Wood burning stoves
across Longford
Boiler stoves plumbed onto the oil radiators you already have, and oversize farmhouse flues lined properly. Free survey, camera up the flue before you buy, certificate the day we finish.
Two census numbers decide most Longford stove jobs
Longford is an easy county to advise on, because two figures from Census 2022 between them settle most of what needs deciding.
56.6% of Longford households heat with oil. The national figure is 39%, and for context the highest in the State is Monaghan at 74.8% and the lowest is Dublin City at 4.4%. More than half the houses in this county already have a radiator circuit, a cylinder and a boiler that runs on the most expensive of the common heating fuels. That makes a boiler stove a far more relevant proposition here than in a county on mains gas, and it is the first question worth asking rather than an upsell at the end.
The housing stock grew 3%, from 18,591 dwellings to 19,195. The national rise was 5%, so Longford built less than anywhere else in this part of the country. Older houses mean older flues, and a great many of them were built to serve an open turf fire. Those flues are enormous. A liner is closer to the default answer here than the exception, and it is far better in the quote than on fitting day.
So the order of work is: a camera goes up the flue before you buy anything. The survey establishes what the chimney can take, whether it needs lining, and what the whole job costs, before any money changes hands or any model is chosen.
Straight about distance: the van works out of Clonegall, Co. Carlow, and Longford is roughly an hour and three quarters. A supply and fit with a liner is a full day or more and absorbs that comfortably. A small call-out does not, and you will be told so on the phone.
Room heater or boiler stove?
A room heater warms the room it stands in. A boiler stove has a water jacket behind the firebox, so it heats the room and the water at the same time and feeds the radiators, the cylinder or both.
In a county where 56.6% of houses are on oil, the plumbing a boiler stove needs is already there. The stove is plumbed to work alongside the existing oil boiler rather than replacing it, so the oil covers the mornings and the shoulder months and the stove carries the evenings, which is when most people want the fire lit anyway.
| Room heater | Boiler stove | |
|---|---|---|
| Heats | The room it is in | The room, plus radiators and hot water |
| Typical output | 4 to 6 kW, all to the room | Split, for example 14 kW as 4 to the room and 10 to water |
| Install | One day, or two with a liner | Two to three days, mostly plumbing |
| Fitted cost | €2,500 – €4,000 | €3,500 – €5,500 |
| Suits | One room you actually live in | An oil house wanting to cut the tank bill |
The sizing trap is the split. A boiler stove's headline output covers both jobs, so a 14 kW model might put 4 kW into the room and 10 kW into the water. People buy on the headline number, assume it all comes into the sitting room, and end up with a room they cannot sit in. Ask for the two figures separately, always.
It has to be designed rather than just plumbed. A solid fuel appliance cannot be switched off the way an oil burner can, so the system needs a route for the heat to go if the pump stops. That is ordinary work and it is well understood, but it is the reason a boiler stove is a two to three day job and a room heater is not, and it is the part to be suspicious of if somebody quotes it as an afternoon.
Hearth requirements differ too. TGD J 2.7.1 calls for a constructional hearth of at least 125 mm under a back boiler, or 25 mm on 25 mm non-combustible supports, against 12 mm for a free-standing stove on a non-combustible floor.
Against kerosene, the gap is the whole argument
On the SEAI domestic fuel cost comparison, in cent per useful kilowatt hour delivered: bulk loose softwood about 8.5, wood pellets in bulk 10.25, softwood by the pallet 10.41, mains gas 13.00, hardwood by the pallet 14.40, hardwood in small bags 15.26, discounted kerosene 17.20, electricity on direct debit 34.38.
Kerosene at 17.20 against bulk loose softwood at 8.5 is roughly double, and in Longford that comparison applies to more than half the households in the county.
The 8.5 cent figure carries a condition, and it is the condition that quietly rules it out in a lot of places: you need to take about three cubic metres loose in summer and keep it dry until winter. Buying in small bags as you go costs 15.26, which is a much less interesting number. Outside Longford town most houses here have a shed, an outbuilding or a yard, so the cheap figure is genuinely available rather than theoretical.
