I love the idea but the maths doesn't add up for me, unfortunately.

This season, one load of seasoned logs from my supplier is £190 and that sees me through the whole year including barbecues. If the Recoheat gadget recovers 1kW from my 7kW stove's flue and costs £300 or more before fitting, that's quite a few years before I see the payback. I love the idea of redistributing the heat - indeed I have a stove-top fan for doing exactly that - but it's something of a luxury gadget given my woodburner is only ever for occasional feel-good evenings and the very rare emergency.

I can't disagree. In pure financial terms probably only stacks up if fitted during installation of woodburner... and if used as primary source of heating ...most of the time.

I can imagine it works as intended.

The noise from fan might need mitigation?

It’s not the most polished design in the world. We don’t have plugs anywhere near our wood burners either. Nice idea though.

It would also be interesting to hear their thoughts on how a sweep should work round an installed unit.

@majordennisbloodnok I suppose its OK on a flue with an inspection/soot hatch... 

Without one it probably needs adding during installation?

We investigated this when we had our wood burner installed. We only use it for very cold/for fun/power cuts, not routinely.

Our stove is less than 5kW so doesn’t need a dedicated air vent which for occasional use isn’t efficient. But if we had had a fan distribution system put in from the chimney into the bedroom above (seemed sensible to us, using waste heat) then a dedicated extra vent would have to be fitted in the bedroom which for most of the time would just be a heat loss.

There are a lot of sites which give more information on ventilation requirements this is just one example https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/log-burner-ventilation.

A carbon monoxide detector is always a good idea if you have a stove since heat makes you sleepy anyway. It’s useful to check it’s not dangerous air quality.

Nah, not for me, it looks cheap, plastic-y, and gimmicky. Heath Robinson would be proud, the only bit that looks properly engineered is the coil inside the flue, which you need a HETAS registered installer for and you should not DIY fit.

If you want to recover heat from a flue, any flue, from a stove, a fired combustion boiler, a gas turbine, you do it with an air to fluid heat recovery exchanger not air to air. The fluid will provide 4x the heat thermal energy per unit of mass flow than air. Eg: a log burner with a built in back boiler, but the regulations on connecting these into CH systems are quite strict.

I'm with the Major on this one, the stove is secondary evening heating as a feature on winter evenings, and usually lit for the benefit of my wife and/or the cat.

@majordennisbloodnok Oh that one is easy to answer Major - he uses his chimchimchuroo! Toodles.

There's a really  interesting masonary stove that Martijn Doolard has built into his cabin in the Italian Alps.

He only has to light it once a day. It channels the heat around the house which it uses as a thermal store and it has an oven too. His project is quite fascinating - made more so by his cinematography skills and lack of words. 

Here's the stove company