I'm so glad I don't heat with wood!

The main reason I do any heating with wood are these:

#1) I LIKE FIRE!!
#2) Cost
#3) What-If's. You know, what if I lose power? What if I lose my job? What if LP goes way thru the roof. Etc. Etc.

I do get tired of hauling wood and cutting it. Some days I just don't feel like starting a fire. Fire heat is not as easy as a gas furnace. I don't think anybody would say it is. My furnace is on right now. I never shut it off. When I have a fire it warms enough that the furnace does not run and it saves me about 1/2 on my heating bill over the coarse of a winter. In a lot of ways, I hope to never have to depend 100% on wood heat. If I do, things went horribly wrong (see what-if's above).

CB

WOW gal you did what I did.....except we had wood when I lived in PA and the smell...oh my gosh I could not stand it.....then we bought a coal stove.....that I could handle easily vs. wood.

No wood for me ever because of the headaches etc. from the smell-----and being older there was no way I wanted to cut,haul, stack, etc. my life away...lol

I have propane fireplace backup for power outages...the heat is so warm!! I love it.

YEAH for you---sounds like you got some parole from hard work!

I must say it is a lot easier. mine is set to come on at 6am and turn down at 10pm or so. i dont have to bother with it but i can't wait to put a wood stove in this place in the spring. i guess it's mostly if the power goes out. also i love to sit in front of a woodstove. it's going to be a one with a oven. i haven't decided exactly which one yet. i think it was chalk creek who had a one i really liked.

I do have a gas fireplace to sit in front of but it's not the same. the closest i can come to it now is turn on the fireplace channel. i can be feeling cold and start watching that and in no time i have to take off a sweater. weird i am! ~Georgia.

Depends on where you live, buying and hauling wood here costs more than propane.

I live in Central IL and if you get gas for 1.20$ i need to know where.We just bought 380 gal for our back up and so pipes dont freeze in basement as it is below frezzing for the last two weeks and the price was 1.89$ gal. our wood over the last 15 years has saved us about 12,000$ which i dont think is to bad.I'mgeting older and the wife cant help me anymore but i just cut more often and for not as long at one time it still gets cut.

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If you are still mowing the grass then the garden needs to be bigger

We had a coal stove when I was little. It was awful! The mess, the smell, the black soot, ugh. Then we switched to electric heat which is great as long as the power is on and the house is well insulated. We used kerosene in this house until the kero got to be more expensive than electric. Then the cost of electric increased by a third. Fortunately we had a woodburner that came with the house and a few trees that had to be removed. I don't know if we could afford to buy wood so for now we are cutting nuisance trees and checking places for pallet wood. It's a lot of work which I don't like but can't afford much else.

So, what happens when that magic box stops working? Hopefully you didn't junk the wood stove. There are no guarantees in the future. Propane and natural gas deliveries could stop at any moment, with a national emergency (shtf). That two year's worth of propane could be the last you ever get.

My free natural gas has froze off three times in as many days. After the first freeze off, the next morning I fired up the chainsaw and cut a week's worth of wood, from a tree limb that'd fallen in the back yard. There's another down/dead oak tree with over a cords worth of wood in it, less than 100' from the house.

I agree about life needing to get easier. I just don't like the notion of it getting harder (painfully so, or potentially deadlier so) if the 'easier way' fails.

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

We use electric, wood and LP for different purposes. I'm sitting here looking at a bill from the Energy Cooperative for $400. I hope you're all sitting down. I wasn't when I first opened the bill and darned near lost it Hard to imagine that while we burn wood and it keeps our living room toasty and that our dryer and cooking stove/oven uses the LP and we have a tankless waterheater, that we still use $400 of electric in one month's time.

I guess it depends, too, on all the chores you have to do. Haying is labor and time intensive. We don't hay, so we have time to cut the wood and just pretty much take our time. The husband and I usually just work together cutting it. Most of it, I split. Don't really mind it either. I think a lot of it just depends on how you prioritize and what time you can afford to allocate and to which chores you'll spend the time.

I use propane and wood. If the cost of propane is down I use propane when it goes up use wood. It nice to have a choice and a backup plan. The propane is expensive this year and I have already used too much so I got wood delivered today. Yup, its tiring.. stacking hauling, but its nice to have the fire. Some nights after work I dont have the strength so I turn on the propane fireplace and relax. If the SHTF we are all going to be very tired most of the time.

I remember when I switched to propane. What a relief!

I miss splitting and stacking wood, though. Was never too fond of Mr. Chainsaw, but I did love running that splitter!

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"I love all of this mud," said no one, ever.

We have an outside wood boiler as well but bought the additional feature on it for oil back up. If for some reason we cant load the stove we can set it for dual fuel and the oil will kick on if the wood burns out.

This not only heats our house and shop but also hot water and in the summer our swimming pool.
We do have a wood stove in the house in case we ever loose power or even after a long day and you want a nice cozy warm fire in the house.

Hi. New here..we heat with a cornstove. It has been really cheap and we spend about $350 for heating our home a year. We have a very small home and ceiling fans and have been heating with corn for 10 years.

Have heated with wood, but that sure is a lot of work. The cornstove puts out that really warm heat like wood does. We sure enjoy it on these sub zero days and nights.

I was thinking about this just yesterday as I was splitting wood...
Yes, I don't like Mr. Chainsaw either...
I don't like starting a fire on a cold morning...
Cleaning out the ash gets old...
carrying wood in gets old...
babying the fire gets old...

but...

I don't have to hop in my car with ga$, commute to work, give them several hours of my day just so I can push a button on my wall.

I don't have to spend forty minutes on top of that time running on a treadmill in the evening because I've been sitting in a cubicle all day.

