Heating with Wood - Introduction

Heating with wood has many advantages particularly if you live off-grid. Wood heat is also dirty and some work, too. You should know what you are in for if you haven't done it before.

You have to procure the wood which, unless you buy it and have it delivered, means finding, cutting, and splitting it. Then you have to store it someplace where you can keep it dry. Bugs, rodents and snakes might move into your wood pile. You have to bring armloads of it inside to someplace close to your stove. It’s dirty stuff so bits fall off on your floor that you might want to sweep up.

You have to light the stove. For this you need a lighter or matches, newspaper, kindling and assorted sizes of wood to get it going. Sometimes, when trying to light a fire in the stove, I wonder how it is even possible for fires to start accidentally. There is a technique to it. If the stove is not drawing correctly you get smoke in the house and have to open doors and windows in freezing temperatures to clear the smoke. An improperly designed and installed stove can be a bigger headache than anyone would want to deal with. Dangerous, too. After all, you are dealing with fire.

Have I talked you out of it yet? I didn’t think so.

Once the stove is going, you will want to keep it going if the weather is cold. Depending on how efficient your house is and how cold it gets where you live, you might have to add wood to the stove every couple of hours, even in the middle of the night. My wife kicks me awake sometimes at 3AM saying, “Your turn.” That means it’s my turn to go out to the living room and put some more logs on. If we don’t do this, it could be 45 degrees in the house when we get up the next morning. Brrrr! That's survivable for sure but we prefer to wake up to a warmer house.

You should clean the stove often. Every day, or maybe every other day, you will need to shovel the ashes from the stove into a metal bucket and put it outside. (Never put your loaded ash bucket on your wood deck. Every year at least a couple of people in our area burn their houses down this way.) You have to figure out what to do with all the ashes. We end up with a good 30-gallon trash can full every couple of months each winter. Finally, you need to clean your chimney once a year, a potentially dirty job if you mess up.

If none of the above has deterred you, you may be just the kind of person that would enjoy the whole process of heating with wood. There are many rewards.

Our woodpile - about enough for one winter

For us, heating with wood is nearly free. Instead of paying a couple hundred dollars a month for gas in the winter like we used to do back in the city, we pay…… nothing! OK, not nothing, but almost nothing. On our twelve acres there are a lot of walnut trees. Every year one of them dies, and/or huge branches break off in storms and we get to harvest that wood to use in our stove. We also are surrounded by a forest full of juniper and a wood cutting permit costs only $20 for four cords. A cord of wood is a tightly packed stack of cut wood four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. We burn a little over two cords per winter.

Because we don’t have to pay for the wood with anything other than our labor, we tend to make it toasty warm inside sometimes, like 75 degrees. What a luxury! You can warm up quickly after coming in from the cold. Just go stand in front of the stove and bake yourself. Nice! You can dry out your wet hats and gloves, too. Some stoves have special attachments for this.

Bacon, eggs and toast cooked on our wood stove

You can also cook on the wood stove if it has a flat surface on top. I cooked my entire breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast on our wood stove this morning. You can keep your coffee or tea hot and reheat last night’s dinner all without having to walk all the way to the kitchen to check the stove (about 10 feet for us but, hey!)

Wood stoves use no electricity, unlike furnaces and such.  If your electricity goes out you still have heat. They are relatively quiet – no little motors or fans running, just the pleasant popping of wood. Heating with wood does not require any connection to society’s infrastructure. You don’t have to count on propane being available or be connected to the natural gas grid. You can be totally self-sufficient in the heat department.

The fire looks great! That may not be important to some, but it is nice.

You can even build your own wood stove. It is not a complicated appliance like a furnace is. It is, basically, a metal box with a fire in it. How hard is that? Actually there is more to it than that. I spent about eight years as a certified Wood Heat Technician. To become certified I had to take classes on wood stove design, the physics and chemistry of burning wood, and the building codes that apply to combustion appliances. I installed a lot wood stoves during those years. I plan to write an article soon on how you can make an efficient wood stove.

I envision writing at least four more articles worth of useful information on how to get your off-grid home set up to efficiently use wood burning as your heat source. Stay tuned for the following subjects: How to cut down a tree safely; How to build your own high-efficiency wood stove; How to properly install your stove and chimney; and How to clean your chimney without making a mess.

It is 40 degrees outside right now and it’s just after dark. It’s been raining all night and all day. Our wood stove is cranking and it’s 74 inside. I think I may have to take off my sweatshirt!