Some people will be hoping to save cash using a wood burner this winter
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An author and TikTok vlogger has shared his calculations on how much people can save by heating their homes by burning wood. And the answer, according to Mark Kidd's maths, is none – if you pay Tesco prices for the wood.
A video posted on his Eco Sufficiency channel shows him looking at a display of firewood for sale in the supermarket chain. In the video, he wonders whether buying small bags of wood can really be good value for money.
He then does some working out to reach his conclusion that burning wood – particularly at the prices he found in the shop he visited – was definitely not a cheaper alternative to using gas. And he's done the maths to back it up, reports Leicestershire Live.
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Mark said in the video: "I sometimes see these little bags of logs for sale in the shops and I always assume that it's an expensive way of heating your house, compared to just plugging into the mains or using the gas. So let's do the calculations."
He used the example of a 7kg bag of wood that was priced at £7.50 and he worked out the total energy produced as roughly the equivalent of paying 25p for every hour spent burning enough to produce a steady kilowatt of energy – or 25p per kilowatt hour (kWh).
But not all the heat from a fire goes into the room. Mark said: "When you burn this some of it goes up the chimney. It's not like electrical energy when you plug it in and 100 per cent of it goes into the room.
"Most modern stoves now are about 80 per cent efficient or thereabouts, so that brings it up to around 31p per kWh. That's not too bad if you consider that the current cap price of electricity now is 34p per kWh.
"But gas – gas is way cheaper." Gas is now capped at 10.3p per kWh by the UK regulator Ofgem.
Mark also did some more calculations based on bulk-buying wood, instead of using the small bags he started with. He worked out the price per KWh for the big bags at about 12p – so still a little more than heating with gas.
He added: "Obviously if you get the wood for free or you've got a friend who's a tree surgeon or something it's going to be much cheaper." See the video here.
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