"Sheldon Harper" wrote in message
...
wrote in news:dg3vs1
:

George George@least wrote:

"Edwin Pawlowski" wrote in message

I don't know about the present models, but 20 years ago a good stove
was
only about 65% efficient...

"Efficiency" is a matter of how long you can keep the warmed air in the
space to be heated.

You are talking about something different. We might say that a heater's
efficiency is the ratio of the amount of heat released to the house to
the total amount of heat released when the fuel is completely burned and
the combustion products are cooled to room temperature.

Nick



"Combustion efficiency: (actual heat produced by combustion) divided by
(total heat potential of the fuel consumed)"

http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/faqs/glossary.html

This is a very good resource about bioenergy.

I still read Ed as talking about stove efficiency, which is how much of
what's produced by burning is recovered to heat the space rather than the
chimney. Nick's definition.

Combustion efficiency suffers on oil burners as well, do to incomplete
atomization and combustion.