Off The Grid News Better Ideas For Off The Grid Living
If you’re going to make it through the winter in a cold climate, you’re going to need heat. Now if you plan to make it living off the grid without gas, propane, fuel oil, or electricity, you’re going to need a pretty darn good wood stove. I know, I know—it’s summertime and hot as can be outside, which is exactly the time to be thinking about the coming cold winter!
There are a few things that you want from a stove. Mainly, you want heat—and if it’s got a good top for cooking, so much the better. There are some things you don’t want though. You don’t want to get asphyxiated and wake up dead, and you don’t want to burn down your house or cabin. You also don’t want to go broke buying expensive cords of wood or spend your whole day chopping and splitting. So listen up, and I’ll share some things with you that I learned last winter.
First off, I’m going to tell you to get an old stove, not a new one. You might be able to find a great deal on Craigslist or in the newspaper. They’re going to be a lot cheaper, not to mention a lot better. They don’t make those things like they used to. You want something made of good plate metal, without a lot of modern crapola. I like the earth and green things as much as anybody; it’s just government green requirements and regulations that irritate the heck out of me. You don’t need something with a 92% Energy Star efficiency rating. We’ll take care of the efficiency a little later.
Just get a good solid stove. If it’s got a few cracks, you can patch them with refractory cement. Make sure they’re patched right if you don’t want to get a room full of smoke. Just because you’ve grown a beard doesn’t mean that you’re Grizzly Adams or that guy who fixes up those old houses on PBS. Test it out and make sure it’s solid.
Before you buy, you need to figure out if you want a big stove or a small one. There are pros and cons to both. A small stove is going to heat a smaller area, but you can make up for that by not going in and out of your door all day so that it gets a chance to warm up the whole place, including the walls and furniture. You’re going to have to get up once or twice during the night to stoke the fire, but you aren’t going to go broke buying cordwood. For me, it was one cord a month with my small stove, and four cords a month when I got the big one. (At first, anyway.) At $150 a cord, that’s a pretty big sting that might be worth getting out of bed for.
A big stove is awesome and makes you smile just to look at it. But mine was a hungry little puppy until I made some adjustments. (It sent a lot more heat out the chimney than I liked.) It makes a good hot fire and has a damper for the air intake that I can adjust for a fast, hot burn or a warm, slow burn. It even has a metal coil to act like a thermostat. I can set it on low at night, and as the fire burns down and gets cooler, it will open the damper to raise the heat output, keeping a pretty even temperature. I can set it for high or medium too. If your stove doesn’t have one, it wouldn’t be too hard to rig one up.
I told you we’d get to the efficiency part, so here goes. No way I was going to spend $600 a month to heat my 550 square foot cabin, so the first thing I figured out was that whole logs burned a lot longer than ones that were spilt. Once the fire was strong and hot, I would throw in a couple of whole logs an hour or two before bedtime. I probably saved a couple logs a day.
The next thing that I looked at was my stove pipe. My stack was a dual-wall pipe, which was keeping a lot of heat inside the pipe and sending it right outside. Well, it was pretty far from the wall, and since I don’t have kids that are going to burn themselves on a hot pipe, I switched it to a single-wall pipe for the stack. (I hope I don’t have to tell you that you still need double-wall starting a couple feet before it goes through the wall or roof so you don’t burn the house down or create an ice dam on the roof. Just make sure to keep it 18 inches away from any combustibles.) Then I got about a dozen flange rings that fit around the outside of the single pipe and screwed them on every few inches to act like radiator fins to distribute the heat better. I saved a cord of wood right away, and the heat was more even throughout the place too. The downside of this is that the inside of the pipe is cooler, so more creosote builds up in it. I’ll need to clean it a couple times a winter, or maybe I’ll just make another pipe with fins and switch it out every month so I’ll have plenty of time to clean the dirty one and no down time without heat.
