(NA) Heating a house with wood

Weekend Warrior

Weekend Warrior

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Mr Madman
In my mid-twenties, I bought a house with a woodstove on 5 wooded acres. I thought I would save all kinds of money by heating the house with wood during the cold winters of the upper mid-west. The experience taught me an important lesson (and actually several other valuable lessons): mainly that my time is worth money. I learned this lesson after several years of wood heating by one day "doing the math" of my time of cutting, hauling, and splitting (by hand with a maul and axe -- I was young) of the wood vs. what it would cost me to heat with propane / gas. The math showed I was working that woodstove for about $2 an hour. I realized a second part-time job, even at minimum wage, would be more efficient than my woodstove and I stopped heating with wood.

Some other lessons I learned before I stopped: 1) A modern, efficient (read oxygen-starved) woodstove can backdraft, with "explosive" results -- got knocked across the room and lost all the hair on my legs which leads to the second lesson: 2) don't open the door to a back-drafting stove, especially in your underwear. 3) Maul's split feet much better / faster than they split wood. 4) Splitting wood by hand when the chopping block is surrounded by previously chopped logs can sometimes create a natural fulcrum which can send a log flying right at your head while simultaneously sending your maul at your foot. 5) The local doctor, and later sheriff, can be hard to convince that you, and not your spouse, cut your own foot AND gave yourself a black eye from your unintentional log-splitting fulcrum. 6) Chain saw blades can be bought for $15 with a 30 minute trip to the store (this was 1995) while sharpening a blade by hand takes hours and never is quite right afterward. 7) Different types of wood burn at DRASTICALLY different temperatures (see backdraft lesson #1 above).

So all this being said, now 25 years later I just moved into a house with a previously-installed woodstove, and I've started heating with wood again. I guess I never learn! Why would I heat again with wood? As I've aged, I've found a few reasons other than money saving. I'm doing it now because I like the independence of recovering my own "fuel" from my own acreage. I also like when I get a chill, I can just go sit by the fire for a few minutes, and the chill is gone. I no longer split by hand, but I have a nice hydraulic splitter. Unlike my stove from the 1990's, this current stove has adjustable air intake, to avoid a backdraft. And, I don't hold any dreams of saving tons of money, but just some independence.

Anyone else heat with wood?
 
We have both wood and natural gas. Natural gas is very expensive here. So Wood helps cut the cost. Also, you can keep the house much warmer for much cheaper. There is work involved, that’s for sure. But a GOOD modern wood stove (read Blaze King) will really cut down on your wood usage.
 
Heftiger said:
We have both wood and natural gas. Natural gas is very expensive here. So Wood helps cut the cost. Also, you can keep the house much warmer for much cheaper. There is work involved, that’s for sure. But a GOOD modern wood stove (read Blaze King) will really cut down on your wood usage.
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Funny that I've heated two different houses with wood but I've never bought a woodstove. I've heard of the Blaze King (and I've also heard nothing but good things about it). I rebuilt my current stove a month ago, a Resolute Acclaim, before doing any research. Now I see that everyone recommends not rebuilding my stove (and I see why, as the rebuild cost about $700). I like this stove, really love the look of it, and I'm shocked at how well it heats my house. The temp last night here was in the upper 20's, but the house was 65-70+ all night, and my house is nearly 3000 square feet, modern style with very high ceilings. I'll look into the Blaze King when its time to replace the Acclaim (before the next rebuild).
 
I too used to have a house where I harvested and used wood to heat. I was more careful and always thought of the harvesting part as exercise. That was many houses ago and we now have a gas fireplace with a remote control. My wife loves it.

We have one more move in us as we are retired and we plan to get closer to the grandkids and I look forward to a wood fireplace again.
 
When I was younger a woman in our neighborhood had a wood stove and used a circular saw to cut up oak pallets to burn. Every now and then she would scoop out a pile of nails.
 
My stepdad and his neighbor team up one day a year and cut enough wood to get both of them through the winter. Of course, to do it that fast he has a $30,000 tractor with a front end loader, Kawasaki mule, a massive trailer, only the best and sharpest chainsaws and the beefiest custom built log splitter I've ever seen. He wanted a log splitter low to the ground so he could roll big logs on it rather than lift them up to it, had it built, it's powerful enough that it will split any size log you're man enough to roll up onto it.

