Wood burners, also known as log burners and wood stoves, are a welcome addition to many homes across the country. As a powerful heat source for your home, the benefits of a wood burner are easy to recognise.
Keeping your log burner working correctly ensures optimum safety and efficiency when relying on the wood burner to heat the rooms around your home. By choosing the right chimney cowl for your wood burner, you will increase the performance output of the device and help keep your home properly ventilated, if there is already a downdraught problem.
A chimney cowl is an extremely useful added extra to your home’s chimney. With windy conditions and/or surrounding buildings causing a downdraught, a cowl keeps your home free from the harmful and unpleasant odorous fumes that can make their way back down the chimney and into your home.
Wood Burning Stove - Problems and Solutions
Contemporary wood burning stoves are feature elements in both modern and traditional homes. But, though the crackle and pop of your wood burner may be the perfect finishing touch to your home, they certainly aren’t without their problems.
Common issues with wood burner stoves include;
- Obstructed Flue. The purpose of your flue is simple, yet crucial, to the efficiency of your log burner. Your flue provides ventilation to the harmful smokes that could otherwise enter your home. The flue can easily become obstructed with debris, birds and other matter from the outside that can build up over time. Making sure you regularly have your chimney swept and make use of chimney cowls which help prevent ingress of birds and other debris from entering your chimney in the first place.
- Excess Smoke. There are a variety of reasons your wood burner could be producing excess smoke. By regularly maintaining and cleaning the inside of your wood stove and burning only seasoned logs you can help keep your home properly ventilated.
Choosing a Chimney Cowl for a Wood Burner
With a wide range of chimney cowls available to help prevent problems such as downdraught and nesting inside the chimney, it is still important to choose a chimney cowl best suited to dealing with the large volume of smoke created by wood burning stoves.
A recent addition to the types of wood burner stove chimney cowls available is the FlueCube chimney cowl that helps your wood burner burn more efficiently by effectively reducing the downdraught in your chimney. The flue cowl stabilises the burn within the stove by creating a positive draw of air through the flue system. 
Available in a variety of colours, a FlueCube chimney cowl increases the efficiency of your wood burner stove and creates the best possible conditions for lighting your chosen firewood.
Even if weather conditions or buildings around your home are not creating any issues with downdraught, it is still advisable to consider purchasing a chimney cowl to prevent rain, debris and nesting birds from entering the chimney.
In fact, chimney cowls are often simply purchased for just this reason. A large concern for homeowners with open chimneys is that birds are often on the lookout for somewhere warm and cosy to nest for the season - with your chimney and fireplace appealing ever so slightly more than your neighbour’s old tree!
What do Chimney Cowls Do? - Quick Summary
Here is a brief explanation of what a chimney cowl is used for:
- Keeps Birds Away. If you didn’t already read the above section that went into details about birds nesting in your chimney - it’s worth a read. Not only can they cause dangerous blockages that mean toxic gases, including carbon monoxide, can make their way down your chimney, but should the bird die you’ll be left with bad smells throughout your home.
- Prevent downdraught. Whilst it may be difficult to figure out what exactly is causing downdraught in your chimney, an anti-downdraught cowl can quickly solve this troublesome chimney issue. For obvious reasons, ensuring an upwards flow of air out of your property will keep the smoke produced in your wood burning stove from lingering inside.
- Help boost draw. From time to time some chimneys may suffer with a lack of draw. This creates difficulties when you decide to ignite your fire and often means the gases do not want to flow upwards through the chimney. There are specific chimney cowls that are made to correct this issue, such as our fantastic range of chimney fans.
Here at Brewer Cowls, we want to make choosing the right chimney cowl easy. Try our handy chimney cowl finder to help make buying a chimney cowl much easier.
Wood Stove Glass Cleaner
It is important that you keep your wood stove burner clean and have the chimney swept regularly. But, what about the log burner glass door? When new, this little window provides the perfect viewing glass to your newly-lit fire, but the glass of your wood burner can easily become dirty and the more you use your burner, the harder cleaning off the engrained soot and smoke will become.
Luckily these stove glass cleaning pads are the perfect solution to keeping your stove looking as good as new no matter how often you use it. With elastic steel wool fibres to gently clean the glass, you’ll no longer need to reach for harmful chemical products to scrub the glass clean.