Next thing I did was build a “thermal mass” around the stove. I happened to have a lot of red brick left over from an old project that I never finished, so I stacked them up like Legos around the back and sides of the stove. They soak up a lot of heat and radiate it back out so that it doesn’t just go to the ceiling or out the chimney. I angled the sides out a little to push the heat into the room instead of right back at the stove. The bricks stay warm for quite a while, so I don’t always throw logs in for the first couple of hours after the sun comes up. If you have some river rock or stones around you, they work just as well. I’ve heard that soapstone holds a lot of heat, so you might want to try that. Sometimes I cheat and put a little electric fan behind the stove to circulate the heat and keep more of it in the house.
Before next winter I plan on taking a tip from a buddy of mine. He wrapped some copper pipe around his stove a few times, and then ran the copper into a couple 55-gallon drums he dug in under his floor boards. The drums have big stones (almost like bowling ball size) with a lot of room for water around them. Then he ran more copper out of the drums to a radiator on the other side of the room, with aluminum fins on the copper along the way. Toasty and efficient. The hot water keeps things circulating well, and plenty warm too.
Well, sweet dreams and stay warm. And, oh yeah—you’re still going to want to keep some blankets around.
Other articles in this issue:
Howdy and good article. I’ve been heating with wood for years and accept it as part of our lifestyle. We currently use an Ashley stove that does a fine job in our old farmhouse. With our Arkansas winters we generally burn between 3 and 5 cords of wood during the cold weather. One can argue about the benefits of split wood vs. logs, but I find a mix of the two most efficent. Having a few logs to load at bedtime does increase burn time. We’re blessed with lots of timber, mostly hardwood in this area, but a scrounger/survivalist can find a good supply in most parts of the country. Most land owners are glad to have someone clean up a deadfall tree or storm damage. Much firewood can also be had by cleaning fence rows for farmers. One thing to consider is that all wood should be seasoned a bit before use. This cuts down on creosote build up and promotes a cleaner burn, along with more efficent heat. At least a year curing is a good rule of thumb. Safety is a big consideration, and that is mostly just common sense. Make sure your system is in good shape and treat it for what it is. Remember that firewood warms you 3 times. Once when you cut or gather it, once when you split or stack it, once when you burn it. Also provides a good dose of exercise. Enjoy and thanks.
Enjoyed the article, and I agree with the point of view. You might like to look at my blog post about installing a wood stove in my trailer, and later stories on the continuing process to tighten up the old, leaky structure.
DIY Woodstove Install:
http://tomcox.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/a-wood-stove-getting-that-warm-feeling/
Getting Weathertight: (Two Parts)
http://tomcox.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/trailer-trash-adventures/
http://tomcox.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/trailer-trash-adventures-part-deux-adios-turkey-tent/
WARNING – DANGER – DO NOT SET YOURSELF UP FOR TRAGEDY.
Folks that try to heat by water running water pipes through a wood heater
are setting themselves up for tragedy. – Steam explosion.
If you build a CLOSED system, steam forms ,and when it gets trapped anywhere in the system
the resulting explosion will be greater than using dynamite.
Please folks, make certain that your system is an open (vented) system, and includes a
circulation pump. I have much personal experience with this matter.
