Got Wood.

Dec. 20th, 2008 09:56 am
snousle: (river)
[personal profile] 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.
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