I always like to have a back up plan
By Dermot Fitzgerald, Managing Director of Boru Stoves
Building or renovating your forever home and looking on the web for a heating solution can be a minefield online with everyone an expert nowadays.
One of the most popular heating systems nowadays is the heat pump with lots of engineers and designers telling you not to build a chimney. This makes you 100 per cent reliant on electricity.
The heat pump part I agree with but not putting in a chimney in my opinion is crazy. I always like to have a backup plan and never more so than now.
Climate change might be one of the reasons you chose your heating system; to help the environment and save a few hard earned euros in the process over the coming years. Climate change can comprise of all kinds of weather systems from snow in June to balmy evenings in November. It also generates crazy weather phenomenona such as flooding, thunderstorms and even hurricanes. This crazy weather then leads to the dreaded power cut.
Wouldn’t it be great to have your secondary fuel source grown within a 20km radius from your home with little to no damage to the environment and no freight as it’s local?
What you may not know is that when grown in a sustainable manner, wood is carbon neutral, so it only emits the same amount of gas into the atmosphere that the tree took in throughout the course of its life. It has relatively low production so cuts your carbon footprint in so many ways.
In June this year, I had my last power cut. It was on a Saturday evening which was the first of the year I had been home for. I could not believe how cut off, helpless and vulnerable we were. These were some of the things that affected us:
No phone charger, no wifi or 3G, no cooker, oven or hob and no lights or candles.
If I had an electric vehicle, I had no way of charging it to get to town.
We had however a stove in the sitting room. That Saturday evening stirred so many memories for me personally. We wrapped potatoes in tinfoil and put them into the fire. I cannot say I'd ever make it onto ‘Master Chef’ but that evening they were - as we say in Tipp - fair good.
To offer some pretty good advice, I would say put in whatever heating system is suitable for your home but also have a backup, the humble stove. It is a crazy world we live in so create some certainty in any aspect that you can.
People always relied on heat and shelter and to this day nothing has changed, only our reliance on fossil fuels and enormous energy companies.
Stoves start from as little as €300 - pipe not included - and can be retrofitted into most houses even if you do not have a chimney. New Eco-Design Stoves emit up to 70 per cent less harmful gasses into the atmosphere than previous models. On 1 January 2022, The Eco-Design Directive becomes law throughout the EU. All Boru Stoves are 100 per cent made in Ireland.