Retired Fire Chief, Cleveland, Ohio
Yes, If you don’t understand how Hydronic Heat works. If you set up your system properly like a Hot Water Boiler with a Circulator Pump, Feed Valve (to provide a constant flow of incoming water based on pressure), an Expansion Tank (to prevent the BOOM), an Aquastat to know what the temperature of the water inside the system is. Everything is dangerous if you don’t know how to properly make it safe. If you contact a Plumbing and Heating contractor I would imagine they could tell you how to set-up a Hot Water Boiler, or you could probably Google it and see how a LOOP is set-up:)
We are of the Sno bird group, and button up our home in Pacific Northwest from Nov-April. We save money by traveling to Arizona. We do not heat our house when we leave. We shut water off at the road, so pipes wont freeze up. If you can travel south in winter, you will save hundreds of dollars, just by not haveing to buy oil for furnace, wood for stove, and propane etc. We have been doing this for 4 years now. It works for us. Thanks. JM
Great topic for this time of year! I’ve been heating with this model for 10 years and have to say that, yes they do make them like they used to. http://www.woodstove.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=53&Itemid=62 You mentioned soap stone as a heat absorbing surround for your stove, well this stove is double wall soapstone, which by the way does retain twice as many BTU’s as cast iron or steel. It also has a catalytic converter, the updated technology side of this wood burning masterpiece. There is a whole lot of wasted energy going up your chimney if you don’t have a catalytic converter which kicks in once it’s up to temperature and burns the fuel that normally goes up with the smoke. That means your wood goes a lot farther. I have a 2 level 4 bedroom house and when the stove is going it’s all the heat we need. Unfortunately if the temp outside is above 40 we can’t use it or it gets too hot inside. Based on only being able to use it when the outside temp is below 40, 2 cords of wood lasts all winter here in Northern Virginia. It’s not an inexpensive stove, but you do get what you pay for. I can fill it up before bed at night and when I come down the hallway in the morning it’s warm and the stove is still too hot touch. Only on the very coldest nights into the teen’s does the furnace kick on before I roll out of bed so no need to get up in the middle of the night if it’s your only heat source. Seasoned wood is a must for this stove using a catalytic converter, that’s why stocking up for next winter is never too early. And if your asking if I own stock in the company after all that the answer is no, just one happy loyal customer.
Great subject! When we built our passive solar home in 1981, we purchased a Defiant Woodstove from Vermont Castings. That sucker heated our whole two story home very efficiently. I would encourage you to hunt for a used stove from Vermont Castings; they are extremely well made. But get one before they had to put in the catalytic converter.
Some sources of wood that is cheaper: Check with your nearest town to see if they have a forestry division, or find out who takes care of downed trees on public property. We are able to buy wood from ours at less than half what it would cost from a wood seller. We have also in the past got a permit to take downed trees in the State Park. The beauty of the last time we did that was that the DNR had already felled and trimmed the trees in the campground…all we had to do is cut the trees up in pieces, split it, and haul it home. Hard work, sore muscles but hey. Isn’t heating with wood suppose to warm you up four times? Once when you split, once when you stack, once when you haul it into the house, and then when you burn it! By the way, here in Michigan they sell face cords, which are only 4′x8′x18″ – sometimes 16″. We pay the local town forestry division between $25-35 per face cord, all split. To buy it from a wood supplier, it would be about $60 – more for delivery.
As to building a passive solar house…well, we live in lower Michigan. Our winters have gotten very cloudy. It is free heat when the sun shines, but that doesn’t happen very much. We are now retired and would love to get active solar or a wind generator. But $$$ are hard to find at this stage of our lives.
I love this site!!!
I forgot to mention this – we have a very steep roof and there is no way my hubby is going up there in mid-winter with ice on the shingles. So we have been hiring someone to clean our chimney at least once per winter, sometimes twice. Putting it off has resulted in a few serious chimney fires, once that the whole pipe had to be replaced.
We have recently purchased a rotary chimney cleaning system that hooks up to your hand drill. It looks a bit like the plastic cording on a weed whacker! You attach flexible plastic rods as you go higher. We had to purchase about six additional rods. Has done an excellent job and we can clean the pipes from inside the house. You clean from the bottom to the top and down again.
Make sure your stove is cool before using any cleaning brushes.
We buy wood from the Amish who have a stair stringer cutting business. It is all made from 2″ pine and they sell the triangular cutouts for $10/ truckload, plus they load it for us with their forklift to pick up the boxes full of triangles. They burn hot and there is no wood chip clutter to clean up off the floor. We also buy the firestarter logs, but cut them up into chunks and use egg-size piece to start the fire so the log lasts a long time.
