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A wood burning stove with Hwam Autopilot tech is a step ahead of the rest. The top class combustion you achieve benefits the environment as well as keeping wood consumption as low as possible, and there’s no need to regulate the air supply manually. Let’s explore the tech and, at the end, we’ll give you a whole load of extra tips to make your wood burning stove as efficient and cost-effective as possible.
The wonderful world of Hwam
Roll back time to 1973 when a Dane called Vagn Hvam Pedersen started a new business. He’d been trained as a blacksmith and had lots of experience in the ventilation field, which made wood burning stove design the perfect match for his skills. A chance encounter with architect and furniture cabinetmaker Anders Fasterholt, who was fascinated by wood burners, sealed the deal and they collaborated to develop a suite of extraordinary products, unique in the wood stove world.
2019 saw the business partner with Aymeric de Galembert, the CEO of France’s SEGUIN Group, significantly expanding their portfolio of products. Now Hwan has a network of dealers across the EU as well as the UK and their stoves are imported by countries as diverse as Russia, Greece, Japan, South Korea and South Africa, testament to their high quality.
The brilliant Hwam autopilot system
Hwam has always believed that if they can achieve a high level of performance in the test lab, people should be able to achieve the same high performance levels with Hwam stoves at home. And that is what led them to create their unique Autopilot system.
By minimising people’s involvement with the air supply, Hwan created better, more complete combustion levels to give owners real world efficiency ratings as good as the lab test results. The tech also drives significant fuel savings. On average, the standard Hwam autopilot system saves owners as much as 40% on their fuel bills compared to a stove with manual air supply control.
Hwam’s Autopilot system is a game-changer when you want to hit the maximum combustion levels without constant fiddling. It’s all about automation and control, and the way it happens is actually surprisingly simple. All it takes is a special metal coil hidden inside the firebox, behind a heat shield and hidden by the fire bricks, which expands and contracts with the heat, increasing and reducing the air supply accordingly.
How does it work?
When the stove is cold the primary air flow automatically opens fully to deliver as much oxygen as possible to the fire bed and make the stove super-easy to light. Once the fire is burning cheerfully and the temperature begins rising the metal coil starts to expand. This moves a little lever that shuts down the primary air flow and opens up another to switch you from ignition mode into the main burn mode. From here onwards the system continually changes the amount of primary, secondary and tertiary air based directly on the temperature inside the firebox, fiendishly efficient.
It does all this without a single sensor. There’s no electronics. You don’t need batteries and there’s no mains electricity involved. The stove is completely self-regulating and you don’t need to touch a thing. Just relax, chill out and doze in the lovely warmth.
Basically, the bimetal spring expands or contracts depending on the temperature of the combustion chamber, simply regulating the dampers so your fire gets the perfect amount of air 100% of the time. But there’s more. This amazingly simple yet effective Autopilot system has inspired further innovation. Hwam has made things even more efficient, sensitive and responsive by developing the idea to integrate electronic air controls, temperature sensors and remote controls, together creating their famously good Intelligent Heat System or IHS.
There’s even a Hwam smartphone app, which operates all Hwam stoves fitted with the IHS system. You get a remote control to change the settings, monitor the temperature, and schedule heating times from your mobile phone.
A simple sum to show you the savings
Say you burn sixteen logs over ten hours in an ordinary wood burner, a perfectly normal situation. A Hwam stove with an Autopilot system means you’ll need six fewer logs, using just ten to generate the same amount of heat over the same time. Do this for two months and you’ll effectively save yourself an entire cubic metre stack of wood. As we write that’s around £250 worth of wood saved over 60 days. You can see how quickly the savings stack up, pardon the pun!
Is a Hwam wood burning stove the best choice for your home?
Hwam’s Autopilot and IHS systems are uniquely innovative, significantly enhancing the user experience by keeping things so simple as well as making your burner a lot more efficient and cost-effective. But like all log burners there are factors to take into account before you decide on the right model, from the size of the room or area you want to heat to the type of wood you’ll be using and the way you want the heating to work for you.
Having said that, many experts believe Hwam systems are the future in a world where everyone is more environmentally conscious, where the regulations on real fires are becoming ever-more strict, and automatic air control systems are making things so much more efficient and clean. It looks like other wood stove makers will be bringing their products up to the high Hwam standard, embracing the same sort of tech that has made the Danish brand so popular.
It’s good to know that every Hwam stove is fitted with their Autopilot system as standard. And it’s also good to know there are more simple ways to make even an ordinary wood stove a lot more efficient.
Other ways to make your wood burner as efficient as possible
Here are our tips to keeping the cost of running a wood burner down and the heat high!
- Get the right sizes burner for your room – there’s no need to go for something bigger than you need, which uses more fuel simply because of its size. If you’re not sure, ask your wood burner supplier for advice
- Choose the most eco-efficient stove you can afford
- Never use wet wood – the most efficient and cleanest choice is kiln dried logs or logs you’ve dried yourself properly at home, which can take as long as two years depending on how it is stored
- Don’t use timber that contains a lot of oil and tar – the flammable tar will line your chimney and if left too long can impede the air flow, or even start a chimney fire
- Learn how to finely adjust the primary secondary and tertiary air flow using the special vents and screw-in knobs
- Replace the fireproof rope that seals the doors whenever it gets tatty or bits drop off
- Empty and clean the stove before every use so the airflow doesn’t get blocked by ash and bits of charcoal
- Get your chimney swept as often as recommended by the manufacturer. If you’re not sure how often to do it, your chimney sweep will probably be able to advise you