Two honest caveats, because the argument is strong enough not to need overselling.
If you already burn turf, you are not comparing against kerosene at all. Census 2022 recorded 14.3% of Longford households heating mainly with peat, close to four times the national 3.7%. Turf cut or bought locally may well undercut everything on the SEAI list. For those households a stove is not a fuel saving. It is a large gain in efficiency and control over an open fire, which is a genuine benefit and a different one.
And a stove is not a whole-house heating system unless it is a boiler stove. A room heater will not warm the bedrooms. If the goal is to cut the oil bill rather than to have a fire in the evening, that points at the boiler stove above.
There is no SEAI grant for a stove. The Domestic Technical Standards document has a clause referencing them, but the eligibility table gives them no scheme coverage.
Running costs from the SEAI domestic fuel cost comparison.
The chimney you have is probably too big
In most counties the flue question is open. In Longford it leans one way before anybody arrives, and the census is the reason.
Stock up 3% against a national 5% means a higher proportion of older houses than anywhere else in this group, and the older rural stock here has original brick or concrete flues built before stainless liners were standard. They were built to serve an open turf fire, which needed a great deal of volume to draw properly.
Connect a 5 kW stove to a flue that size and it cannot fill it. The gases slow, cool and reach their condensation point inside the masonry rather than at the top of it. The condensate is acidic, it soaks into the brickwork, and over a few winters it does real damage. An oversize flue is a safety problem, not merely an inefficiency.
So budget for a liner as the likely answer rather than the surprise. It is not automatic: TGD J asks that the flue be suitable for the appliance, not that it be lined as routine, and plenty of Longford chimneys pass. The camera decides. But going in expecting €1,000 – €2,500 and being told you do not need it is a much better afternoon than the reverse.
The size rule, since turf matters here. Under TGD J Table 2 a closed appliance up to 20 kW burning timber, peat or bituminous coal needs at least 150 mm internal diameter. Only smokeless fuel or wood pellets may drop to 125 mm, and a great many stoves ship with a 125 mm spigot.
Ventilation. TGD J 4.2.1 requires a permanent vent of at least 6,500 mm² of free area for any non-room-sealed solid fuel appliance, plus 550 mm² per kilowatt above 5 kW, so an 8 kW stove needs 8,150 mm². There is no under-5kW exemption in Ireland; that is UK Approved Document J, as are DEFRA exemption and Smoke Control Areas. HETAS withdrew from Ireland in March 2022.
Because Longford has so little new housing, the airtightness problem here usually arrives through the back door: an older house gets new windows and doors, the fabric tightens, and a fire that drew perfectly for thirty years starts smoking. Nobody connects the two events.
For a rough read before booking, the chimney suitability checker asks five questions.
Multi-fuel, in a county that still burns turf
Census 2022 recorded 14.3% of Longford households heating mainly with peat, including turf, against 3.7% nationally. Only Offaly, Roscommon and Galway are higher. So the wood-only stove that suits a Dublin suburb is often the wrong appliance here.
Wood burns best on a flat bed of its own ash, with air coming from above. A dedicated wood burner therefore has no grate and no ashpan, and leaving a bed of ash in it is correct rather than lazy.
Turf and coal need air from underneath. A multi-fuel stove has a raised riddling grate with an ashpan below, so primary air comes up through the fuel bed and the ash can be riddled clear instead of smothering the fire.
Put turf on a wood-only stove and it will not get the air it needs. The result is disappointing rather than dangerous: a fire you spend the evening fighting, poor output, and smoke that ends up as tar in the flue rather than heat in the room.