A couple of safety remarks —
>> younggrandmah2b —
“We buy wood from the Amish who have a stair stringer cutting business. It is all made from 2″ pine…”
Please be careful about creosote buildup when burning pine. Most sources recommend hardwood as fuel, because, all else being equal, pine and other “needle tree” woods yield a lot more creosote. Pine is great for outdoor cooking and campfires, but be very careful about burning it in a wood stove, or even a fireplace.
>> Ben from Texas –
“A CARBON MONOXIDE MONITOR IS A MUST…”
Absolutely! Either an AC-powered model with battery backup, or one that is entirely battery powered.
I would also add at least two, battery-powered smoke detectors — across the room from the stove, to keep down nuisance alarms from loading the stove or getting a fire going. Be sure to keep fresh batteries in all such detectors. Fire extinguishers are also required equipment, as far as I’m concerned. I have two, and probably should have more.
This wives-tail about pine creating more creosote than hardwood needs to fade away. Dry Pine will not make creosote. Wet , not properly seasoned wood is what creates creosote. Weather burning pine or oak.
I see more people burning unseasoned hardwood than unseasoned pine,pine only takes 6 months or so to be fully seasoned and oak can take over two years…That’s right, 2 whole years cut split and stacked to be fully seasoned.
This myth persists, I believe because pine, being a soft wood seasons much faster than a hardwood like oak or hickory. If you mix your wood stacks the pine will dry much faster than any hardwood with it in the same stack. I see most people burning hardwood that has only seasoned a few months. It is this unseasoned stuff that is the wood that creates the black shiny stuff. They burn this for a month and then in their pile they have some pine that is now very dry and they burn a big load of that too dry pine and overfire their old stove that they are used to burning marginally seasoned wet hardwood in. It burns much faster and hotter than normal and poof …chimney fire. It was not the dry pine that did it ,it was burning all the unseasoned hard wood first and then having an overfire in an unregulated firedragon that caused the chimney fire.
New stoves damper down better and prevent almost all overfires except with an entire load of almost kiln dry wood. Even in the rare case of an overfire, if there is not a builup of creosote it wont cause a chimney fire ,just might damage the stove.
I have one way to prove all you “no pine burning under no circumstances” people wrong…How does anyone out west or in upper Canada or Alaska burn wood when all they have is pine and spruce to burn?They dont have hardwood(some birch or some exotic but its expensive to buy) Do they have chimney fires once a week? Nope, they just burn it seasoned,keep it from burning undampered and out of control, and have no creosote to catch fire.
If your stove pipe has black shiny dripping buildup inside, you are not burning seasoned wood no matter what you thought,my dad was notorious for this. If the wood is hissing and sizzling in the firebox it is too wet and not really ready to burn.It will burn, but will deposit lots of creosote too. If you throw a bunch of well seasoned or near kiln dried wood in there then, and dont change the damper from almost full open mode that the unseasoned wood needed to burn, to almost closed it will overfire almost any stove.
My stove pipe gets cleaned once a season. and the only stuff in it is fuzzy brown stuff. No black hard glass stuff I repeat ZERO black shiny creosote for the whole season. Once you start burning truly seasoned wood you will know the difference. NO hiss, you only need about 3 crumpled up sheets of newsprint to start it and you will use much less wood to heat your place. It takes a lot of heat to boil away all that water away.
Lets let this old outdated information about creosote and pine go away and start using facts to keep people safe.
Aaahhhh, wood heat. Nothing warms you nearly as well. I’ve been heating my house in central Maine for 11 years now with nothing but wood and wouldn’t have it any other way. We have an airtight steel Warner stove in the cellar that takes a 24″ stick and a Glenwood cook stove in the kitchen with a roll top and water tank. In the spring and fall when it’s cool we use only the cookstove to take the chill off and to cook and bake when it’s burning. In the winter we run the cellar stove and we can keep the house over 70 degrees all winter long for under 5 cord of wood. We prefer it 65 to 68 but when my son was an infant we wanted to keep the floors warm and dry for him and had no problem doing it. We burn a lot of oak (which we season for a year and a half), maple, beech, birch and ash. The softwoods like pine and spruce we only use for kindling as it produces a lot of creosote, burns hot and fast and leaves no coals. We buy or scrounge our wood by August for the FOLLOWING winter and store the stack that has been drying in the yard for a year in the basement in October. That way we always have two years worth of wood on hand. It gives me a real warm fuzzy feeling to look out and see ALL of my heating fuel for the next two winters in the yard, all bought and paid for. We also live on 6 acres of woods that we can cut selectively, by hand if need be if things get really crazy expensive, even to the extent of using old fashioned logging crosscut saws, bucksaws and axes if gas is unavailable for the chainsaws. We can sustain this indefinitely on our 6 acres and we are surrounded by a few hundred acres more of woods.
