What’s the difference between a wood-burning stove and a multi-fuel stove?
A wood-burning stove is generally designed to burn only wood. Wood burns best on a bed of ash with the air for combustion circulating over the fuel rather than from below it which is the case with other solid fuels such as coal, anthracite, peat and briquettes. These burn best on a grate which allows air for combustion to circulate from beneath the fuel, and hence why multi-fuel stoves have a grate fitted (usually with a riddling function which moves the grate back and forth in order to sieves the ash into an ash pan below the grate). Some manufacturers make multi-fuel only stoves in which you can burn the full range of solid fuels including wood, and others make wood-burning only models (I.e. with no grate) and supply a ‘drop-in’ grate as an option if you decide that you want to burn other multi-fuels later on. Generally, wood-burning only models are usually cheaper than multi-fuel variants for this reason.
