Wood heat

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I guess it depends on your situation. For us our power goes out quite a bit and we have an almost endless supply of wood on the property. Check with your insurance and local codes I suppose. In some states you cannot install a used stove to save money. We found a sale on new stoves in the summer.for 30% off. It was about $2500 total to get it in. But yes that is allot of gas if you can still get it.
 
Heating with wood right now. It's in the 20s and we have 2 stoves going. But, we live in the woods, so wood is either free or cheap if you buy it. I think it depends on your location. There are people around here living in mobile homes with wood stoves. We have a regular house , well sort of, so not sure how you have to put a wood stove in a mobile home .
 
We heat with wood only, although our off grid situation kind of forces it. We also live in a forest so do our own firewood, but buying it is easy enough. Depending on the area, and if the electricity goes down often, heating with wood is the most reliable option. Most other heating types requires some electricity to function.
There are many mobile homes around here with wood stoves, retailers usually have listed by each stove if its mobile home approved.
 
I have cut wood and fed stoves my entire life until last year. I still have 2 stoves in the house and 1 in the shop but I had a Carrier Green Speed heat pump installed in our house. It's the greatest home improvement I've ever made! We still cut a little wood for the shop, fire pit and emergencies but its not every other weekend!
 
Cut my own wood from my woods.
Can't physically do that anymore.

I buy it now, my cost is below $200 a year.

My Englander is their biggest firebox, heats 1900 sq ft easily.

Cost me under $1000 to install with chimney , 10 years ago.

Before that I was spending $250+ a month to heat from Oct to April.

Do the math.

Jim
 
I had a heating business. I always recommended that my customers have at least two heat sources and that at least one of these not require electricity. Wood stoves fit the bill quite well.

One source for free firewood is old pallets. Find a business that wants to get rid of them and go haul them away. Most places will give them to you so they don't have to pay to have them taken to the dump. If they are in the habit of sending them back to a shipper then the broken pallets still need to be removed. You might also go to a construction site and ask to claim wood from their dumpster. Here again it will reduce their dump fees. If they want to charge you then go to the next site.
 
Weve had wood heat for 11 years, cut it out of property. Old house uses alot of wood, but would cost a fortune in electric heat. Ours has a glass front so ismts a relaxing setting in the evening watching the flicker bounce off the walls. It's also nice for making coffee, heating soups, stews, frying etc on...every little bit helps.
 
Weve had wood heat for 11 years, cut it out of property. Old house uses alot of wood, but would cost a fortune in electric heat. Ours has a glass front so ismts a relaxing setting in the evening watching the flicker bounce off the walls. It's also nice for making coffee, heating soups, stews, frying etc on...every little bit helps.
My house exactly, thought I was reading something I wrote! My husband and I have heated with the woodstove for 30yrs. We cut and split 2x a year off our property. Awesome heat!
 
It really doesn’t matter much if you can get a lot of gas for what a stove costs. Heat is the object and if the gas stops coming, the gas heater won’t do much good.
We heat with propane and wood pellets, with a working fireplace and wood stove here just in case. I’ve heated with wood all my life, even in places where there is “no wood”. Wood is everywhere. Pallets, tree trimmings, etc. stock up

We just got several tons of coal as a backup to the backup, as well as materials to make pellet burners for the stove and fireplace. Several tons of pellets in sheltered storage. Just in case.
 
Until we moved into our current home 3 years ago, we always had a wood stove as a backup. It was a life saver several times. The way this home is arranged, a wood stove would not work very well. I miss it.
 
Until we moved into our current home 3 years ago, we always had a wood stove as a backup. It was a life saver several times. The way this home is arranged, a wood stove would not work very well. I miss it.
You would think that the way my house is set up, it's long. The wood stove is in an addition the original owners added on the east end. It will heat the whole house! We have great insulation so I'm sure that helps. One year during an ice storm we lost power for 4 1/2 days! Used the generator for fridges, freezers, lights and tv and cooked and heated with the wood stove! Strange thing, I'm west of Ft. Worth Tx and never lost power back in Feb.!
 
I would like to have a wood furnace someday. I know of two people who have them and they both love them. One has a basement setup next to his LP furnace. The LP is his backup. The other has his furnace outside, about 75 or 100 feet from the house, with the heat duct underground. I assume the furnace blower draws the heat through the ductwork.

Houses here usually do not have an open floor plan so wood tends not to heat the whole house real well. My brother has a stove in his addition that heats two rooms and up the stairway. It does well at that but can't hear the rest of the house. With a nice open plan it could work well but here you still have to get the heat into the bathroom to ensure the pipes don't burst, and in -20° weather getting the heat in there can be rough...
 
I miss wood heat! Have had it most my life. That said, it's just a numbers game. How much does a stove and wood cost where you live? How much is your current heating bill and possible replacement of furnace? Compare then consider the added perk of not depending on a mass system be it gas or electric. Then you can make a real decision. One other thing is wood is a little messier in the house - whether that bothers you or not???
 
While wood heat can be both economical and efficient it is not the most sustainable.
It takes three trees to heat a home for a year. (approximate) Those trees have taken 50 years to grow. To sustainably heat your house you will need a tree farm of 150 trees being replanted as you harvest to always have the 3 trees per house per year for each house being heated.
In a small town area if you have 1000 homes that will require a tree farm of 150000 trees continuously growing, harvested and replanted yearly. Under ideal conditions (no blight, no insect damage, predation, no forest fires) that would be sustainable. Try to do that for a single smallish city and you run out of room.
Not to bring up science, you are adding the carbon that has been sequestered for 50 years and adding it back to the environment in a single year. OK you are growing more trees so you are statistically "carbon neutral" over the long haul as long as those trees all reach maturity on time and none die. Just remember that 2 out of every 3 trees planted don't live to maturity.
 
The older a tree gets the less it takes in carbon, old growth forests take in next to nothing and also things don't grow to good under those trees, I see that a lot around here, not even berry bushes, maybe some mushrooms, but that's about it, and deer and elk want nothing to do with old growth as it's not safe for them and there is no available food, that's why forest edges are so good, lots of new saplings and conversion woods that they can easily feed on. I see this as the trees above our property have grown the underbrush has disappeared and so have the deer.
 
Viking,
That old saying has been proven false. A taller old tree has more ability to use sunlight because there is more area. Also the tree grows from the top down so every year it uses carbon to build the entire trunk one more layer in diameter from the top to the roots. While the lower levels of sunlight at the forest floor restricts what grows well that means the the tree is using it instead. Just search "do old trees produce less oxygen?" to get the latest research on old growth trees.
 
Well I did a Google search and it seems like there are both sides to this issue, I guess it all depends on if people are environmentally inclined or scientifically inclined or a little of both.
 

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