I’ve never had a chimney fire and this is why. We season our wood for 1 1/2 years like I explained. I use a scoop of “Safety flue” or “Chimney Sweep” or some other creosote dryer every once in a while, maybe once or twice a month. We have a tile lined, block and brick chimney and a stack thermometer on the connector pipe. When I start a fire in a cold stove I open it up for about 30 to 45 minutes and let it roar, get that needle up into the red zone for a while and cook out that creosote before it builds up. Do NOT do this if you have a build up of creosote because that will start it burning and stack fires burn down houses. Be sure to clean out the creosote chips that fall into the ash pit through the small trap door in the base of the chimney. If you’re using the clean flue powder, the creosote will dry up and flake off like potato chips but these will burn hot if ignited by a hot coal or spark and get some air.(I gather these in a bucket and throw a few scoops of them on a good bed of coals for added fuel and they clean the chimney too) If you have only a stove pipe you should have some way to clean out the ash and soot that fall down the pipe, usually a T connector with a short section and a cap hanging down. Take this cap off regularly and empty it (take it off over a bucket because they do make a mess) If your ash and creosote fall back into your stove they could block off your airflow and it wouldn’t burn properly.
Our cellar stove has a threaded cap on the air intake to regulate the burn rate and a cast iron damper plate in the connector pipe to hold the heat in. At night I shut both of these down to a slow simmer and I’ll have coals still burning hot 8 to 10 hours later. In the morning I’ll open it up to cook off the smoke and soot that has built up over the night and to warm the chimney back up. It runs up the inside of the house and is a very good heat sink, when it warms up it will keep the house temp pretty even all day. I like the idea of putting heat radiating fins on the connector pipe to save more heat and I think cooking the creosote off regularly will keep it clean despite the cool running temp.
I also like the idea of heating water in copper pipes around the stove (open system for sure as the wise fire chief commented) and have seen several of these systems up and working without a circulator pump. The cold water enters through a low outlet in the tank and rises as it heats to dump into the tank at a high point. The hot water then can be drawn off by spigot or pumped into the house water system to aid the regular water heater. Good topic, Turtle
ALL GOOD COMMENTS ABOVE,,Here in East Texas we can purchase round slab wood from the local saw mills.Usually for 25$ a bundle about a quartercord,no splitting just cut to fit your stove..I’m fortunate because I have 15 acres to burn already dead wood in an airtight stove,throw a semi green”split” log on the coals at night and its still warm in the morning.Remember to alway’s crack a window by the fireplace for oxygen,the stove can’t burn without it neither can you live if you die from carbon monoxide poisoning..Symtoms?..If you wake up with a headache you might have been breathing low oxygen levels..A CARBON MONOXIDE MONITOR IS A MUST WITH A WOOD BURNING STOVE AND DON’T FORGET TO CHANGE YOUR BATTERIES ON YOUR FIRE ALARMS AT THE START OF YOUR FIRST FIRE OF WINTER..God Bless..
Here in New York, we put in a wood stove 3 years ago. We had to go with one of the new, high efficiency stoves, and the town ordinance requires the double walled pipe. Even so, my heating bill is half what it once was. For split hard wood delivered, it’s about $70 per face cord. We go through about 8 face cord for the winter (Oct – April). We have a 1200 sq foot ranch, and this stove heats it all, no problem. It’s a lot more work, but the heat is better, it’s cheaper, and we don’t have to rely on the gas service.