It's a spectacle, all that equipment coming out to cut some wood for heat. 25 acres of good hardwood timber to pick from means they can pick from one of the fallen trees or drop a nice big one and have it cut, split and stacked in the barn by dinner. They stay a year or two ahead so the wood is good and dry.

I just couldn't do that with my little half acre with my '95 ezgo golf cart and wagon. I like my electric heat with gas logs as a backup.
 
Wood heat has a quality to it like no other. It’s far “cozier” than propane/gas/heat pump, and the smell is great.

Our last house was set up for a wood stove in the basement (which was finished and we used as the TV room). The one the house came with was supposedly not safe anymore so we bought a new one. The trick we found was to source appropriate burning wood at someone else’s labor. So we bought a cord of wood the first year, and we had to chop down some trees by the second year. Those trees we chopped, we gave half the wood to someone in exchange for them splitting the remainder. So it can still be cheap.

But it’s not a good primary source, too much work. It’s something to do when you’re there to enjoy it, or as a backup when your main furnace goes out (we had that happen).

I miss the wood stove.
 
I saw up (free) hardwood pallets as described above - forest/local firewood is scarce here.

Burning wood does keep you warm; all that cutting and hauling builds up a sweat!

I wasn’t sure I’d like the heat of a woodstove til I saw the cats stretch out in front of it like they were in some magical kind of euphoria, then I understood.
 
Fiveslide said:
My stepdad and his neighbor team up one day a year and cut enough wood to get both of them through the winter. Of course, to do it that fast he has a $30,000 tractor with a front end loader, Kawasaki mule, a massive trailer, only the best and sharpest chainsaws and the beefiest custom built log splitter I've ever seen. He wanted a log splitter low to the ground so he could roll big logs on it rather than lift them up to it, had it built, it's powerful enough that it will split any size log you're man enough to roll up onto it.

It's a spectacle, all that equipment coming out to cut some wood for heat. 25 acres of good hardwood timber to pick from means they can pick from one of the fallen trees or drop a nice big one and have it cut, split and stacked in the barn by dinner. They stay a year or two ahead so the wood is good and dry.

I just couldn't do that with my little half acre with my '95 ezgo golf cart and wagon. I like my electric heat with gas logs as a backup.
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I already had a big tractor with a front end loader, so hauling wood out is not too much trouble. One thing I did pick up is a set of pallet forks for the front end loader quick-attach. It makes hauling the logs easier, and then I'm stacking my wood on pallets, so when I burn through one stack, I can just go get another pallet and bring it to the forefront / near the door by the stove. I don't burn the actual pallets though, lol.
 
Weekend Warrior said:
I already had a big tractor with a front end loader, so hauling wood out is not too much trouble. One thing I did pick up is a set of pallet forks for the front end loader quick-attach. It makes hauling the logs easier, and then I'm stacking my wood on pallets, so when I burn through one stack, I can just go get another pallet and bring it to the forefront / near the door by the stove. I don't burn the actual pallets though, lol.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it can be great when you have the equipment to make it easier. A guy like me, with a small Stihl chainsaw and a maul, it's too much work. I have zero need for a tractor.

I do have plans to build a nice outdoor fire pit, though, but feeding that once a week or so isn't that big a deal.
 
I did it for a while.

In terms of practicality, I found the compressed bricks that Tractor Supply sells to produce the most heat with the least effort. They also were the cleanest solution. I took the chimney off to clean it after a winter of using those bricks, and there was nothing to clean. There was little or no visible smoke coming from the chimney, either, once they ignited (which also was much easier than when using logs).

The bricks also were much less-expensive than self-harvested wood if I assigned even a dollar an hour to my own labor. I forget the exact price, but they were pretty cheap by the pallet. They were more expensive than purchased cordwood by bulk, but probably pretty close on a BTU / dollar basis.

