How are you going to heat this winter?
First Warrior
Everyone, Registered Users Posts: 707
Just wanted to know what you folks heat with over the winter. We have been burning wood for the past 30 years. We heat two buildings with wood, my studio and our house. I bought a load of red oak ( 22 logs ranging from 22"dia to 14" dia 16 feet long) took a week with a borrowed wood splitter and a chainsaw and I got this stack. The double stack is 32 ft long and about 3 ft wide. I've got another log load coming that's all black locust. The wood warms you twice, once when you cut and split it and once when you burn it.
Comments
"borrowing" a bums old blanket under an overpass if I'm not
Been nice not having any heating or cooling bill the last few months. That will change in a month or so.
Mine consist mostly of Ponderosa Pine, Mesquite, Juniper, Alligator wood, Pecan and what ever sombody lets me cut out of there yard. My stack is about the same size of yours and I use probably about 3/4 of it this heating season.
I do actually have forced air heat... however, i live kinda remotely and so its propane fired. My house is like impossible to heat with propane for resonable cost. So wood is what i burn. Which is hard sometimes because of the fact that this is the desert.... arent a whole lot of trees around here.
Aj
Aj
I'm thinking about adding a franklin stove and burning wood. I'd have to get a generator to power the central unit's fan to circulate the heat throughout the house if there's a power outage. And I'd have to add a flue/chimney as there is not one now. I've never burned wood in my house but my dad's always heated with wood so I helped him when I was still living at home. He's the expert in the family for advice on wood burning.
Or I could add a propane tank out back then install a line into the house to fire up a large enough heater to keep the house warm. I'm researching wall mount gas/propane heaters. I'm figuring I'd still need a small generator, if there's a power outage, to circulate the heated air using the central unit's fan.
Another option is a generator big enough to run the whole house. I figure I could get a propane fueled generator rather than gasoline.
Any suggestions for a 1300 square ft all electric home? I don't want to totally depend on the electricity. I want to consider options to reduce costs of electric heat and ways to heat during electric outages.
My suggestion for that kinda of emergency fore-thought would be to choose 1 room that everybody can stay in until the situation passes. one would figure that an emergency of this type occurs once to twice a year and if your prepaired enough for that, it keeps a few extra bucks in the pocket and calls for family closeness in daughting times. Unless you want to show the neighbors up... with the full package running while there sitting in the dark looking at you.
propane would work for you well for that type of situation. A 250 gallon bottle would be enough for running the genne and the central heat for the amount of square feet your heating. I have 2 central heat units in my house (one for each side) and in a month we consume a 250 Gallon bottle, This is maintaining 76* with a heater duty cycle of about 20 min burn every 35 to 45 minutes. So we could probably assume, you would get about a months life out of a 250 running full tilt. current prices for our neighborhood have had the fuel at 2.41 a gallon, so you would be looking at roughtly 450 to 650 dollars to fill the bottle. So we could probably guesstimate total investment would run you around 2900 to 3500 bucks depending on your abilitys to install, codes requirements, fuel charge for your location and bottle purchase cost.
Now if you went to firewood, the cost can be reduced if you follow the one room emergency spot and forget about moving heat around the house. But if you need to heat the entire area, wood kinda looses its luster if your house has many turns and is difficult to move heat without central air. The disadvantage i see with wood, are all in yourself. how much do you want to work to be prepaired for the situation, the more wood you stack the better off you are. I dont know what your firewood resources are like, so this may be easy or difficult. A stove does no good if in the middle of a freeze you run out of wood, or if the cost of wood is too high to maintain your heat level.
For me, I average 8 cords of wood a season, and it takes me from the end of winter to when it starts again to be prepaired for our winter which are super wimpy compared to east coasty guys. But i run 3 fireplaces, from 1630 until 0600 the next day to maintain the heat level while were home. It makes for a full time job during the winter. But Its a great way to stay in shape... and cut some pounds. but I probably have maybe 10 more years of doing this before my body wont let me.
Aj
We had a chimney fire once when we lived in Washington. It is indeed a scary thing. Luckily, I had a few items called Chim-Fex which will put out a chimney fire in short order. They look like a railroad (or trucker's) flare and they light the same way. You just light it and put it in your stove or fireplace and as it burns it produces a gas that won't support combustion. So the chimney fire just gets snuffed out. If you can find any in your part of the world, I recommend their use. We'd have lost everything if it hadn't been for Chim-Fex.