The Wet Wood Ban: What You're Actually Required to Tell Customers (and Why It's Worth Writing Down)

A smoky stove is rarely the stove's fault

A customer rings three weeks after a clean, HETAS-compliant install. The glass is black, the room smells of smoke every time the door opens, and they're convinced something's wrong with the installation. Nine times out of ten, the actual cause is sitting in their garden in a tarpaulin: logs that were never properly seasoned, burning at well above the moisture content the appliance was designed for.

You didn't sell them the wood. But you're the one who gets the call, and if you didn't say anything about fuel at handover, you're also the one who has to talk them down from a complaint that was never really about your work.

This is where the Ready to Burn rules matter to installers, not just to timber yards and garden centre firewood racks.

What the law actually says

The Air Quality (Domestic Solid Fuels Standards) (England) Regulations 2020 came into force on 1 May 2021. They do two separate things: they phase out the sale of traditional bituminous house coal, and they restrict the sale of wet wood.

The wet wood part is the one that affects most of your customers. Anyone selling wood in volumes under 2 cubic metres has to sell wood certified as having a moisture content of 20% or less, under the "Ready to Burn" scheme. Woodsure is the only body Defra has appointed to certify wood fuel against that standard, and certified logs carry the Ready to Burn logo along with the supplier's name and certification number, whether they're sold in a bag at a petrol station or listed on a website.

Sell wood above 20% moisture in those smaller volumes and you're breaking the law. Local authorities enforce it, with a £300 fixed penalty for a first offence and the option of a larger fine through the courts for anything more serious. The one exemption that matters: wood sold in bulk loads of 2m³ or more doesn't need Ready to Burn certification, but the seller has to give the customer written guidance on drying, storing, and testing the moisture content themselves before burning it.

None of this makes the installer legally responsible for what fuel the customer burns. But it does mean there's now a recognised standard you can point to, and a reason the advice you give at handover carries more weight than it used to.

Why this lands on your desk anyway

Burning wood above 20% moisture doesn't just smoke more. It burns cooler and dirtier, which means more tar and creosote building up in the flue, more soot on the glass, and a stove that looks and performs like it's faulty even when it's been fitted correctly. Over a season or two, that build-up is also exactly what drives the chimney fires and flue liner failures that turn into warranty disputes.

Customers rarely connect a damp log pile to any of that. They connect a problem with their stove to the person who fitted it. So the handover conversation, and more importantly a record that you had it, is doing real work even though you're not the one selling the fuel.

What's worth saying, and recording, at handover

A few minutes at the end of the job covers most of it:

Tell the customer what moisture content their appliance is designed to burn (20% or below, for the vast majority of modern stoves) and that a cheap moisture meter from a hardware shop costs less than one failed call-out visit.

Point them toward Ready to Burn certified logs or kiln-dried fuel if they're buying from a yard or online, rather than "seasoned" firewood with no certification behind the claim. "Seasoned" isn't a regulated term; Ready to Burn is.

If they're planning to season their own wood, be specific about how long that actually takes: most hardwoods need at least a year under cover, sometimes two, not the few months a lot of people assume.

Mention it again in writing, even briefly, in the handover pack or follow-up email. A verbal comment gets forgotten by the time there's a problem; a written one is something you can point back to.

Where this tends to fall apart on a busy week

The advice itself isn't complicated. It's remembering to give it on every job, and then having any record that you did, that falls apart when you're doing four installs a week and the fuel conversation happens standing by the van with ten other things on your mind.

That's the gap a proper job record closes. In BurnerCRM, handover notes sit against the job itself, next to the HETAS reference and the completion photos, so "advised on Ready to Burn fuel and moisture content" is one line you tick off rather than something you're trying to remember you said six months later when a customer calls about a smoky stove. It won't stop someone burning wet logs. It just means you're not relying on memory to show you told them not to.

If keeping that kind of detail against every job is the bit that slips when the diary's full, BurnerCRM is built around exactly that problem for stove and wood burner installers.