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Are they really energy efficient? Do they make the kitchen to warm in the summer? Go on convince me I need one

I have a rayburn. using mains gas

no i doubt it is efficient. but it is difficult to judge,, as ours does the cooking, water heating and central heating, and acts as a radiator in itself. oh and we load of the clothes horse and plonk it infront of it overnight, and the clothes are dry by morning. we have low ceilings in this house, but if we had higher i would get one of those pulley rack things and the clothes could dry high up at the ceiling all day too. so its difficult to work out how much it costs as its difficult to work out what you save in other areas.

its a lovely thing to have... adds cosy to the home..
but its impossible in summer.. far too warm to keep going all the time, we have turned ours off as it s supposed to be summer here ! (being mains can turn it back on for oven use, but it takes a while to warm up - but then we get a tank of hot water too....) so mostly we are using a hob we have separatly. i odnt know anyone how has a rayburn or aga or similar that does not have some other cooking device as well.

this one came witht eh house, so we have to see how it goes for a while - must admit I like having it. if we had our own woods, then i would go for a woodburning version. but we dont...

I've got an oil fired Aga and it's is something I would never want to be without. I fear that it isn't all that environmentally friendly though, strictly speaking. She's not so much a tool, she's a presence in the kitchen. Everything I do revolves around Bertha (yes, I'm sad enough to have given her a name).

I keep mine running all the year around, the kitchen does sometimes get a bit like a sauna in the summer but I'm lost without her. There's always bread being risen and yoghurt being made and stews bubbling and................ okay, I'll shut up now. I like mine, can you tell? .

We had a Rayburn in a house that i lived in once.
It was mains gas and had to be kept on low the whole time (we did dry clothes over it and make cakes/bisuits/pies) but otherwise it took use an hour to cook pasta.

if it had been doing the hot water and heating, then we would have been happy to have it on, but it didn't, so we weren't really.

We tried to make the most of it by cooking jacket potatoes/casseroles/bread in it, but in the end, it wasn't really worth the extra we had to pay in gas.

Chack out your local regional council before buying anything - they are bringing in new clean air laws, which effectively exclude any woodburning ovens. We got caught out - we bought one, stored it for a month, and suddenly aren't allowed to put it in.

Anyone wanna buy a woodburning oven?

Magpie wrote:Chack out your local regional council before buying anything - they are bringing in new clean air laws, which effectively exclude any woodburning ovens. We got caught out - we bought one, stored it for a month, and suddenly aren't allowed to put it in.

Anyone wanna buy a woodburning oven?

Bummer! Can you put it outside like a pizza oven/BBQ?
I think modern Agas are your choice of gas/oil/electricity.
WHere abouts are you in NZ?

Thanks for the feedback, I'm still keen to hear more...

Hi Helen
I've had two rayburns in different houses. Both were solid fuel. One did hot water and a couple of rads as well. In both cases I had a separate cooker for use in the summer. There were times though in the summer when I would light it - but then this is the UK!

I put the rayburn in the second house because the house was an old farmhouse and the kitchen was formerly the dairy. It had flagstone floors laid directly on earth so in the rain, they got quite damp. The rayburn was brilliant at drying the room out and the damp floor made sure the kitchen never got too hot!

I found they are brilliant for drying clothes. I fixed a rack above the rayburn and could dry jeans in an hour! That's faster than my old tumble dryer could manage.

The cats loved them as well.

If I wasn't in a smokeless - ish zone then I'd certainly have another one.

Zoe

We had a wood burning rayburn in the last house and like Helen we keep ours going all year drying out the damp floor!

Fors: warm and cosy, fantastic at cooking and the warming oven stick towles in there before you pick the kids up from school on a wet cold winters day, wrap them around their heads when they come in(opps I forgot everybody drives now adays) ....always hot water with kettles simmering, slip it over to the hot plate instant hot water, dogs love it!

Against: takes two hours to get to the right temp for cooking (still the best though) dogs love it too much making it difficult to cook with them uder your feet they also get singe marks turning our white dog orangey, Oh and if you leave the air vent open at the bottom when you shouldn't you'll end up with 12 burly men on your door step (chimney fire) well worth it though
probally not eviromentally friendly in the the gas, oil, coal versions but try off setting that to justify.

Kim

I have posted about Aga's/Rayburns somewhere on here before. So here goes....

Aga's in my opinion are not an option (sorry to you 'round lidded people'!). Fine in a big hoose, with plenty of money. They are nothing but a huge, expensive cooker. If you have lots of room, you can have one with an additional boiler which can do the heating/hot water, otherwise you need a conventional boiler for that.

Rayburn's however are a different kettle of fish. (Hooray I hear from all the 'square lidded people'!). Rayburns do both cooking, hot water, and, if it's reasonably new, heating too. I grew up with a solid fuel one which only did cooking/hot water, but it heated the big kitchen (where we all lived), my parents room directly above, and to a much lesser degree, my room directly above my parents one. Not sufficient mind to deal with the premafrost on my bedroom window. This was, pre central heating in the 70's mind!

We bought a new oil Rayburn when we renovated the house 3 years ago. I would not be without it..... I regularly look at houses for sale on the interweb, and it's almost the first thing I look for - a Rayburn. No Rayburn, and I stop looking. Not that we are looking to move mind!

