Standards and efficiency - Approach

Providing a point of comparison
Stûv stoves are officially tested according to the European standards EN 13229 (for inserts) and EN 13240 (for stoves), which provide a safety guarantee for people and property.
As well as checking safety, the laboratories measure power and efficiency and analyse the smoke, enabling consumers and professionals to make valuable comparisons of products.

The efficiency
The stove's efficiency indicates the percentage of heat produced by the combustion of the wood which is actually used to heat up your house : A stove with 80 % efficiency releases 80% of the energy from the wood for heating the house. Did you know that an open fire, for example, rarely has efficiency greater than 10%, which means that 90 % of the energy consumed goes into the atmosphere ?
It is important to understand that the efficiency drops when the stove operates at a lower rate and that combustion is less complete.

This is why public authorities, who are committed to fighting global warming, are encouraging the replacement of older low-performance stoves with highly efficient ones.

The smoke
It contains heat and various gases including CO2, CO and fine particles that affect the respiratory passages. With high-performance stoves that are used correctly, these emissions are very limited, but they increase as soon as the efficiency falls and combustion is less complete.

To sum up, a stove well suited to the room to be heated works most frequently at its optimal rate and therefore produces good combustion and high efficiency. This means that consumption is minimal and emissions into the atmosphere are greatly reduced.