Heating your home office

With so many people working from home these days, we are getting a lot of requests for simple ways to heat a home office. Home offices are appearing in all sorts of places but the most common is in a shed or room in the garden. The question then comes up of how to heat it? One answer is to fit a small woodburning stove. That will certainly get it nice and warm but there are inherent disadvantages to a woodburner in that situation. The first is that you’ve got to light it when you arrive in the morning, so the office is going to be cold for a while until it warms it up, and then you’ve got to remember to keep it loaded and not let it go out. Most garden rooms will only need a small stove, but small stoves have small fireboxes, so it will only stay in for a short while. Finally you’ve got to consider whether you have sufficient dry, seasoned firewood to keep a stove running for five days a week, all winter long, and somewhere to keep it all. 

The easiest and most straightforward solution for many has been to fit a small wood pellet stove. You can set it to light itself half an hour before you start work so that it’s nice and cosy when you arrive. Once it has brought the room up to temperature, it will then either modulate down or switch itself off. Only when the temperature begins to go down again will it light itself again to maintain your office at the pre-set temperature. Pellet stoves have a built in hopper so once a day you simply top that up from a bag of pellets and the stove does all the rest. The Duroflame range of pellet stoves perfectly fit the bill for this sort of situation. Small and easy to fit, they will happily sit in a corner keeping the room warm and dry without needing any attention, leaving you free to get on with your work.

Pellet stoves are much simpler to install than a woodburner as they don’t make such demands on the chimney. Garden rooms inevitably have short chimneys, which will often result in a poor chimney draught. A woodburner relies on the draw in a chimney to get it going and to burn well. A wood pellet stove still needs a chimney but doesn’t rely solely on the chimney draught as it has an internal fan. Talk to one of our trained staff on 0800 246 1250 and they will work out with you exactly what will be needed to install the stove, whether it is a woodburner or a pellet stove. Most log stoves produce radiant heat, so they can easily overheat the area in front of the stove, whereas a pellet stove spreads its warmth by natural convection, giving you a gentle circulation of warm air instead.

A garden room isn’t the only office space that benefits from having its own independent heating, offices are being set up in spare rooms, conservatories, attic spaces and even garages. All of them need a way of keeping warm without heating the whole house all day and to many a pellet stove provides an easy to use, automated way of burning a renewable fuel that is both kind to the environment and kind to your pocket.