Energy concerns rekindle love affair with open fires

Sales of woodburning stoves and demand for chimney sweeps and coal surge amid fears about energy supplies
Juliette Jowit
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday October 14 2008 10.51 BST

Logs burning on an open fire. Photographer: Stephen Simpson
Faced with the gloom of winter, expensive heating bills and global insecurity, people are returning to the comforts of the hearth with a boom in open fires and wood-burners.
Solid fuel burners, chimney sweeps and coal merchants are all reporting a surge in business as customers try to find a cheaper way of heating their homes, and some even cite worries about energy supplies running out during a severe cold snap.
Instinct, though, might also be playing a part. For at least 125,000 years, probably much longer, fire has cooked food and offered warmth in cold climates and scared away predators — making it very important to humans, said evolutionary psychologist Dr Lance Workman.
"There are so many advantages it seems likely to me that fire has played an important role in human evolution and that this is why we still find it rewarding today," he said. "We don't simply 'un-evolve' such reward systems just because we live in centrally heated houses today."
Fire was the only way to heat homes for millennia. But the availability of electricity and central heating has encouraged more than nine out of 10 homeowners in the UK to switch to radiators and artificial fires since the 1960s.
The fashion for open fires was reignited several years ago, thanks to home makeover and design programmes. Interest in solid fuel burners has also been flickering to life as homeowners turned to burning fuel and pellets as an environmentally friendly alternative to gas and oil heating.
But manufacturers and retailers say there has been a noticeable jump in sales this year. The Solid Fuel Association said members reported a 40% increase this year; the National Association of Chimney Sweeps said there had been a "resurgence" of demand and some businesses had waiting lists of two or three months; the president of the Coal Merchants Federation said his sales were up 20% and fellow members were enjoying similar rises; and the country's biggest chimney and flue business saw a jump of 50% in September, .
Richard Hiblen, national manager of chimney and flue suppliers Specflue, said: "The honest answer is as soon as British Gas put up their prices we see a big surge."
The dominant issue appears to be price: figures from the Solid Fuel Technology Institute suggest burning wood alone or mixed with coal costs nearly half the price of gas or oil and one third of electricity for every "useful" unit of energy produced — not including supplies for free from skips and the countryside.
Another common concern is security of supplies, especially after several winters of reports that Britain almost ran out of energy, and problems with Russian exports of gas to Europe.
"That's a real concern, and worry for elderly people: they are the generation who experienced 30 or 40 years of the cold war with the Russians," said Martin Glynn, who runs a busy chimney sweep business and is president of the National Association of Chimney Sweeps.
There has also been growing concern about climate change, leading some homes to swap carbon-polluting fossil fuels to burning "carbon neutral" wood and wood pellets, which are said to absorb as much carbon in growing as they release in burning.
The growing popularity of coal has raised some concern about the environmental downside of home fires. But the scale is currently small, says Jim Lambeth, general manager of the Solid Fuel Association. "The amount of emissions coming out of the chimney is infinitesimal in comparison with the millions of people burning gas."
And as more homes turn to fires and stoves, more "younger" people are realising how warm they can be, claim supporters. "It's a real living fire: it doesn't just heat the area surrounding, it heats the fabric of the house," said Alan Wright, managing director of the country's second biggest coal merchant, Corralls Coal.
But beyond the practical advantages of keeping predators at bay or making the budget meet, a big part of the appeal of a fire will be the romance or comfort of it, say supporters.
"We have an electric fire that has artificial flames, even without heat," said Workman. "As nights draw in I find myself putting it on because it's comforting even if it's not cold, and I think other people would do likewise."