Like someone else said, I can leave my door wide open for all I care and am not freaking out about the money going out the door (unlike my refrigerator).

And my number one reason: I can warm my backside and my whole frozen self in less than a minute standing next to my wonderful woodstove. So what if its the frozen tundra out there, I can work outside just a little bit more because I know it won't take long to get warm again. If I'm over someone's house who heats with propane or central, it takes quite a while to warm up... even in sitting on the register.

I'll take wood.
Obviously, for the older folks, propane or such is needed.
And I'm all for making life easier - that's why I can get done in thirty minutes what someone will go work all day for just so they can push a button.

Just my perspective... ;-)

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Proverbs 22:3 "A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished." KJV www.informedchristians.com

I like wood. I can sure sweep the floor and carry the ash out a lot cheeper than $1200 a yr. I think my wood burning has cost me maybe $350 total (thats 175 a yr) in the last two years in central OK. That counts all the tools, stove and chimeny. Got plenty black jack, here and it throws out the heat.

am1too

I'm so happy a friend gave me a small milk barn warming stove to connect to the kitchen flue chimney so I have electric radiators, wall propane and wood heat at my disposal.

If the power goes out and I cant run the cost efficient oil radiators, I can either use the propane or fire that little flat top milk stove with oak deadfalls that I have to clean up from around my house whjen they drop out of the 4 white oaks that canopy my house.

Regardless if I run the air conditioners in summer or the electric oil radiators in winter, I keep my shack at 68 to 72 degrees and my monthly electric bill has stayed in the $105 to $150 range for the last three years every month.

Its been 5 years since I had 150 gallons of propane loaded into the tank out back and I have twelve 5 gallon buckets filled with oak limb pieces 3 to 5 inches in diameter and 8 to 12 inches long dry stored in the tool shed to feed the milk stove if I choose to use it to conserve my propane if the power is out.

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"I didn't have time to slay the dragon. It's on my To Do list!"

I don't have propane heat. We have electric (was like that when we bought the house). But we have two wood stoves. We save approximately 66 percent every month that we heat with wood. It is amazing. The heat is great, love the smell, and it keeps me active. Now, I'm young, but the kids help out too. I like the cutting the tree, to splitting the wood, to carrying it in, and heating my house. Makes me feel good. Helping the family and all. Turning the dial never did that for me.

hey rose
yes I answered in that other thread. I can not handle wood smell, just racks my brain..LOL-----but the coal stove was wonderful. I could handle that smell easily.

yes we lived in PA then. anthracite coal was available and low cost then.

We had the wood/coal option stove also. Wood was backup if we couldn't get coal. So it is a win/win as a dual package.

Coal was so simple. Brought in a small coal bucket filled from our outside coal box, threw a few on, let it just burn hot for a long time, used very little coal actually and it was so much easier than wood.

Many can't handle coal but I could. And the wood is what killed me.......so it is just what your body can handle.

Coal was easier, cleaner, safer, just as hot, etc. than wood. (well safer also cause I didn't have to run that chainsaw and cut something off..LOL--me and chainsaws don't get along much....haha)

For us it is wood all the way, we use around 3-4 cord a year, and wood is our only heat. We have a furnace in the basement that keeps the house warm, sometimes to warn if I forget to shut it off for a bit. Usually it will keep a fire all night, so the house is still warn in the mornings. We are just putting in a wood cooking stove at this time as well. To me it is a great feeling to know we have heat, and are able to cook our meals for regardless of what happens to the power bills. I also find the work of getting wood to be great exercise, and I spread it out over the whole year, that way it is not as big a job. Propane here is very expensive, so that is not an option for us.

It's a lot easier to run to the supermarket and buy your veggies than growing them in your own garden, where you have to prepare the soil, fertilize, weed, keep the bugs and varmits out, harvest, clean, prepare, freeze or can, etc.

Even tho it's more work and hastle, we'll stick with the garden and burning firewood. Besides, just think about how much we're saving by not having to go to the gym to get our exercise.

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This is the government the Founding Fathers warned us about.....

Our homestead is heated with wood and I cook on a wood burning stove.

We took possession in late October so we got a late start on gathering wood before the deep freeze/snow hit.

It's been a challenge to say the least trying to stay ahead of need and less than pleasant to go out in sub freezing weather to gather wood.

We figure that we are going to have to invest in a good 4 wheeler since our tractor is less than reliable in the cold weather and heavy snow. That means DH has been chaining wood and I have been using my sled to haul it to the house. The wood is mainly hard oak and hickory. Burns great, long and hot, but it dulls a chain saw cutting blade in record time meaning frequent stops to sharpen, oil and refuel.

We figure to pay around 3-4,000 for a suitable 4 wheeler and groan when we think about gas and two stroke oil expense.

The thought of going to LP and a furnace has crossed our minds and for the time being we have dismissed the idea. The wood is available on our thirty acres in abundance. We are getting a GREAT workout cutting, hauling and splitting it and next year we will be able to be better prepared.

Yes, modern technology is great. But last year we had a 4 1/2 day power failure after an ice storm. No heat. We bought a generator. 1200 dollars. Figure THAT in with the average cost of a tank of LP for us last year. ( I wrote at least two checks for over 800 dollars, lp was over 3.00 last year per gallon) and you have second thoughts about going LP.

Right now we are both able to do it so we are going to stick with wood heat. If we can get a break in the weather to do some serious gathering, it would be a Godsend. But for the moment it's a pleasure NOT writing that 800 dollar check to MFA or 200 dollar check to the Macon Electric Co-op!

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I'm in my own little world, but it's ok. They know me here!