There is a second-order point worth making in a county where the fuel is changing. Longford is where Lough Ree Power at Lanesborough ceased production in December 2020, the last peat-fired station in the country to stop, brought forward from 2027 under the EU Just Transition programme. Households are moving off turf too. If you are switching to timber at the same time as fitting a stove, the flue wants sweeping and a camera first, because seasoned timber burns hotter than turf and a hotter fire in a flue with years of turf tar in it is the standard set-up for a chimney fire. More on that on the Longford chimney repair page.
The stove selector asks about fuel first for this reason.
Putting a stove into a house that stood empty
Census 2022 recorded 2,338 vacant dwellings in Longford, about 12.2% of the county's stock, down 17% from 2,824 in 2016. Underneath that, 934 dwellings were recorded vacant in 2016 and again in 2022, roughly one in twenty in the county, and those are being bought and brought back into use.
A stove is very often on the renovation list, and none of the following stops one going in. It changes the order.
Jackdaws. An unused pot is an attractive nest site and a nest can fill a metre or more of flue. It is the commonest cause of a smoke-back on a first fire in a renovated house.
Nothing is documented. No sweeping record, no known history, nothing an insurer can be shown later. That is an hour's work at the start.
Cold chimneys deteriorate faster. A stack unheated for six winters has had no warm flue drying it from the inside, and nobody was living there to notice the damp appearing on a bedroom ceiling.
The practical consequence is budgetary. Survey first and the liner is priced into the job. Survey last and it arrives as a surprise on fitting day, which is the version everybody wants to avoid, particularly on a renovation where the money is already spoken for.
Getting the size right matters more than getting the brand right
The most common mistake is buying too big. An oversized stove gets run shut down to stop the room becoming unbearable, and a stove run shut down smoulders. Smouldering produces tar, tar coats the flue, and tar is what catches fire.
That matters more here than in most counties, because a turf-burning flue is already laying down more tar than a timber-burning one. Adding an oversized stove run shut down to a flue that is already working hard is how a chimney fire gets built over a couple of winters.
A rough starting point for a reasonably insulated modern room is the volume in cubic metres divided by fourteen. A 4 by 5 metre room with a 2.4 metre ceiling is 48 cubic metres, so roughly 3.5 kW. Most Longford sitting rooms land between 4 and 6 kW for a room heater. An older farmhouse room with solid walls and single glazing needs more than the arithmetic suggests, which is a common situation in this county.
For a boiler stove, ask for the room output and the water output as two separate figures, and size the room half exactly as above. The water half is sized on the radiators it has to serve, which is a different calculation and one that has to account for the oil boiler already on the system.
The stove size calculator does the room half properly, with insulation and window area factored in.
On efficiency, EU Regulation 2015/1185 has required at least 65% seasonal space heating efficiency for closed-fronted solid fuel room heaters sold in the EU since 1 January 2022. Everything on sale meets it, so treat a shop presenting that baseline as a feature with some caution.
What a stove costs in Longford
Supply and fit, including VAT, labour, flue components, hearth work where needed, waste away and the certificate.
| Work | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Home survey | Free, no obligation |
| Inset stove, supplied and fitted | €2,200 – €3,500 |
| Freestanding stove, supplied and fitted | €2,500 – €4,000 |
| Boiler stove, plumbed to radiators | €3,500 – €5,500 |
| Chimney liner, likely rather than optional on the older stock | €1,000 – €2,500 |
| Twin-wall flue, where there is no chimney | €1,800 – €3,200 |
The line that moves most in this county is the liner. On the older rural stock, assume it is coming and be pleased if the camera says otherwise. The boiler stove line also carries more variation than the others, because it depends on the state of the existing oil system rather than on the stove.
Indicative only. An exact figure follows the survey, in writing, before any work starts.
What the day actually looks like
A straightforward inset or freestanding fit into a sound flue is a day. Add a liner and it is a long day or two, which on the older Longford stock is the likelier case. A boiler stove plumbed into an existing oil-fired system is two to three days, because the plumbing is the bulk of the work rather than the stove.
