Chilly :(

I nearly lit the wood burner last night!
I'm after some fire bricks to put in the bottom whilst it's going, as I'm wondering about using these in the greenhouse - heat them up and then put them in the greenhouse to help take the chill off. Would place them on the floor under the more tender stuff..........

 

The folk on the Hardy Tropicals site put "water bottles" around their plants (which are themselves covered with fleece "tents") for the coldest nights. Some experiments, last Winter, with thermometers under the fleece & outside in the open suggest that a few 5L containers (the big drinking water bottles from Supermarkets) filled with hot water actually reduce the temperature loss quite a bit, so I think some hot-bricks have merit - although seems quite a lot of faff to me carting them out from the stove to the greenhouse ...

Perhaps you could get thermal bricks from decommissioned Night Storage heaters? I'm thinking they might retain their heat longer (although they might be rather fragile, from memory)

Or make a rocket-stove in the greenhouse to contain the heat "Under ground" once the fire has gone out.

If (when??!!) we build The Orangery ("Pipe-Dream Projects 'R Us" (c) Kristen !!!) I would like to put some underfloor heating in floor-zones that would accommodate overwintered plants stood on top of them.

I wonder if it is feasible to duct the chimney for a stove under a floor? Seems like all the ones I have seen go straight up, to "draw" well I presume, but the Romans had suspended floors and under-floor fires / heating ... the heat going up the chimney from a stove would surely make a useful contribution to under-floor of something that was only looking for a small temperature lift

 

On the basis that I'm topping it up at least once an hour with logs anyway, an extra two minutes every two hours is no biggie............
The water tank is another thought, as I've cooked a stew on the top of the burner, so would have a constant supply of free hot water too. A tank with a tap in the bottom and I could recycle the water too!
Got a thermostatic heater already, but t'other half is moaning about leccy and gas prices already!

 

I'm going to fit a plug-in usage-logger this Winter so that I know how much the heater costs.

But it does seem to me that heating the air is not ideal in a greenhouse, and getting the plants "feet" warm would be sufficient (well, there comes a point where the air needs heating too of course, but warm-feet would be cheaper and allow lower air-temperature I reckon)