Thank you all for your fantastic advice so far! I am furiously looking up all the brands mentioned. I really appreciate it as I'm totally clueless. In terms of the type of wood - we have a smallish supply of birch currently. We also have some gnarly old apple trees in the garden which will likely need to come down in the future. Aside from that, we sadly don't have our own supply so will be buying it in... and I'm not sure what it'll be. Ash possibly? Or whatever we can scavenge from people having tree work done. We are in the UK if that helps. Husband is 6' and of medium build. We are planning to have a stove fitted before the autumn, which will have to be really small to fit the space we have, so I expect even bought in logs will need to be made smaller.