Farm house, logs, charcoal and heating.

Fit a charnwood LA multi fuel burner will burn for 12 hours on a load before needing refilling and has a glass door on the front so very safe over night. The LA45 that I have gives out 3.1KW to the room and 10.1KW to the water.

Fully designed to burn 24 7 and have lower flue gas temps than an open fire so less likley to have a chimney fire, down side is it burns smokless fuel alot better than wood b ut it does meet all other requirements and you can still burn wood during the day when people are in the house. Charnwood is 71% efficiant and open fire about 35% so alot better in that respect as well.

The only other thing that will work is a trianco aztec electric boiler but that will cost more than smokless at night and wood during the day.

they seem like your best options, other than that it will have to be a pillow over the face for 10min if he puts out the fires at night

Well if you have a stove with back boiler to heat the rads, why not keep that going overnight to keep the radiators warm? Block all chimneys to open fires to stop drafts and never use them again.

Surely the new stove and heating should be doing the job? Next up insulate and draft proof as best as possible.

The use of open fires should be phased out - pollution from open fires is really quite bad!

Are you sure you can't get an LPG tanker up the road? We live in a farmhouse built in 1630 thats up a dirt track and have LPG fired central heating, the company we use has small tankers specifically to be able to get to rural properties. Check with some local companies, they'll come out and have a look and tell you. If the access road is that bad what about widening it enough to get something up there, would also help in an emergency if Grandpa is proved right and theres a fire, not so much fun if the fire engines can't get to the house!

We also have two woodburners here, the big one in the living room is a cheap one and proves the point that not all wood burners are created equal as it eats wood at a prodigious rate and is hard to get to stay in for any great length of time, the smaller is better at staying in but not brilliant. We also have a house in France and our only heating there is from a single wood burner and its bloody brilliant, its a Clearview and I can't reccomend them highly enough, it throws out huge amounts of heat, lights with absolute ease and is so controlleable its like turning the gas down when you push the bottom damper in. It'll happily stay in overnight if you bank it up before you go to bed and shut it right down, enough so that in the morning all it needs is a poke and some small sticks thrown in and its up and roaring away again (much like me!). Oh and the glass NEVER gets dirty, Cheap wood burners suck.

It does also depend on what you burn, burning scrap softwood is OK but theres no substitute for well seasoned hardwood, we burn mostly oak and some beech. Oak particularly burns nice and slowly. Well seasoned is also important, it needs at least a year air drying, two if possible.

Open fires are very inneficient compared to a log burner and from an environmental point as long as you get your logs from a sustainable source then its pretty much carbon neutral. Coal whilst it provides great heat is an environemental nightmare and as others habve mentioned needs a different set of circumstances to burn well so really you need to burn one or the other to get the burner at its most efficient.

Where our house is in France is a big timber producing area and most people heat and even cook still on wood. In fact my nearest village has just installed a centrally operated central heating system for the whole town, basically they've put in a massive boiler house thats run on wood pellets made from the waste product of the local sawmill and the heat is then piped around the village underground to all the houses. We have a friend over there who has just replaced her Jotul woodstove with one of these new pellet stoves, it burns again pelleted sawdust so you fill a hopper and it self feeds, they are very efficient and will keep burning as long as theres pellets inthe hopper but you would need to buy the pellets in.

Nope not in chilly England - nothing is cheap here, best price I got on the big red bottles 45kg? was £60 if buying multiples and thats probably gone up now..

BL1300 that new stove thats been put in should burn all night relatively simply - BUT NOT if you burn wood, its got a coal grate in it so you're going to need to burn coal. On the plus side you might get the OAP's winter fuel allowance (if it hasn't been cancelled to save the government money) to buy it with

Our log burner stayed in all night last night for the first time - stacked it up with slightly rotten oak and shut the dampers down ;D I doubt it was putting out any meaningfull amount of heat most of the night though.

Once harvested that Oak - and anything else you cut down now - will need AT LEAST a year to season. Burn it too soon and it'll produce little heat and a lot of soot and corrosive combustion products.

If you don't have stocks of seasoned wood ready for burning, standing deadwood can be a useful source of immediately usable fuel.

As for the grate: when burning coal you want it open - coal burns best with air fed from underneath. When burning wood you want it closed as wood burns best on a bed of it's own ash.

Not sure Pete would like that. Unless you mean peat? ;D

But you're right, it's not a renewable fuel - although neither's wood if it's not being re-planted.

Theres your problem, to keep it in overnight on wood you need some good hefty hardwood logs, old chair legs will never do it. Coppiced wood is great but it tends to be fairly small in diameter and again you have the problem of it burning through fairly quickly. It may well be worth buying in some bigger logs if you don't have access to them on your land just to use at night.

It looks like a hunter herald 14 in the pictures, if it is it is designed to burn smokeless fuel over night not wood it is listed as intermittent when burning wood.

By the way you your hearth should be 150mm to the sides of the stove yours looks alittle short

I wouldn't have thought the thermal shock to the boiler of dumping water into it every night would be doing it any favour either....