Slash Fuel Bills, Heat With Wood
A wood stove can provide lots of heat on cold days for your house at a reduced cost for fuel. You will need a chimney. You will need a modern airtight stove. You will need some extra time to do more chores.
Modern airtight wood stoves are reasonably efficient at burning wood. Unlike the old Franklin stoves, you can control the amount of combustion air that reaches the fire. By controlling the air you control the combustion rate. With a controlled combustion rate you have control over the amount of heat the stove throws and the amount of wood that will burn in a given time.
Wood stoves are not cheap. Expect to pay about $700 or more for a decent model. It will also cost something to install the stove and the necessary pipes and chimney if you don’t have a stove already. There is some amount of maintenance that goes along with owning a wood stove. You will need to brush the creosote out of the chimney and stovepipes every year to prevent possible chimney fires. You will need to keep the area around the stove clear of combustible materials like furniture. Once you have your stove installed and it is cold outside, it is time to think of operating your new furnace.
You will need firewood. We’re not talking about the manufactured logs you buy at the grocery store for $5 a piece. You will need cord wood. For a typical winter you might go through five to ten full cords of wood. This is a lot of wood. That much firewood will cost a fair amount of money. If you are cheap you might look around for construction sites where trees have been cut down and cut up. You might be able to approach the builder and arrange to cart away the firewood, if you have a pickup truck. Maybe you have some trees growing on your property and can cut your own wood. Most probably you will have to buy firewood. This is part of the expense of running a wood stove for heat. Fuel is not going to be free, unless you scavenge.
When you get your wood you may or may not need to split it into manageable chunks. You may need to purchase a wood splitter or get skillful with a Monster Maul. You will more than likely have to split and stack your wood in a dry place where it will not rot out from rain and snow. A barn is a good place to store your wood, but tarps can also be used to keep your fuel dry if you have to stack it outside. All this adds up to a fair amount of manual labor. A wood stove is also an exercise program.
During the heating season you will have to haul wood from your stacking area to a rack by the house for easy access. I recommend building a rack out of Wolmanized 4×4s outside your front door. This makes it easy to bring wood inside for the fire on cold nights. A reasonably-sized rack should hold wood enough for about a week of burning. You can bring bucket loads of wood in for your fire a few times during the day.
When you wake up in the morning during the heating season one of the first things you will be doing is starting the fire. It helps if you have some trees around your house because you will need a source of twigs and small branches to act as kindling. Crumple up some newspapers and throw some twigs and small pieces of split wood on top. Allow enough space for air to circulate in your stack, then light the paper and wait for the wood to catch. You need to pay some attention to a fire in a wood stove if you expect it to keep burning.
Once you get a good bed of coals in your stove you can just add logs one or two at a time every couple hours throughout the day. You will have to adjust the air supply and damp off the stove if the temperature gets too hot. You should have a magnetic stove thermometer on the pipe just above the stove to monitor the heat from your fire. When the fire gets low, rake up the coals with a poker and add more logs.
A wood stove is not the best thing for keeping a constant temperature in your house. It will make the room it is in too hot and the rest of the house too cold. It is a good idea to run your furnace fan to distribute the heat throughout the house when your fire is going. On the plus side, if the power or the furnace goes out, you will still have a source of heat. With a properly installed and maintained wood stove you can expect to save about 50% on your winter heating bill. You will most likely want to heat with the furnace during the night unless you feel like waking up every two hours to put more wood on the fire.
Wood is a renewable resource and still provides a viable means of heating your home in the winter. If you’re bored and need more work in your life, there is nothing like tending a fire and hauling wood to give you some extra work to do. You can save a small amount of money by burning wood in a modern wood stove. You may enjoy the intense heat provided by an operating stove on cold days. Just realize, what you save in money will be paid for in extra work for you in tending and maintaining the stove.
We live in Alaska and heat with wood. It is more work than a traditional furnace but great outdoor exercise. And yes, some mornings are rather chilly. We have a large wood box on our furnace so by adding a bucket of coal with the wood before going to bed, we can keep it going overnight. My grandfather used to say wood is the only fuel where you get three heatings. First when you cut it. Second when you haul it. Third when you burn it.
Also you want to allow your split wood sit preferably a year (covered or in a shed) after cutting to allow it to properly dry before burning. Green wood does burn but smokes and isn’t as efficient. You can get a kit to make a wood stove out of a barrel for about $100. I’ve used these stoves and they work great with a good damper and a little practice.