I split everything myself (even resplitting the delivered “split” hard wood), as running large logs in it creates a LOT of creosote build up in the chimney – very dangerous. It means more frequent trips to the stove – especially overnight in the winter, but, it’s SAFER, and less cleaning needed.
Great comments and I would like to add this. Do you have baseboard electric heat as an alternate to your primary heating source? If you do, you don’t use it, it just sits there all winter long. Here’s an idea. You can use wind powering a car alternator which is connected to those unused baseboard heaters to make heat. But not the way you think. All car alternators are just 3 phase generators connected to some diodes and then to a regulating system of some sort. That’s hint one. Hint two is this, heaters are just dumb resistors that will heat when any voltage is applied to them (less than there rated voltage which is usually 240 VAC). Back to hint one, remove all the electronics from the alternator and just use the 3 phase windings to product voltage. Now when the alternator is turned by the wind it will create voltages up to the field saturation point of the windings or about 70 volts AC. Being this is 3 phase there are three windings all producing that 70 VAC. Connecting them is series will produce 3 X70 or about 210 VAC. That is an unloaded voltage so when you connect a 8′ baseboard heater to the output it will drop somewhat but the net output is heat for free. You can gleam anything from 1600 to 2000 watts this way, below the rated 2400 watts of the heater. As long as the wind blows your new generator will be producing heat in that heater. The key is that this is an alternate heat source meaning that whatever amount of heat it produces will be subtracted from the amount of heat that your primary heat source has to produce and those useless baseboard heaters will be working for you all winter long. You can leave it connected and it will be there making heat for you. FYI this is somewhat self regulating in that the heater is a load and will put a drag on the generator keeping it from over speed. I’ve just given you the root of an idea and it is not suited for everyone. You must be familiar with electrical systems and be able to isolate the baseboard wiring from the house wiring and be general all around Mr Fixit at heart. But it will work.
I would like to thank everyone for their comments and ideas, yet there’s a one or more possibilities that haven’t been examined, just examine the ideas and make your own or buy your own. These are just examples and with care and always with safety in mind you can do the same, and all of the following run from 12V DC and can be enhanced with a few electronic parts which make them better.
For Home Heating:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHdDA_XXSps
For Cooking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVw3VqOyVdU
For Heating Water:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0laEk8FCvs&feature=related
A little water, solar power or battery power, baking soda or vinegar or salt (needs cleaning more often), stainless steel of some sort-old knives etc., a jar and connectors (wire, hose etc.) and your making HHO.
Just some examples, and there are many people that are doing much of the same.
And yes there HHO Barbecue, and yet another Green Home Heater.
Yet another HHO Home Hearter
http://www.thegreenhomeheater.com/
HHO Barbecue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga1OOssYqk
HHO Home made Stove:
http://www.youtube.com/user/hhoball#p/a/u/1/XaO6xWTkL2Q
Just to mention a few…. and to say that there a many ways to do the things that one is use to doing without spending thousands of dollars.
We approached things a little differently here…wanted to seamlessly incorporate energy needs into our lifestyle without attracting too much attention. When looking at heating with wood we found two things…local code required a large new chimney and a woodstove would not efficiently heat our home as well as the current system without our regular boiler as a back up. The layout of the home had different wings…
Because of these things we opted to buy a woodburning boiler that ties in directly with the heat system currently in the house. When we figured the cost of a stove and chimney and the fact that it wouldn’t heat half our home this made sense. It cost us a couple thousand more than the stove and chimney but we use NO OIL anymore. It heats our home through the baseboard system just like the oil burner did. Our boiler only needs to stoked twice daily, takes logs up to 3 foot long, and we use about 8 cords a winter…for a 4,000 foot home.
The payback on our investment was a year and a half…the wood stove idea would have been about the same because we still would have continued to use oil for half the house…
The system also heats our hot water. In the summer months we get hot water from an instant on-demand water heater…electric…but we have solar panels too.
