With rising energy prices, woodstoves are making a comeback

[Thom Little]

Conventional woodstoves and stoves that use sawdust pellets both are in "tremendous demand" throughout North America this fall, said Larry Milligan Sr., owner of Orley's Stoves and Spas in Medford. The store is nearly sold out of the hundreds of stoves it had in stock at the start of the season, Milligan said.

A cold, wet fall and soaring energy prices are fueling the change. The Oregon Public Utility Commission last month approved rate increases of up to 21.9 percent for residential natural gas users. Heating oil is about $2.70 a gallon in Oregon, up about 50 percent from last year. Electricity rates are up as well.

Firewood, on the other hand, goes for about $150 to $200 a cord, a 4-by-4-by-8-foot stack. A couple cords could last a heating season, depending on use. Finding a reliable supplier is possible but not easy, says Page.

Cleaner and simpler are wood pellet stoves, which burn small pellets made of sawdust and wood shavings.




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[LosinIt]

1. A comeback? Ours never left us.

The problem is that you get so spoiled with the constant steady heat. Then I go to work and freeze with the up and down with the thermostat and the wind chill factor of the blower. Plus, working overnight they turn the heat down. I guess 3rd shift people don't deserve the same comforts that day shift people do.

[Maddy McCall]

2. No mention of how much your insurance will go up when you install...

a wood heater.

[Broken_Hero]

3. Yeah...

My parents have moved to pellet stoves, but my wife and i still use the woodstove, and it saves us a lot of money. We have a friend of ours who has his own sawmill, and i pick up tons of planks, and blocks from his waste bin, and that keeps us warm all winter long...:)

[formactv]

4. I just installed one in my dome.

In eight years kerosene has gone from 73 cents to $2.50. I can get good firewood right here.

[Bruce McAuley]

5. We just put a wood stove in our mobile home...

I converted our place from electric furnace to oil 3 years ago, because the local utility said it was the most price/energy-efficient way to go at the time. Now our oil costs $2.30 a gallon, including tax, so a little box wood stove works good for keeping the place warm during the day. A cord of wood costed me $120 delivered from a local guy, and it's good Douglas fir, lots of heat in it and dry.
We are supposed to be on the list for energy assistance, but if I waited for them to get around to us we'd have run out of oil a week or two ago. Now I only use the oil for night heating at a very low level, and really enjoy the little wood stove during the day.
I think we're going to spend the energy assistance money($300?) on a pallet of "earth logs", which is a ton of Presto-Logs that REALLY work good and have lots of energy in them, that would cost about $225 or so, and we'd have to figure on hauling them about 20 miles from the dealer to our house, but they say it's equivalent to 2 cords of wood. We've used them before in the past, and they work GOOD, and hold the heat a long while.
Fuck the Saudis, I want to be shed of my oil addiction by next year, with electric heat(zone units) for overnights and wood during the day.

Bruce

[phantom power]

6. Use of wood heating concerns me.

Can all 300 million of us (Americans) use it? I expect that we'd find ourselves with no trees left after a relatively short time. That isn't to say I don't think anybody should use them, I just wonder who gets to burn the wood and who doesn't? It isn't a question anybody has had to answer yet, but as our forests continue to dwindle, and fossil fuels continue to dwindle, it's going to become a very operative question.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Depends on why they're doing it.

Burning wood from a sustained forest should be fairly carbon-neutral, so as an alternative to sticking fossil fuel in your heater it has certain attractions. This is going to be more expensive than just cutting down old-growth and leaving a big blank patch, however. I suspect anyone doing it just to save money will cheerfully chuck the last redwood into the furnace, secure in the knowledge they've saved enough for a new Chinese DVD-recorder from Wal-mart.

[phantom power]

9. It's that "saving money" angle which worries me.

As the cost of natural gas, electricity and oil go up, I imagine more and more people will try to take up the slack with wood. I envision a sort of slow deforestation train-wreck, that nobody can stop. Everybody cutting up the forests to keep their families warm. What will anybody say? "Hey, let your family freeze to save the last forests?"

It's happened before, in other countries. It might have happened here long ago, but the discovery of coal, oil, etc, probably saved some of the forests for a while.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. I think you're right about the coal.

The last major de-forestation of Britain was rabid ship-building by the navy, which cleared just about everything that wasn't a royal hunting reserve (the British monachy have always been big fans of killing stuff, which in retrospect was probably a good thing), to the point that the navy went to Ireland to nick their trees.

Between that and fuel, there wouldn't be a tree left if it hadn't been for the industrial revolution and the use of a) coal for fuel, and b) iron for ships. I don't think there are enough trees to do it twice.

[Kolesar]

7. Be sure to use sealed-combustion

So your heated room air does not go up the stack.

[Odin2005]

11. Be careful...

If you switch to wood and cancel your heating payment, your Ex might use it to take your kids away (there was a story about this here a few weaks ago). :crazy:

[NNadir]

12. Wood burning produces some serious pollutants.

Most of the people who die worldwide from air pollution - which accounts for between 4 and 8 million deaths per year - die from indoor air pollution. The vast majority of this indoor pollution is connected with burning biomass, of which wood is a particular variety. (Industrial air pollution kills 1 to 2 million a year.)

Now it happens that I am using my circulating fireplace quite a bit more this winter, and my neighbors are using theirs. (I have quite a number of downed trees on my property, and have not bought wood in ten years.) This however is an aesthetic and economic decision. I am making no pretense that this is good for my health, my children's health, or good for the environment (at least in some sense.) I rationalize this by noting that if the wood rotted, it would still inject CO2 into the atmosphere, and that by burning the wood, I am preventing the use of some fossil fuels. But I'm not going to pretend to say this is all a happy affair. It is not.

I know I'm going to hear some bullshit about catalysts now, but the fact is that no such catalyst is 100% efficient, nor are they monitored for their long term performance. One sticks a catalyst in ones flue to make a pretense of environmentalism connected with wood burning, but the fact is that wood burning is hardly an environmental bonanza. The catalyst will ultimately become coated with ash, dust and unreacted or uncatalyzed soot, after which it will be pretty much useless. Also many stoves and fireplaces have some back draft, accounting for the pleasant romantic odor. That odor, no matter how much one likes it, is toxic. (Some people like the smell of pipe and cigar smoke, I note, which is also toxic.)