Anyone heat their house/shop burning wood?

[694spdRT]

Just curious if many members hear burn wood to heat their homes or shops.

I have a LP forced air furnace and now that LP went over 1.60/gal I have been kicking the idea of burning wood around for a couple months. Yesterday I bought a nice used Big Jack 90 add on woodburner from a guy close to me all set up for $425. It should pay for itself in about 2 months compared to LP.  Plus, we just finished logging off 240 walnut and black cherry trees so I will have more tree tops for firewood than I know what to do with. I will start cutting in the next month and hopefully it will be alright for next season. If not my father in law has firewood I can use in exchange.

I had thought of getting an outdoor woodburner but the $8,000+/- setup price and going out in the winter to stoke it doesn't appeal to me very much.

Expecting -10 degrees here this weekend and I wish it was setup.

[Charger-Bodie]

i heat my house with wood our highest heat bill last year was 45.00

[Charger1973]

We use wood around here once in a while.  Its nice to have as a backup or for really cold spells.  As long as its setup right and you know what you are doing it can be a good thing to have. 

[Silver R/T]

Only got gas/gas fireplace setup

[Old Moparz]

Seems like a good idea to me if you have access to all that free wood to burn. A guy who used to work with me installed a wood fired boiler that looks like a small shed on the outside of his house. He loves it & gets wood for free on his & his father's property. I have a propane fired boiler in my house too, & it's always been expensive. About 10 years ago I had to do something to not only offset the cost, but to get my house warmer than it was. I have a vaulted ceiling that's over 25 feet high, & the rooms are mostly open to one another. It's never been a house that was efficient as far as heat goes.

I thought about a wood stove but I'd have to buy wood, a good chainsaw, then spend time spitting & stacking it. I'd also have to locate the chimney in a spot that would make it work with the right draft. That would force me to place it in the front center of my house & in my opinion, would be hideous. I thought about a pellet stove, but the BTU's on those 10 years ago, & the pellet availability wasn't very good. I ended up getting a coal stove that's a high efficiency model, & works like a pellet stove. It vents right through the wall like a dryer. The coal I buy is bagged in either 40 or 50 lb bags, called "rice coal" & is the size of 3/8" gravel. It's cheaper than wood for me & a lot cheaper than propane.

I fill the hopper with 40 pounds & get a 24 hour burn with little or no attending to it. The coal ash makes an excellent non-slip treatment when the driveway ices over too. My garage doesn't have heat other than a portable, kerosene, forced air unit. I wanted to heat it with either a separate propane unit or another coal burner one, but the New York State energy code requires that I insulate the entire building if I heat it. That means sheetrock, taping, spackle, paint, & moving all my stuff to do it. I can't right now, so the portable heater will suffice.

If you do heat the garage with a wood burning unit, make sure you check the building codes & that you're very careful about having an open flame around cars & gasoline vapors.   

[Steve P.]

My sister-in-law has a split level house in Spencerport, New York. Maybe 5-6 miles from Lake Ontario. Her free standing wood burner is on the lower level. Never turns on the heat at all. She stokes the fireplace in the morning and in the evening before bed. She does use the blower from the furnace to move air around the house evenly.

We were up for X-mas a few years ago and her place was very comfortable and smelled like cherry wood. I loved it..   

[bull]

When I was a kid (I'll try to keep this short) I bought a red and white '70 Charger in the summertime and parked it in the back of my dad's 40x60 shop about 10-15 feet from his big 'ol wood-burning stove. IIRC it was a 500-gal drum of some sort that he capped and built a door for. Anyway, fall rolled around and then winter and one day I noticed that the driver's side headlight door had gotten warped from the heat this sucker was putting off! Nice. Luckily I was able to find another headlight door to replace it but from that day on I made sure I kept my car a good 25-30 away from that thing. We soon discovered that we lost a lot of work/storage space due to that stove because the heat often got so intense near it. We had a lot of trouble trying to fan the heat into other parts of the shop so if you were in the front of the place it was like 35-degrees and in the back by the stove it was like 80. It was definitely a poor man's setup so if you have the means to centralize and/or pump the heat evenly throughout the garage or house you'd be better off. We had a couple chimney fire scares in our home too. One time our wood stove in the house got so hot the metal turned red and we had to start pulling the stuff out of it so the house wouldn't burn down. Remember, we lived in Eastern Oregon at roughly 4k feet elev. at the base of the mountains so it wasn't uncommon for us to get several weeks of subzero temperatures during the winter.

IMO, wood stoves are dangerous, messy and too much work, but I do like some things about them such as the dry heat, no reliance on electricity and being able to cook and heat up water. They are definitely nice to have in areas where electrical power is unreliable. I've heard good things about pellet stoves such as all the benefits and few of the drawbacks of wood heat.

[694spdRT]

I also looked pretty hard at a Bixby 115 Maxair corn stove because I have "free" corn also. It is a pricey unit at around $3800 plus piping but it is about as maintenance free as a "solid" fuel heating unit can be. Just dump in 100lbs of corn push start and walk away. I had reservations about getting heat through the entire house and it does have a lot of "technology" that may or may not stand the test of time.