Happily self sustaining energy use.
I’m half sorry to hear that, Diane, as I decide wtheher to wear a *sweater.* At least cold is normal this time of year. This is the longest we have ever gone here without a fire. If the past two winters are any indication, we will pay dearly in a month or two with colder temperatures than our house is prepared for.
I’ve been burning for 5 years now. I found that the small soapstone stove I originally bought was not enough for the house. Plus I had to load it a lot more often. So I bought a large steel/cast iron stove. It’s a combination radiant/convective stove so furniture can be closer to it than a regular radiant stove. It holds more than double the amount of wood as the small one. But I used very little extra wood between the two. Both stoves are non-catalytic. I get about 8 hours of heat out of a load and have enough coals to get the next load going without outside aid. I have a 3rd floor that the stove won’t reach. I installed a 10,000 btu automatic gas heater to take up for it. It’s a good setup for a 111 year old, 25 window twin house. My chimney is 35′ high and I clean it once in October & don’t burn till December. I check the pipe once in the winter to make sure. Always use seasoned wood. I get almost all of it for free. Good burning everyone.
i put up enuff wood this year so that the only time my boiler is going to run is when we arent home to fill our woodstove or for our home hotwater im up in central maine and it gets cold up here and we have a pretty long winter im tired of paying almost 4 bucks a gal for heating oil and burning 3 to 4 tank fulls of oil each year in planing on only useing one tank full this winter and for those that are wondering how much oil is a tank full its 275gals im thinking that my house will only use between 5 and 6 cord a year but ive got 12 cord here so that i will have plenty and ill know how much it does take so that i can replace what ever i do burn so if i use 7 cord i will know that im going to need to order more for next winter and make sure ive got enuff for the next winter too im going to try to have a 2 year supply on hand here every year and who knows if i have the extra money to spend i might try for 3 years worth next summer i grew up burning wood i loved the heat from the woodstove but didnt like all the extra work involved in it but now im going back to wood heat hopeing that i can save some money and beable to do other things around the house to save even more like raiseing are own chickens for eggs and for meat putting in raised beds for our veggies the more we can do to save some money the better it leaves us something extra to spend on our hobbies like hunting and reloading my own ammo and fishing and flytieing
Having burned only wood since the 70′s, I will never go back to anything else. Just about finishing up on a 1900 sqft log cabin that we built with wood heat in mine. Have any old Mama Bear and also a wood cookstove. If we burn only Aspen, I clean the flue in the fall for the next season. Usually not needed. With pine, I have to run a brush down once a month because of cresote. All wood is very well dry and seasoned. Although it takes only about a month here in Utah to get it dry enough to burn when split in the summer time. I have found that if you ask and take a trailer with sides, most contractors will throw there scrape wood in it for free. Most are happy since they have to pay to have the dumpster hauled off. Most are just small pieces of wood that does not need to be split and works great in the wood cookstove. Just stay away from the green treated lumber.
Cuddling in front of the wood stove…lovely:) We are installing a rlelay old wood stove in our living room this year..yay! We still need to purchase one for the upstairs. Where did you get yours? I like it:)
I would like to see an article on wood gassification for running both diesel and regular internal combustion engines. The misnomer is that it isn’t just wood, but any biomass can be gassified in a gas generator, scrubbed, and used to run engines. You can easily find tractors, trucks, riding lawn mowers, and generators converted and running on youtube.
It is not all that difficult to do, and makes for a easy unlimited fuel source for pretty much any remote system or vehicle. You can pull over to the side of the road and pick up deadfall twigs to refuel your truck, use dried horse manure, anything. Much easier than making alcohol or biodiesel, and no special storage.
Since process gas (the scrubbed smoke) was what originally ran our cities instead of natural gas it could even be used to run propane appliances.
What is normally plowed under on our farms like corn stalks can be chopped up and used to run the tractor. Wood chips from brush clearing.
Looking forward to a good article released to the OTG community.