Antique Wood StovesAntique Wood Stoves: A Functional Piece of History in Your Home
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If you can get your hands on antique wood stoves, then consider yourself very lucky because a lot of people would love to be in your position. One of the big trends that have been seen in recent years in the antique industry is the move towards buying antiques which are beautiful in their own right, but also that are functional. People are buying antique beds, bookshelves, tools and even clocks, rather than simply buying the antique decorative pieces that were once more popular. There is nothing quite like sitting around an antique wood stove and enjoying the feeling, the crackling sound and the aroma of a wood fire in a stove that has seen many years of fire in its day.
Woodstoves are good ways of heating your home, especially if it is difficult to get access to alternative heating sources, but they have been improving in operational efficiency over the years and if you are interested in using genuine antique wood stoves to heat your home then you may be concerned that it will not be an efficient method of heating your home, and that it will be wasting a lot of heat and creating a lot of smoke.
Well the good news is that many of the innovations of recent years have been centred around reducing the price of the stove and therefore, the really well built antique wood stoves are still performing pretty much as well as the newer models. The good thing about antique wood stoves is that you can generally assume that if the stove has lasted this long, it must be a pretty good one, built with fine materials and well designed. There is not much more you will need from a woodstove.
If you are really worried about the practicality of using antique wood stoves to hear your home, then there are a few steps that you can take to ensure that your stove will work at maximum efficiency and performance. The first thing is to make sure that antique wood stoves are kept clean while they are under operation. The main thing that will cause a stove to work poorly is if creosote is allowed to build up inside the stove. This is caused by inefficient or incomplete burning and the main cause of this is using wood that is damp or green, or because there is a lack of oxygen in your stove.
To reduce the risk of this you should make sure that you are using properly seasoned wood that has had a year to dry out, and has been stored above ground level. You should also make sure that there is a good air supply. Follow these two simple steps and you should find that antique wood stoves perform just as well as new ones. |