The wood furnace I am putting in has all the modern bells and whistles like draft control, humidfier, and limit controls. It will be tied right into my existing ductwork so the entire house will be heated like my LP unit. When I am not home or if the fire goes out then the LP furnace will kick on. The only real issue I do consider a downer is keeping the chimney clean.

In my shop I use a kerosene heater and I have a LP unit I am hooking up soon.

[Mean 318]

In the past three years, I have seen two shops burn up.... I would never put my car in a shop that uses wood.. just my opinion that they are not worth the risk

[694spdRT]

In the past three years, I have seen two shops burn up.... I would never put my car in a shop that uses wood.. just my opinion that they are not worth the risk

Did they burn as a result of heating with wood? I am not heating my shop with wood anyway.

The outdoor boiler/woodburner's would be ideal for the in floor heating tube systems. It sure would be nice working on a car with nice warm floors.

[Rolling_Thunder]

I use wood to heat the house...    alot more efficient than a heater it seems....   

[BrianShaughnessy]

Seems like a good idea to me if you have access to all that free wood to burn. A guy who used to work with me installed a wood fired boiler that looks like a small shed on the outside of his house. He loves it & gets wood for free on his & his father's property.

A guy at work heats his 150 year old farmhouse with one of those units outside.   He has several acres of trees to get fuel from.   He also gets a large truckload of wood at least once a year.   He spends more than his share of time out splitting wood all summer. 
He fills it once a day in the fall / spring and twice during a regular winter day.   Below 0 and he's out a 3rd time. 
He remodeled half the house so far but the outside air blows right through the rest of the house.   
Doesn't seem like he has much a choice to keep this house heated.

There's at least one town (Hurley) looking to ban these burners because some of the uptight rich folks that live there don't like the smoke.

Meanwhile I've heard of some people with older homes in Kingston pay upwards of $500 to $600 a MONTH for heat / electric.    That's gotta be a lot of waste with older homes... I wonder why more aren't torn down. 

[Old Moparz]

There's at least one town (Hurley) looking to ban these burners because some of the uptight rich folks that live there don't like the smoke.

I just read the same thing but don't recall where it took place. I would think that the smoke, & the amount of it, will depend on how efficient the heating unit is, or whether the wood being burned is seasoned. Might even be the wrong type of wood, like pine, or how airtight & how well it burns everything inside it. My coal stove has very little waste after 24 hours & the ash I get is equal to the amount you'd find in a large coffee can. It burns well, vents through the wall, & doesn't use a chimney.

As for the municipality banning the wood burning units, I'd say they should consider setting a minimum efficiency standard, or some kind of emission standard before banning anything. From what I recall reading, everyone & their brother in the area with the complaints were making & selling these wood burners in front of their house. Might be some kind of kit, or maybe they bought plans for in the back of a magazine like Popular Mechanics. I saw a lot of them on lawns up near Cooperstown, NY last summer.

[BrianShaughnessy]

Found link to Hurley article from the paper.  http://zwire.townnews.biz/site/news.cfm?notn=1&ncdr=1&BRD=1769&dept_id=74958&newsid=17718000&PAG=461&rfi=9

They want a 300 foot setback, high chimney, etc.

[2Gunz]

There really is nothing like wood heat. Its awesome.

But......

How much do you value your time?  Its a pain in the ass and time consuming.

And free...... depends on how you look at it.

Chainsaws, gas, a truck or trailer to hall it, the occational injury.......

And lets say you do have land with wood, why not have somebody log it and use that money to pay the

gas bill.


Anyway when I was a kid my folks house was heated by a wood stove. And well Im over it.

Nothing is as fun as chopping wood in the snow because winter was very cold and you are

down to a few chord and its still coming strong.

Anyway my vote is to flick the switch and if it takes it, do some overtime at work to pay the bill.

[sailpanel]

We use wood and gas. Gas on cool nights but warm days then just wood once it turns cold and stays cold. Theres nothing like coming in from the cold and backing up to a wood heater. I'll probably use wood as long as I'm physically able, allthough the pellet/corn stoves (FYI they work better with the pellets than corn so I've been told by the folks have them around here) are starting to grow on me. The start up cost is high but the pellets( if bought by the ton) aren't that bad. There is no where near the mess, and those little suckers flat put out the heat.

[694spdRT]

There really is nothing like wood heat. Its awesome.

But......

How much do you value your time?  Its a pain in the ass and time consuming.

And free...... depends on how you look at it.

Chainsaws, gas, a truck or trailer to hall it, the occational injury.......

And lets say you do have land with wood, why not have somebody log it and use that money to pay the

gas bill.

I considered everything you just said before doing it and they are valid points. When LP was 60 cents a gallon I would have never even considered it. Now it is three times that and who knows where it will go. 

Like I had said we did log off the cherry and walnut trees because they are bringing good money now. We have roughly 50 acres of hardwood that we log about every 15 years. That money goes back into farm improvements and recently a new storage building. Even after logging there are over 200 tree tops that are not of any use for sawmills and will just rot away...not to mention the mess of leaving it in the woods. I do have friends and family that will help with cutting/splitting, got the truck(with dump box), got a trailer, have chainsaws, skid steer with grapple forks, and the wood is right on our land so no travel time is involved.  If I get tired of it I am out $425 bucks or I can buy truckloads of cut and split hardwood for $40-50 per pickup load locally.