Dust sheets go down first and the fireplace opening comes out. If a liner is going in, it is fed from the top of the stack and connected at the stove, then sealed at the pot with a proper closure plate rather than mortar and hope. The hearth is checked or built to TGD J 2.7.1, the vent is cut in and sized to the output, and the stove is set, connected and levelled.
On a boiler stove there is a day of pipework either side of that, tying into the existing circuit and making sure the heat has somewhere to go if the pump stops. That is the part that takes the time and it is not the part to rush.
Then it gets lit and tested before anybody leaves, with a smoke test on the flue and a check that the draw is right with the doors and windows shut. That last check is the one that gets skipped elsewhere, and it is the one that finds a ventilation problem while there is still time to fix it.
You get a certificate of installation on the day, the old fireplace and packaging taken away, and a straight explanation of how to run it. That conversation matters more with a multi-fuel stove than a wood-only one, because riddling and ash management are habits rather than instincts.
Full detail on the main stove installation page.
Where we fit stoves in Longford
Longford uses a single Eircode routing key, N39, which is unusual and reflects how compact the county is. Lanesborough sits on the Roscommon border and Granard is close to the Cavan line.
Because the trip is a long one, Longford work gets batched. Four things are worth saying on the first call: the town, what you burn, roughly how big the room is, and whether you want the radiators fed as well. Those four get the estimate close first time.
One tradesman, not a showroom
Johnny Roberts runs J.Roberts Solid Fuel Services on his own out of Clonegall, Co. Carlow. Ring the number and you get him. The person who surveys the flue is the person who fits the stove.
There is no salesperson in the middle and nothing being cleared off a floor, which mostly matters because it means the recommendation can be "that flue will not take that stove" without costing anybody a commission.
There is no statutory register for solid fuel work in Ireland, so what is actually checkable is the insurance, the work itself and the certificate. All three are available to see.
Stoves in Longford. FAQ
Would a boiler stove work with my oil heating?
Usually yes, and in this county it is the question worth asking first. Census 2022 put 56.6% of Longford households on oil for central heating, well above the national 39%, which means most houses here already have a radiator circuit and a cylinder in place. A boiler stove has a water jacket behind the firebox, so it heats the room and the water at the same time and can be plumbed to work alongside the existing oil boiler rather than replacing it. The oil then covers the mornings and the shoulder months and the stove carries the evenings. It is a bigger plumbing job than a room heater and it has to be designed properly, because a solid fuel appliance cannot be switched off the way a burner can.
Will a stove actually save me money in Longford?
The arithmetic here is about as favourable as it gets. On the SEAI fuel cost comparison discounted kerosene is about 17.20 cent per useful kilowatt hour and bulk loose softwood is about 8.5 cent. Longford is 56.6% oil, so that gap applies to more than half the county. The 8.5 figure needs three cubic metres taken loose in summer and kept dry, which is the condition that rules it out in town terraces elsewhere, and outside Longford town most houses here have the shed or the yard to do it. The honest caveat: if you already cut or buy turf locally you are not comparing against kerosene at all, and for you the gain is efficiency and control over an open fire rather than a fuel saving.
My chimney is huge. Does it need lining?
Probably, and in Longford that is closer to the default than the exception. The county built less new housing than anywhere else in this part of the country, with stock up only 3% between 2016 and 2022 against 5% nationally, so most houses here are older and a lot of them have flues built to serve an open turf fire. Those flues are enormous by modern standards because an open turf fire needed the volume. Connect a 5 kW stove to one and it cannot fill it, so the gases slow, cool and condense inside the masonry instead of leaving the top. That condensate is acidic. TGD J asks that the flue be suitable rather than lined as routine, so it is the camera that decides, but budget for a liner as the likely answer rather than the surprise.
What does a stove cost fitted in Longford?
