Generator or Woodstove?

Two seperate issues, IMO. If you lose power you lose the well, heat, and refrigeration. The generator takes care of that. If it's large enough you continue your life as though the power didn't go out. If you heat with propane right now run a seperate service line from the pig to the generator. If you don't heat with propane pick up couple of 100 pound tanks with an automatic switch over regulator. Unlike other fuels propane keeps forever.
The wood stove is more an issue of the price of fossil fuels will continue to rise and it should be cheaper to heat with wood. While it may be handy in a power outage, it will also save money throughout the heating season.

My thoughts exactly. If you have a well, getting something that will pump the water comes first. We have a woodstove (it's our full time heat source), and a gas powered generator that will power the well pump (you need one that will go 220 for this). If you have city water, then the stove will get more use, and save you money on heat even when there are no outages. As for the cooking, you can always use the stove to heat things up and cook simple things. We are on the rotten grid that caused that giant power outage that covered the whole east coast and parts of Canada a few years back, and our power goes out regularly, and often for 24+ hours. I don't like to run the generator all day because it's loud and stinky. With a little practice, you would be amazed at what you can cook in the coals of a woodstove!

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Melissa
Reformed hoyden. Please forgive me if I relapse.

For $2600 you could almost get a generator and woodstove... my Ashley woodstove http://heating-and-cooling.hardwares...ve-219618.aspx was $599 (regularly $749) and it heats my house just fine. It's not pretty like many of the more expensive ones, but most of them have a much smaller firebox than I want. 16- 18 inch pieces of wood are great for the cookstove, but not practical for my main heat source. Then we bought concrete board and 12 inch stone tile to protect the floor and wall behind the stove. That was another $200 or so (can't remember exactly, but it was not over $300). Of course I was lucky because we had a nice masonry chimney already...

As for a generator-- if you need it to power your water pump then I would get one, but honestly the woodstove makes more sense. Do you realize how much it costs to run a generator? I borrowed one from my father during the icestorm of 1998 and it cost a fortune to run it for 13 days, but at the time I did not have a woodstove (I was renting a place and needed to run the waterpump/furnace). I would never rely on using one for a long periods of time again. Worst part was that we had to ration gas-- you could only buy 10 gallons at a time because the stations were not getting gas delivered. Also, it was several days before we could even drive anywhere-- lived in the boonies and there were trees down all over so DH and several other men had to cut/clear trees from the road to get to the little store 7 miles away.

I have a little television and a radio that run on batteries so I can find out what is going on and we use candles/kerosene lamps for light, but we have used a car headlight ran off an extra battery-- just have to remember to start the car and charge the battery occassionally! As for your food-- I keep a few bags of ice in my freezer and if the power goes out we just put the ice and food in some coolers and sit them outside.

We have both. Our main source of heat is wood, and when the juice goes off which it does often out here in the sticks, we use the generator to keep the freezer frozen. When the juice goes off, we just light the Alladin lamp in the living room, an oil lamp in the bathroom and go on about our merry way. If the power is off for an extended period, we fire up the generator 4 times a day or when we want to play on the internet. The generator is an old Kohler, 16 hp, remote start from a motorhome. It's barely idles under a full load, conservatively rated at 4,000 watts 110v. With the 20 gallon tank, we can run it for days without running out of gas. We use Stabil to keep the gas preserved and cycle old gas out. We also keep two 5 gallon gas cans. Since we have rural water, we don't need 220v so this old workhorse is perfect. Also, you can easily get replacement parts for this genset.

Rather than using an expensive transfer switch, I have separate outlets to plug essential appliances into when the generator is running, and run an extention cord to the big freezer in the hunting shack. We leave a light on connected to the regular power so we'll know when it's back on.

As the freezer empties through the year, we fill it with 2 liter bottles of water to freeze. This keeps the freezer frozen longer when the power is out, provides a source of ice for an ice chest and keeps it from cycling often when the power is on.

If the power goes out in the evenings we just light the Alladin, grab a book and enjoy. Hit the start switch on the wall if we want to see what's going on here.

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Rudeness is a small man's imitation of power.