lose that competition and the flow in the flue can reverse — combustion products enter the room, which is a carbon monoxide event rather than an inconvenience. A dedicated supply, ducted from outside directly to the appliance, removes the competition entirely. The case worth checking specially is an older stove in a house that has since been draught-proofed, insulated or fitted with a powerful kitchen extractor, because nothing about the stove changed and its conditions did.
- Is burning wood cheaper?
- Only if the fuel is cheap, and bought seasoned logs frequently are not. Delivered hardwood at a proper moisture content, priced per unit of usable energy, can be comparable to or dearer than mains gas — and the comparison has to be made per unit of HEAT delivered rather than per volume of wood, which means accounting for both the moisture content and the appliance's efficiency. Where the wood is genuinely free or nearly so, the economics change completely, and so does the labour: felling, splitting, stacking and moving several tonnes a year is real work that does not appear on any bill. The decision is more often about resilience, atmosphere and fuel independence than about cost, and those are legitimate reasons that do not need to be dressed as savings.