The outdoor boilers have been banned in many of the towns around here because of the low chimney stacks.

[Mean 318]

Yep, the first one was full of motor cycles and cars, it was massive! All they said for that, is that it was related to the wood heating. The other one, an ember found its way to a bad place and burned up the whole shop, lots of car in that one- No MoPars in that one

In the past three years, I have seen two shops burn up.... I would never put my car in a shop that uses wood.. just my opinion that they are not worth the risk

Did they burn as a result of heating with wood? I am not heating my shop with wood anyway.

The outdoor boiler/woodburner's would be ideal for the in floor heating tube systems. It sure would be nice working on a car with nice warm floors.

[bakerhillpins]

A guy at work heats his 150 year old farmhouse with one of those units outside.   He has several acres of trees to get fuel from.   He also gets a large truckload........ snip

Meanwhile I've heard of some people with older homes in Kingston pay upwards of $500 to $600 a MONTH for heat / electric.    That's gotta be a lot of waste with older homes... I wonder why more aren't torn down. 

Hey now, watch where that comment points.  Seems that there are plenty of folks out there that could say the exact same thing about them dam old 60s and 70s muscle cars that get 12 mpg when there are plenty of cars out there now that get 35mpg..... there has got to be a lot of waste, I wonder why more are crushed. 

Old homes are just like old cars and there is plenty to appreciate about both. I live in New England (NH) and one of the main reasons is the older homes and their architecture. I think the older capes/saltboxes and federals are beautiful and living in them has a LOT to be desired. I have the same feelings toward the chargers. Granted we don't necessairly drive our chargers every day and they don't use up the resources like an un-insulated home but they sure are comfortable places to live.

Anyhow, On topic. I grew up with wood heat as the electric was too expensive. Great heat source, lots of extra work, plenty to be careful about with using them. Clean your chimney EVERY YEAR at a mininmum. It's is really important to set them up properly and have proper heat guards and or spacing. My old 70s Vermont Castings Defiant operates at roughly 600-650 deg f. Its a wonderful heat. Plus the lugging the coordwood helps burn off the office job pounds.

If you want wood heat with out the coordwood try Tarm... http://www.woodboilers.com (disclaimer: The folks that run this place are friends, I don't personally own a TARM but I will be checking into them when the home system is replaced this spring, YMMV, yada yada yada )

[694spdRT]

Here is a pic of the furnace I will be using. My father in law has used the same one for over 20 years. Our houses are very similar 14-1500sqft 2 stories and his is always nice and toasty no matter what the temperature is outside.

My house is over 100 years old but, it has been well insulated in the attic and sidewalls. I also have newer thermopane windows.

[Charger_Fan]

I thought of getting a waste oil heater a few years ago, because I always have plenty of old oil around...

...then I saw the price tags on them!


Never mind.

[RECHRGD]

We've got two wood stoves in the house and one in the shop.  I live on 45 wooded acres and have all the equipment necessary to make cutting and splitting about 6 cords a year not that big a deal.  It's 14 degrees out side right now and 71 inside.  I have all the stoves and chimneys serviced every year to be sure their safe.  The one in the shop is elevated about two feet up because of gas fume hazards.  It's good exercise for us desk jockeys, but it does take time and probably not all that cost effective if you have to buy your wood.  I'm getting up there in years now and seem to be less motivated to go out and cut the wood than I used to be.  I'll probably start turning on the electric heat more as time goes on just for the ease of it.  But, as long as your able and have a cheap source of wood, it's a great way to heat.   Bob

[hemihead]

But that's not good for Global Warming! ( sarcasm) See Enviromentalists and Musclecars topic.

[69DodgeCharger]

With the cost of propane and the way my house leaks heat i have no choice but to burn wood as much as possible. Yeah it sucks to go to my property and cut it, haul it, split it, season it and then bring it in to the basement but so do 1,500-1,800 hundred dollar propane bills for each winter. cost has steadily increased over the last few years. last year I had a monthly bill for $330 and I have metered propane so I guess you have to ask yourself what is more uncomfortable. Dealing with the hassle of heating with wood, or paying the ridiculous prices for propane/natural gas.

[694spdRT]

With the cost of propane and the way my house leaks heat i have no choice but to burn wood as much as possible. Yeah it sucks to go to my property and cut it, haul it, split it, season it and then bring it in to the basement but so do 1,500-1,800 hundred dollar propane bills for each winter. cost has steadily increased over the last few years. last year I had a monthly bill for $330 and I have metered propane so I guess you have to ask yourself what is more uncomfortable. Dealing with the hassle of heating with wood, or paying the ridiculous prices for propane/natural gas.

That is pretty much the reason why I am adding the wood furnace. I should save about $1,500/year or more if LP goes up plus I can keep my house warmer than I normally would with LP. I normally buy all my propane at the summer fill price but it is a big chunk of money to drop right in the peak of parts hunting season.  

I do like the idea of being a little independent in at least one small way too.