Environmentally, I don't buy the argument that burning wood is "carbon neutral" because the carbon was sequestrated in the tree. The same can be said of the carbon in petroleum if you widen the time scale. As I see it, what is being released now is what matters, not when or how it got into the fuel in the first place. Nonetheless, I suspect that the bricks emit much less carbon than logs simply because there's little or no smoke. That's not very scientific, I know. But it seems sensible. More complete combustion should produce less atmospheric carbon.

I've thought about installing a wood stove in this place, but it's too much work for too little benefit. Propane and electric oil-filled radiators do the job just fine at a low cost. Unless I have guests, I heat the house to about 55 F with the propane and the rooms we're sitting or sleeping in to about 68 F with the oil-filled heaters. I pre-buy the propane in May or June to get the best price, so my combined total heating costs usually come out to between $2,000.00 and $3,000.00 / year. I doubt I'd ever recover the investment in a wood stove at that rate.

Rich
 
1103190917-1.jpg Why heat a house with wood?.....answer is the last line of the OP....energy independence....plus! Of course the longer answer has more to do with your situations and inclinations. Just looked over at the thermometer on the thermostat indicating 77 degrees with an OAT of 31. Cozy, and I like it this way. :)

Situation (ideal)....we built our house to be super-energy-efficient in 2011, with consulting from the OSU building structures gurus, ICF construction, and fanatical tightness. When they were finishing out the build in February in NE Ohio they kept the whole place (two levels of 1800 sq. ft each) in the 60's with a single 1500 watt milk house heater sitting in the basement. We live in natural gas country, but they wanted $15K to run it to the house, so said 'no thanks' and went all-electric, with a low-temp heat pump (will work at -0). Put the absolute smallest high-efficiency (air-tight with external air) wood stove we could find in the living room.

Inclination (lazy)....have two farmer neighbors with large wood lots who sell firewood for dirt cheap. Part of my Fall each year (it's great being retired) is to convey an additional year's firewood to the un-attached garage (current year and next year are already in place and dried). Two large Rubbermaid garbage cans will move the wood to staging in the attached garage as needed. So far we've gone thru one garbage can this year...so fairly economical. Safety plan is a garden hose attached in the garage that will reach the wood stove, should there be a need and the fire extinguishers prove inadequate.

Gotta love it....life is good!

Jim
 
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When you're married to a Norwegian, you have no choice but to install a very fancy woodstove as the very first thing after buying a new house.
It's not our primary heat source, but cozy in the evenings.

There are many wood-sourcing options in AK. My favorite sourcing technique is to post a craigslist ad under "Barter" offering sourdough bread (or starter) in exchange. His favorite sourcing technique is to buy "off-cuts" from a lumber outfit and chop them up.
 
Weekend Warrior said:
In my mid-twenties, I bought a house with a woodstove on 5 wooded acres. I thought I would save all kinds of money by heating the house with wood during the cold winters of the upper mid-west. The experience taught me an important lesson (and actually several other valuable lessons): mainly that my time is worth money. I learned this lesson after several years of wood heating by one day "doing the math" of my time of cutting, hauling, and splitting (by hand with a maul and axe -- I was young) of the wood vs. what it would cost me to heat with propane / gas. The math showed I was working that woodstove for about $2 an hour. I realized a second part-time job, even at minimum wage, would be more efficient than my woodstove and I stopped heating with wood.

Some other lessons I learned before I stopped: 1) A modern, efficient (read oxygen-starved) woodstove can backdraft, with "explosive" results -- got knocked across the room and lost all the hair on my legs which leads to the second lesson: 2) don't open the door to a back-drafting stove, especially in your underwear. 3) Maul's split feet much better / faster than they split wood. 4) Splitting wood by hand when the chopping block is surrounded by previously chopped logs can sometimes create a natural fulcrum which can send a log flying right at your head while simultaneously sending your maul at your foot. 5) The local doctor, and later sheriff, can be hard to convince that you, and not your spouse, cut your own foot AND gave yourself a black eye from your unintentional log-splitting fulcrum. 6) Chain saw blades can be bought for $15 with a 30 minute trip to the store (this was 1995) while sharpening a blade by hand takes hours and never is quite right afterward. 7) Different types of wood burn at DRASTICALLY different temperatures (see backdraft lesson #1 above).

