Got Wood.

[snousle]

We can has heat.



We kind of procrastinated on getting a wood stove. The flue was in place, hanging from the ceiling, so we just had to "hook it up". There's that word again! "Just", which means "the hard part".

I could not resist this beyootiful soapstone stove, although I can't help but wonder if it was really such a great idea. It's supposedly a little more efficient than iron stoves, but it is not clear how that could be true given that stone is surely more insulating than iron. It heats up a little on the slow side but stays hot for a long time.

Anyway, this is my first time living with wood heat, and it's a bit of a learning experience. This thing eats quite a bit of wood, and when you have to haul it out of the woods you get a real close-up look at what energy is all about. I think a lot of American energy policy is wonky because our use of energy is so abstract that people don't understand where it goes. You flip a switch, or put a hose into a hole, and never actually see or touch the fuel you are burning. When you have to cut it, chop it, haul it, stack it, and put it into the firebox yourself, you realize, holy shit, this is a LOT of wood. Could you imagine doing this without power tools of any kind? No wonder people lived in one-room cabins with no windows. The real cost of windows isn't the glass, it's the heat!

Wood gathering is a bit of a family affair. We have quite a bit of fallen oak - enough on the ground right now to heat our house for ten years. I don't know about the long-term effects of removing wood from the forest floor, but in the short term it both keeps us warm and reduces the risk of forest fire, so I call it a good thing. But just because it's sitting fifty feet from the house doesn't mean it's a piece of cake to use it.

This wood is like iron, so Bill needed a $900 Husquavarna chainsaw to deal with it. (Got that a few years ago.) Our neighbor, who's having a few age-related physical problems, is nonetheless the only guy around who is strong enough to get the rounds onto a truck, so he lifted about half a cord for us in 80-pound sections. Then another neighbor brought over his splitter, which makes short work of the rounds. (Bill can split the stuff with a maul, but not for very long without hurting something. When I try, the maul just bounces off - it's kind of embarrassing.) Finally, I get to stack it under the roof of the pizza oven.

Then we burn the wood in the oven to make pizza, and the neighbors come over to eat it. LOL.

We didn't really get on the ball this year, so we've also bought a cord of ready-to-use wood from the neighbor with the splitter.

The moisture content of the wood definitely affects the heat output, and what we've got now is not perfectly seasoned, so some of it burns sluggishly. I have tried to measure the moisture in one of the split pieces, but gave up - after several days in a warm oven, it was still losing 5 grams an hour and was apparently going to continue doing that forever. I stopped after it had lost 20% of its weight, and I'm guessing it's somewhere around 25-30% moisture in total. Ideally, it should be less than 20, but considering that green wood is 60% water, it's not terrible.

We still use small amounts of propane, i.e. on very cold mornings when we want heat NOW, but if we kept the house at 70 using the furnace it would cost a fortune. True, the cost of heating a space is a small fraction of the cost of building a space, but somehow it hurts more. Hauling wood makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Comments

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

I used to live for a year in a 17th century converted barn with no central heating, double glazing, nor gas or oil in Shropshire near the Welsh border.

The romantic allure of wood being mainly the heat source soon loses it's sheen when it's icy/snowing, the logs in the shed outside are frozen together with all sorts of creepy crawlies hiding within, and there is ice on the inside of (the old murky thick glass) windows when you wake up, despite the 3-4 foot stone walls. Did have electricity but no electric heaters (cost?) but we had one evilly smelly old
paraffin heater.

Getting up to prep the fire in that was hard, and I wasn't really allowed as a kid. probably the start of my getting late habit!

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Believe me, it's a lot more romantic in California than anywhere that has a real winter. We just have "show winters" where the trees look pretty for a few days but you don't have to put on a jacket if you don't want to. Sort of like April in London, LOL.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Which, I might add, makes the amount of wood we use even more startling.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

True.

You've not known icy damp winters til you've had one on or near North Wales. :-O

Seems like the rest of the country might be bright and iceless, apart from maybe Scotland (another one) and it just rains and then freezes...repeatedly. And sometimes snows ;-)

I think only Canada could maybe compete in the damp yet bitterly cold stakes...

[bbearseviltwin.livejournal.com]

The old saying was "Wood heats you twice, once when you chop it and once when it burns."
The efficancy with the soap stone stove is in that the heat is absorbed by the stone and stored thus radiating into the room long after the fire is out. Thus saving heat that would have been "wasted" by being used and lost early when you don't need it due to overheating. Or something like that, but it makes thermodynamic sense if not logical sense.

