Lekto Wood Fuels have kindly sent me some of their night briquettes for the purpose of this review. With the weather outside this December a little frightful this was a warm welcome. (Excuse the puns) 🙂
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We’ve owned a log burner now for about 6 years, both in our current house and the last house. The odd things is, I’d never even heard of a night briquette until a few days ago! So my first job was to find out exactly what I was dealing with.
Table of Contents
What is a night briquette?
They are made from softwood bark, shavings and sawdust which is then compressed using 10,000psi of pressure to form these little brick shapes. The bark is generally taken as ‘would be waste’ from sustainable lumber yards and turned into eco friendly fuel. Each briquette measures roughly 15cm x 10cm x 7cm and are delivered in boxes measuring 34cm x 34cm x 27cm. This makes for easy storage.
What is the purpose of a night briquette?
Night briquettes have previously been most popular throughout Europe but are starting to become more common in the UK. As economies begin to look for more sustainable, environmentally friendly and cheaper fuel sources, heat logs have become a suitable eco-friendly option looking into the future.
For those who use their log burners as a primary source of heat, (in place of fossil fuel heating systems), the need to keep a fire going for longer periods of time has become more important. That’s where the night briquette comes in handy.
If, like us, you work from home, winter can become a time when heating is required throughout the day. Keeping your log burner going for long periods of time can become quite time consuming and a constant interruption, not to mention costly. If you have to keep restarting a fire that’s burnt out using more firelighters and kindling the costs can add up.
Lekto Night briquettes allow you to keep the flame going for longer periods of time – up to 8 hours in some cases! You no longer need to worry about the fire going out every couple of hours. Simply throw a couple of night briquettes on and they will burn slowly in the background.
As the name suggest however, their primary purpose is to produce heat throughout the night and make life easier in the morning to get a fire started.
Testing the night briquette
During my testing I put a briquette on the fire before going to bed. 10:30 pm. I then checked again in the morning, at about 8:00 am. Some nine and a half hours later and the stove was still warm and the living room still felt warm in mid-December with no other heating on throughout the night or morning. When I first opened the door I could only see ash, but after digging around I found this little potato shaped ember glowing away. Wow!
I then simply added some kindling, opened up the air vents and boom! Fire again without any of the hassle. They really work. Not just a gimmick.
Can night briquettes be used on their own?
Lighting a night briquette can be difficult due to the high density and material of the product. Therefore it’s recommended to create a good bed of embers or a suitable fire before adding the briquette. Once lit they will burn happily with even just a little air flow.
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Night briquettes will give off a reasonable amount of heat, but from testing, they perform best when coupled with another, faster-burning fuel. Hardwood heat logs or hardwood logs will provide a boost in heat when required.
Using several briquettes in a fire can give off a reasonable amount of heat but the airflow would need to be increased to produce more heat. This in turn will cause the briquette to burn faster.
Delivery service from Lekto Wood Fuels
Simply put, the delivery for these items is quick and easy. Next day by DPD in cardboard boxes. They weigh 20kg per pack, so quite heavy but our delivery guy didn’t seem to mind.
You can find out more about Lekto Wood Fuels delivery here.
Storage
Night briquettes will need to be stored somewhere dry and ideally in their plastic packaging. You won’t be able to store them anywhere outside where the moisture content is high. This will cause them to absorb the moisture and fall apart. We store ours under our stairs with a few placed in the wood basket next to the fire. You could also store them in a dry shed or garage.
The problem with night briquettes
There’s not much I can say that I don’t like about this product. It does what it says on the tin. The only negative thing, they can be a little messy. There was quite a bit of sawdust and shavings broken off in the plastic packaging. This did however still burn nicely when poured into the fire.
Conclusion
Night briquettes are given their name due to their unique ability to burn throughout the whole night, producing heat and making fire lighting an easier process in the morning. This has been proven to be an effective use of this product.
This doesn’t however mean this is the only use for night briquettes. We’ve also been using them during the day to both produce a prolonged heat source whilst also making it easier to light quicker burning wood fuels when extra heat is required.
I don’t believe this product will replace our current use of hardwood logs (or hardwood heat logs) but they certainly have changed the way we currently use our wood burning stove. I can now heat my house effectively throughout the day with reduced effort.
Lekto night briquettes are a good product, they’re environmentally friendly and they’re helping us keep warm this winter. To further test their use, I have now turned off my central heating system altogether to see how effective these combined fuels are keeping my family warm this winter. I will follow up in January with an update on how this is going. Sign up to my newsletter (you’ll find this in my sidebar) or follow my blog to keep updated on progress.
Thanks for reading this review of the Lekto Night Briquettes. Why not try another one of my posts for some further reading: