Town and Country Runswick stove Hot

This is a very good stove and a revelation in terms of efficiency when compared to the open Baxi type fire-place it replaced!
I burn either anthracite ovals or logs. Logs give a more intense heat and do not tar-up the glass, but higher volumes are required.
The ovals seem to be a better economy, although they smoke-up the glass and create a lot more ash. I find if I bank them up (ie am not to miserly with the quantities) they keep in for ages. Ovals are also easier to store.
The control-ability is excellent, and with logs you can easily 'dial-in' that lazy, dancing flame effect which is really better than watching TV.
The riddling mechanism is more a triumph of reality over good intention, but is good enough to maintain the air flow up through the grate, which is crucial for regulating the burn rate of solid fuel.
The ash pan is easy to remove and empty, and I find if I carry this out at 24hour intervals when burning anthracite, its capacity is adequate.

Stove Expert replied: Clear the ashpan more often to maintain the grate longevity. Interesting that you are finding the glass worse when using smokeless fuel!!

Get it professionally installed by a Hetas registered company - you are f***** if your house burns down as a result of using the fire and you cannot produce a certificate for insurance purposes. Beware - prices vary hugely so get the standard 3 quotes.
This stove has transformed our home, heat-wise. You don't really appreciate how much cold air an open fire sucks into a building until you've compared it with a closed appliance like the Runswick.
The levels of fuel efficiency and control over burn rate are also staggering in comparison. I do not hesitate to recommend the Runswick!

Stove Expert replied: Always get stove installed professionally as the customer says insurance is so important and to invalidate it is at your peril!

I already have a Clearview Vision in another chimney. This is an excellent stove, very high quality but badly overpriced. I wanted a new inset stove for my lounge to replace a Jetmaster ie the available opening was on the small side & I didn't want to undergo major building work on the fireplace. At £730 the T&C Runswick was much cheaper & had the major advantage that it could be fitted without the need for an additional liner. The Runswick is very efficient at 79.9% & belts out a lot of heat keeping a large room warm. The quality is lower than a Clearview but quite satisfactory. My only niggle is that the riddling grate is poor & barely functions but this is not a major problem. By comparison, the Clearview riddles very effectively. The Runswick firebox is quite small requiring max 30cm length logs but of course I knew this before purchase. The airwash works very well & the stove is very easy to light & fully controllable. Overall I am very pleased with this stove & I deem it very good value.

Stove Expert Replied: Fair review of an experienced stove user.

We bought one of these stoves last year due to the efficiency gain over an open fire and the associated safety of not having to worry about sparks. We chose this particular model due to the promise of minimum upheaval as we should have been able to simply slot it into the existing fireplace, however no matter how hard we tried, the stove did not appear to fit snugly. We put it down to a problem with the actual fireplace and removed the fireback replacing it with a new one but still encountered the issue. In the end we removed the fireplace and mantle and fitted it back around the stove making a fire back as we went. It was a little bit of extra work so just be careful if you do decide to purchase this stove as it is quite expensive relative to a number of smaller free standing stoves. All said, however, we love this stove, it has a nice big window and is super easy to control, if I had one little niggle it is that the handle on the door can get very hot and it is a pity that there is not some sort of insulated cover over it, however the gloves provided are great. The glass can sometimes get a little bit dirthy when the room is very warm and the airwash vents are almost closed, but saying that a bit of kitchen roll and some damp ash the next day always clears the glass perfectly. What I especially like is that I can clean the chimney as per a normal fire and no flue liner was required. All in all, now that the stove is fitted and kept us warm through all the snow of last winter, I would have no hesitation in getting another or indeed recommending them to other people, it has also been much admired by many people for it's rustic simplicity.

I have a low mantle and had to cut 2in off the base plus make spacer then still found the fireplace was out of square. So before purchase make an exact template of the rear and see how it fits.
I run it 16 hours a day and do need to empty the ash daily. The pan is annoyingly a little wider than a standard tin bucket and has low sides but works ok. I could do with a second pan to be able to do a quick swap.
Can burn fast and furious so beware forgetting to close lower vents. Air control is easy and effective but I wish upper ones were linked by a rod (I will modify mine) so you only need to set one. I never try to burn overnight as the box is too small for much wood and smouldering is bad with wood. Wood needs to be 8 in long max although a little larger will fit.
The glass smokes up quite easily so I clean daily and burn it out in the last hour on a high setting rather than closing off and letting it smoulder out overnight.
If unable to feed it continually it cycles well from a full box to a cup full of embers but keep the top vents well open to avoid smoked glass.
The thin flat top is good for heating sausage rolls on tinfoil.

Stove Expert Replied: Beware of fast burning for longer than 20 minutes as this may expose the stove to higher than normal working temperatures and can lead to distortion of the body. Short periods 15 - 20 mins max twice a day is usual recommendation.

We chose a Runswick for our home in 2008, in order to minimise the building work needed for the installation. It set very neatly into the existing fireplace/chimneybreast of our modern (1985) home.

Lovely large, clear glass area. The door handle is very easy and positive, and though it does get hot it is easy to use with gloves on. The top of the stove (about 5" deep) did not tend to get very hot - not suitable for heating a kettle for example.

The firebox is tapered a little towards the back (normal for inset stoves) so we tended to use shorter pieces of wood than the theoretical max.

Air flow is incredibly controllable, top and bottom. The lower vents are easy to operate even with the toe of a shoe, and the upper vents with the back of a thumbnail which means not needing to bother with gloves much.

When we used it 12+ hours a day, we didn't need to clear out the ash more than a couple times a week. Normally only about once per week.

We have not tried to keep the fire in overnight, because it is not fuel efficient, but a few times I restarted the fire in the morning from what was left in the grate, still glowing under a layer of ash.

The first winter (2008-09) our wood was not very well seasoned, so sometimes if we burned it slowly then the glass would get a brown haze in parts. Easily fixed by using seasoned wood, and everything burned efficiently and cleanly the next (2009-10) winter. (Also glass cleans up a treat with a wood-ash paste.) An inexpensive moisture meter was a useful investment while we got used to what seasoned wood feels like.

We stayed with our existing precast concrete liner rather than having an insulated stainless steel one. In retrospect, I think this was our mistake - we were heating up the chimney breast instead! (The advantage of this, in that long, cold winter just gone, that the chimney breast acted like a storage heater.)

We have moved house this year, and had another Town & country stove installed, but free standing this time.