Older Rayburns are not well insulated (and therefore heat the kitchen too much in the summer) and not particularly efficient (unless it's a solid fuel one). Unless you buy new, or one that's only a few years old, heating will be limited to a couple of rads. A new one will cope with a whole house though.

Gas and oil ones (ours is oil) are very very controllable. There are 3 seven day timers. One for the cooker, one for the hot water and one for the heating. They all come on and off at the times you set. Our heat is also driven off a digital room thermometer - if the temp drops below a 14C the heating comes on (at any time - so there will be no burst pipes if we are away) and to the set temp in the evenings when we are in. The Rayburn fires its self up when extra hot water is needed to the rads.

We have a full tank of hot water all day and the water burner is only on for about 20 minutes just before 5pm. All at mains pressure too!

Cooking is fantastic - I don't understand why people seem to worry about cooking in them (friends recently fitted a second hand one, and at their recently party, whilst I was warming my derrière on the Rayburn, the roast pork was produced from the electric oven....... )

We now cook everything from scratch - including bread. The ovens are vented up through the chimney, so boiling tatties, or pasta is done inside the oven. Bring the tatties etc to the boil and stick the pan in the oven - no smells, no steam. Soup is done the same way. The floor of the oven can be used as an extra hotplate if you are cooking for lots of people and the roof of the oven is the same as a grill. The lower oven can be used for slow cooking casseroles etc or warming plates (or drying your Yorkshire Terrrier after it's bath, as was done when I was a wee boy hehe). A full Sunday breakfast can be done in the big grill tray in the oven. The only bit that's cooked on the top hot plate is the toast! Mine is done on there every morning. Porridge can be put in the lower oven when you go to bed at night and it's done to perfection when you get up in the morning.

Sheets folded and laid on the top of the hot plate lids both dry and iron themselves overnight. Wet boots dry, socks warm, herbs dry, butter softens for baking, bread dough rises........ I could go on!

Ours being new is 88% efficient. Older ones, like older boilers will be less efficient. We get all our cooking, hot water and central heating for £600 a year at current oil prices. When we fitted the Rayburn in 2004, oil was half the cost, so £300 was excellent! A new solid fuel one, if you have time to chop logs etc will eat anything...coal, coke, anthracite, logs, rubbish, tattie peelings, former Labour Prime Ministers, tax inspectors, etc etc.....

They are expensive mind, this one was £5000. But it was the best £5000 we have spent and we would not be without it.

Reconditioned ones:
http://www.lintongreen.fsnet.co.uk/

Aga Rayburn (they are both made by the same people):
http://www.aga-rayburn.co.uk/

Hey, thanks for writing all that! We are resorting to putting just a wood_burning heater in our barn, which we're building first. It does have a hotplate on top, and you can buy a little hood-style oven to go on top too. For our house though, I want to import a Rayburn, so it's good to hear they are efficient. I will need specific data for it, for our regional council, on exactly how efficient the wood burning ones are, and what their smoke particle emissions are - any idea where I would start looking for that? (It is a few years down the track before I will need it, but it is good to get a head start!!) I did look on their website, but couldn't find that info.

Well, hopefully by the time we actually put it in, the council will have changed their minds on what is sustainable anyway!

Maybe that is an option for you too, Rag-grrl, the wood-burner we are looking at is the Lady Kitchener - have a Google and see what you think.

oh i forgot about the no smell cooking - that's great - you can make fish pie without the whole house smelling of fish.. ...

I was daunted when I first moved here as suddenly had to learn how to cook on it, but actually its great.

only problem with no smells.. is it is possible to completely forget about something... and find the blackened remains the next day....
but sticking a note on the stairs.. or using a timer sorts that problem...

Magpie - I think it will be difficult to quantify the particle emissions of a solid fuel one....I'm no expert, but I imagine what you burn will have a lot to do with it. Imagine the crap that a burning politician would emit....

Red - yes, you do have to leave notes all over the place to remind you that something is in th oven - we left bread in ovenight last week, but it was fine in the morning

Hi
If you have a solid fuel one it really helps to reduce condensation as well. Air from the house is drawn in to the fire and sent up the chimney encouraging good air circulation.

You can dry an entire week's washing in front of one and not have any condensation on the windows.
Zoe

[quote="Thurston Garden"]Magpie - I think it will be difficult to quantify the particle emissions of a solid fuel one....I'm no expert, but I imagine what you burn will have a lot to do with it. Imagine the crap that a burning politician would emit....

Ha ha ha ha TG - but that would be sensible now, wouldn't it? The Regional Councils here have decided to have this rule about emissions, and have decreed that no burner shall be installed which doesn't meet their guidelines. As you say, it depends so much on what you burn, but they can't see that. Just as they can't see the pollution from vehicles, but if you can't see that, you don't have to do anything about it, do you.
Also, small manufacturers won't be able to sell their product, if they don't cough up the NZ$10 000 to have each model tested.

So, if rayburn have done some testing, it would save me a lot of hassle!

OK, rant over...

Hi Helen,
I have a mains gas fuelled aga, I live in Scotland which can be cool in the summer and rather cold in the winter, I love the aga, we live in quite a draughty old house and it is a central meeting/heating point. I could not say hand on heart that my aga is energy efficient, it does do a lot, ie. we don't have a tumble dryer and all the washing gets dry on the pulley in the kitchen over the aga, plus I cook more/dry more, warm my a**s more! I love my aga and would hate to be without it. Your best fit depends on what you need your range/aga/rayburn to do......