So all this being said, now 25 years later I just moved into a house with a previously-installed woodstove, and I've started heating with wood again. I guess I never learn! Why would I heat again with wood? As I've aged, I've found a few reasons other than money saving. I'm doing it now because I like the independence of recovering my own "fuel" from my own acreage. I also like when I get a chill, I can just go sit by the fire for a few minutes, and the chill is gone. I no longer split by hand, but I have a nice hydraulic splitter. Unlike my stove from the 1990's, this current stove has adjustable air intake, to avoid a backdraft. And, I don't hold any dreams of saving tons of money, but just some independence.

Anyone else heat with wood?
Click to expand...

Had a 1500 sq ft house years ago that I heated with wood for three years. Fire place insert with a fan that circulated the air in from floor level, around the fire box and out at the top. Worked great. I bought firewood. Don’t know if I was saving money over gas.
Have a Cabin up in the mountains, about 700 sq ft. Big rock fire place that is completely internal. Takes about a day and a half of fire to heat the rocks up to the point where it, not so much the fire it self heats the place up. The air it sucked out of the room up the chimney, 12 inch square made it not very efficient. That air had to come in from outside. Then I put in some duct work from underneath the cabin directly into the fire box and glass doors. Works great. I buy wood. Years ago I cut and sold firewood for a living. The novelty wore off a long time ago.
 
Pretty soon it's going to be illegal in California......


My sister has a woodstove with a cathalytic converter and a cooling jacket that ties into the houses hydronic heating system. Once the burn chamber heats up, it re-routes the exhaust over the cathalytic after-burner which mostly turns CO into CO2 and eliminates most soot. Once the woodstove pumps our hot water, the other heat soources like Geo and an oil furnace drop offline.
 
kath said:
When you're married to a Norwegian, you have no choice but to install a very fancy woodstove as the very first thing after buying a new house.
It's not our primary heat source, but cozy in the evenings.

There are many wood-sourcing options in AK. My favorite sourcing technique is to post a craigslist ad under "Barter" offering sourdough bread (or starter) in exchange. His favorite sourcing technique is to buy "off-cuts" from a lumber outfit and chop them up.
Click to expand...

I’m married to a Norwegian. Gave her a chainsaw for Christmas once. She let me play with it when she wasn’t using it, which was never:)
 
When I was young we had a wood stove in out house, downstairs. We closed off those three rooms and mostly lived in there during the winter, wearing a jacket in other parts of the house where the thermostat was set to 50.

Our stove had a fan which circulated air around the firebox and the amount of heat it could produce was phenomenal. If we kept it going full blast, it would have easily been 100+ degrees. I really liked knowing that whatever ice age was coming, I knew were going to have heat.
 
My moms house has a pellet stove and she loves it. She keeps the pellet stove around 73 degrees and the propane heat at 70 degrees.

She started the cool season with 2.5 tons of pellets and I suspect she will use 1.25 tons this year.

Around 300 bucks a year to heat the house on wood pellets. But it needs electricity to work, so it doesn't heat during power outages.
 
I’ve always had a wood stove, for two reasons

1 Appeal, it’s nice to have it going for say Christmas night or if you want the that vibe

2 Stuff happens, I can always find something to burn, even if the electric goes out, heating oil company has a issue, etc, can always find wood to toss on.

Now I wouldn’t have a full time house heated by wood, unless I had a bunch of crotch fruit who I could task with that, be good for them too, don’t do your chores I’ll get a hotel room and you can enjoy the 40f house lol
 
My remote cabin has two wood stoves but I got tired of midnight fire tending so I added an oil stove. We use wood to bring the temp up and oil to maintain it. It's the best of both worlds.
 
When I bought this house I heated with wood for 2 winters. The first with the pile the previous owners left, until I found out much of it was rotten, The 2nd winter with purchased wood. You can get permits here to cut downed trees on public land but it's too much of a hassle for me. So then I had an air-source Mini-Split heat pump installed. Very happy with the decision. With our cheap electric prices it's only a bit more than purchased wood, and it does cooling for those 2-3 days/year. I keep wood around for power outages, ambiance and as a bit of a boost those few below freezing days even though the system doesn't need it. It doesn't have it's own electric backup but is rated way below our typical winter lows. Absolute worst case I've kept all the electric heaters in the house in good repair.
 