An inset stove supplied and fitted runs €2,200 to €3,500, freestanding €2,500 to €4,000, and a boiler stove plumbed to radiators €3,500 to €5,500. Add €1,000 to €2,500 for a liner, which on the older stock here is likely rather than optional, or €1,800 to €3,200 for a twin-wall flue where there is no chimney. The survey is free and nothing is quoted until a camera has been up the flue, so the liner is priced into the job rather than appearing on fitting day.
I burn turf. Do I need a different stove?
You need a multi-fuel one. Wood burns best on a flat bed with its air coming from above, so a dedicated wood burner has no grate and no ashpan. Turf and coal need air from underneath, so a multi-fuel stove has a raised riddling grate with an ashpan below it. Census 2022 recorded 14.3% of Longford households heating mainly with peat including turf, close to four times the national 3.7%, so this comes up constantly here. Burning turf on a wood-only stove is disappointing rather than dangerous: it will not get the air it needs and you will spend the evening fighting it.
Do I need an air vent?
Yes. TGD J 4.2.1 requires a permanent vent of at least 6,500 mm² of free area for any non-room-sealed solid fuel appliance, with a further 550 mm² per kilowatt above 5 kW, so an 8 kW stove needs 8,150 mm². There is no under-5kW exemption in Ireland; that is UK Approved Document J, as are DEFRA exemption and Smoke Control Areas. Longford has less new housing than anywhere else in this group, so the version that catches people here is usually an older house that has had new windows and doors fitted. The fabric tightens, and a fire that drew perfectly for thirty years starts smoking.
What size stove do I need?
Most Longford sitting rooms land between 4 and 6 kW for a room heater. A rough guide for a reasonably insulated modern room is the volume in cubic metres divided by fourteen, so a 4 by 5 metre room with a 2.4 metre ceiling is about 3.5 kW. An older farmhouse room with solid walls and single glazing needs more than the arithmetic suggests. Boiler stoves are sized differently and this is where people go wrong: the headline output is split between the room and the water, so a 14 kW boiler stove might put 4 kW into the room and 10 kW into the radiators. Buy one on the headline figure alone and you will roast the sitting room.
The house was empty for years. Can a stove go into that flue?
Usually yes, but survey it first, and in Longford this comes up more than anywhere else on the site. Census 2022 recorded 2,338 vacant dwellings in the county, about 12.2% of the stock, and 934 of those were recorded vacant in the 2016 census as well. That is roughly one dwelling in twenty empty across two counts. A dormant flue collects jackdaw nests, there is no sweeping record and nothing is documented about its condition. None of that stops a stove going in. It means the camera goes up before the order is placed, so the liner is in the quote instead of being a surprise.
Is there a grant for a stove?
No. The SEAI Domestic Technical Standards document contains a clause referencing stoves, but the eligibility table gives them no scheme coverage. If a retailer tells you a grant is available, ask them to point at the table. There is also no statutory installer register in Ireland for solid fuel; HETAS withdrew in March 2022 and is a UK body regardless. What is actually checkable is public liability insurance, previous work in your area, and the certificate issued at the end.
How long does the job take?
A straightforward inset or freestanding fit into a sound flue is a day. Add a liner and it is a long day or two, which on the older Longford stock is the more likely case. A boiler stove plumbed into an existing oil-fired system is two to three days, because the plumbing is the bulk of the work rather than the stove. It gets lit and tested before anybody leaves, including a check that the draw is right with the doors and windows shut, and you get the certificate on the day.
Do you actually come to Longford?
Yes, for work that justifies the trip, and it is worth being straight about the distance. The van works out of Clonegall in Co. Carlow and Longford is roughly an hour and three quarters. A supply and fit with a liner is a full day or more and absorbs that comfortably, and a boiler stove across two or three days more so. A small one-off call-out does not, and you will be told so on the phone. Longford work gets batched, so if a neighbour or a family member needs something as well, mention it and both get quoted in the one visit.
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Thinking about a stove in Longford?
The survey is free and a camera goes up the flue before anything is ordered. If the oil bill is what is driving this, say so on the call, because that points at a boiler stove rather than a room heater.