[h0gwash.livejournal.com]

That is a gorgeous stove.

[chef2b.livejournal.com]

Your wood stove is a hell of a lot more efficient than the one that the old man's dad made from an old water heater. It worked, but you had to constantly feed the damned thing. Not so efficient.

What worked for us, is to have the next small stack of wood that was going to go into the fire on the floor in the room with the wood stove. Once the room got heated up it tended to dry out the wood that was "on deck" so to speak. Not ideal, but good in a pinch.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Removing all the dead wood from a forest is not a good idea in the long run, because it removes a) a habitat b) nutrients and c) erosion control. There are a lot of species, from protista on up, that rely on dead wood for food or housing. You can reduce the impact by returning the ashes to more or less where you took the wood from, and leaving half the deadwood where you find it.

http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/forest/ecological/deadwood.html

In CA though I believe you have an ecosystem that relies on occasional flash fires? So it might not be the major issue that it is elsewhere provided you cycle the ashes back into the soil.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

The ecosystem here looks pristine, but actually it exists in a constant state of existential panic. There are so many invasive species that it's hard to know what is "good" or "bad" anymore.

We are only removing wood from a ~5 acre area near the house where fire control is most important anyway. The rest of the forest has plenty - so much that it's hard to find your way through it all. The rate at which we plant stuff will probably exceed the effect of wood gathering in the long run, since the decay of these trunks takes decades!

Is that enough eco-guilt? I think our harvest rate is going to be just fine.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to guilt you, it's just that I happen to have researched this as it applies to our local forests. Is all.

[barbarian-rat.livejournal.com]

I can relate to that. Duke and I used wood heat when we lived in Rio Nido. There is always a lot of prep work in the summer/fall, cuttin' splittin' and stackin'. Then all the haulin' in the winter from the stacks and into the house. Not to mention the constant cleaning out of the ashes and the annual chimney cleaning.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

My understanding is similar to bbearseviltwin's - the soapstone is thermal mass that smooths out the delivery of heat to the space. Think of it as "baseline" heat, the propane furnace is "high demand" heat, in a way.

I have one of those natural gas wall furnaces in my apartment; as soon as I started using a fan pointed UP, my consumption of gas dropped shockingly - I was paying to superheat the air up around the ceiling to get a reasonable temperature down where I was; the fan immediately fixed that. You might consider if you have a similar issue where you could make better use of the heat you've got.

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Yep, we figured out the fan thing right away. We also have a 16' ceiling in the main room so it is particularly important.

But then we were also crazy enough to have several hundred square feet of windows, so dispersing the heat isn't exactly a win-win situation!

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

Sounds like one of those electrical 'convection' (?) heaters...they basically heat a big brick, which then radiates heat for ages.

I expect soapstone is the same idea.

But doesn't stone crack?

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Soapstone does not crack. The stove is actually made of a number of small panels, so there are no large single pieces, and that probably helps prevent cracks as well.

[bbearseviltwin.livejournal.com]

Two words, thermal drapes.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of windows... I keep my shades down virtually all the time. Of course, I live in an urban setting, the windowsills are somewhere down around knee level and I generally don't wear clothes at home, so.... And these are only single-glazed windows, so in winter they leak heat like a freakin' sieve.

The heat thing is part of the reason my "dream house" would have the bare minimum of windows for fire code, or whatever, with thermal shutters.

If I want to look outside, I can go outside... or install a high-res video camera feeding one of these ginormous flat-screen TV sets available these days. ;)

[bbearseviltwin.livejournal.com]

ah nothing like looking at nature the way god intended, through my electro view screen. ;)

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Having lived on wood heat for several years when I was younger, I'm not fond of it. It's an amazing amount of work and while it does "heat you twice", you have to be willing to spend that money in the form of time.

If your forest is like most of the Northern Michigan ecosystems, you can probably encourage some fast growing pines to pick up in the area you're clearing at the same time also planting slower growing local fauna. Once the slower growing stuff has taken hold, you can harvest the faster growing pines.

[bbearseviltwin.livejournal.com]

I hope your not planting fauna, they scream so when you cover them with dirt. :D Flora on the other hand just love to be planted.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Oh good grief. I've lost so many geek points....

*hangs head in shame*