EdFred said:
Pellet stove. Don't have one, but would.
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My neighbor (whom I supply with logs from my land, which he cuts and splits for his whole-house wood stove) really wishes he'd gotten a pellet stove.
 
I cut and split - I get 4 cord of log length delivered. We might save some money, but with me it's just lifestyle. I have a mostly sedentary job, so an hour or so on the wood pile feels good. No accidents - yet!
 
With a 30 ton hydraulic log splitter, the math is in favor of wood.
I don't heat the house with wood anymore. I put a wood burning insert in my fireplace 30 years ago and I used to run it 24x7 from the end of October into April. I would use @ 6 cord a season. It would heat most of the house ( I have 4 level split level house). The room downstairs didn't get any benefit from it.
Now I only run it on really cold days, or for ambiance. Mostly because I'm lazy and I'm running out of trees on my property to take down.
And buying wood costs more than propane in my neck of the woods.
 
Zeldman said:
Around 300 bucks a year to heat the house on wood pellets. But it needs electricity to work, so it doesn't heat during power outages.
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If she has issues with power install a UPS for her.



Wayne
 
We had a really nice fireplace in the prior home. It had a controlled external air source, so it didn't pull air from the house except when we opened the doors. It also filled a chamber with air from the outside to heat. When it got hot enough the fans blew it into the house. That over pressurized the house which means warm air leaked out instead of cold air leaking in. That really warmed up the house.



Wayne
 
Now I am curious.
Growing up I had a coal stove; parents switched to wood pellets after I moved out.
I always liked both, multiple neighbors went with wood stoves.

Now, I have house built in 1910; it has four fire places. Old fashioned brick chimneys, minimal testing during home purchase. Previous owner used one fireplace once.... So basically I have brick chimneys, with no liners and have not been used in over thirty years.

Any pros/cons of wood pellets vs wood stove inserts or just get liners put in and burn wood.... Or just leave the fireplaces as pretty wall ornaments?

Tim
 
Nothing like sitting by a wood fire, even if it's inefficient.

Our cabin has a wood stove in the living room and a small coal stove in the bedroom, no other heat. We can let the fire in the living room go out because the coal burns all night long keeping the bedroom warm. In the morning, relight the wood stove and eat breakfast in the warm bedroom while the living room warms up again.

But if wood wasn't free around the cabin I'd probably go coal in both rooms.
 
Dana said:
Nothing like sitting by a wood fire, even if it's inefficient.
Click to expand...

Yep, drinking a fine wine with my wife, listening to the pop and crackle of the wood and throwing another log on the fire....
 
I used to cut the wood for my fathers outside wood stove. 10-15 cords a year. Had to keep in 3’ Sections. It was a summers of work. Good work but dangerous with a saw that long. He finally gave up using it due to the labor in just Loading it twice a day.

I use anthracite (hard) coal. Coal is still king in NEPA. Can’t beat the heat or the cost. I feel marginally better as my coal company has been reclaiming odd slag piles left over in the area as opposed to strip mining.
 
My youngest son partially heats with wood in his house in Kotzebue, Alaska. With stove oil at something like $8 a gallon, heating with wood is the only real alternative and still their oil bill will top out at almost $1,000 per month in January and February just keeping the house at 55-60 F. The closest trees are about 30 miles away by snowmobile. Then you have to find dead standing timber, fall it, get it onto and haul it back on a sled without rolling the sled or the snowmobile, cut, split and stack. Land ownership can also be a problem so you have to make sure where you are cutting is legal for you. A lot of work for sure and he burns 10-15 cords per winter so nearly every weekend is devoted to wood gathering. And of course, winter is the only time when you can gather firewood (unless you have a barge) since they are pretty much surrounded by water, so the cold and distance adds to the problem.
 
Just make sure you keep the flue clean, or you may heat the house a lot more than you had planned.
 
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