Heating with wood burners/fire places only?

[sumi]

I'm trying it this year and so far so good. O.K. granted, it hadn't exactly been COLD here so far, but for my South African body anything under 60* is "cold", so… I had a fireplace in my previous house, lovely but woefully inadequate. Currently I have a wood burning stove and am getting clever about directing the heat away from where it's not needed (kitchen) and where it's nice (upstairs, bedrooms). It's pleasantly warm up here at the moment and absolutely divine in the lounge where the stove is. The fire's been going about 3 hours and another 2 hours. (It went out in-between).

Heating oil here is VERY expensive IMO, so I am going to try to avoid using the central heating this winter.

Wood, wood, wood, there is enough to be had for free, if my spare time and the dry days coincide. It didn't lately. So I'm buying logs at the moment

Does anyone else here heat with wood burners/fire places only?

 

[Beekissed]

We've left our wood gathering late this year due to a hitch in our summer season causing us to play catch up all fall. Finally got the first pile split yesterday of dead, dry pine...Mom loves pine for a hot fire, so we mix it in with our hardwoods for a good, steady, hot burn.

Tomorrow we haul the splitter to my uncle's house where he had two large oak trees go down in storms this past spring. He cut them up for us, which is really nice, but we need to go split it and haul it. He had a large oak cut up for us this past year too and it really helped fill in our wood shed.

This year my middle son is living out here and has the time to help us with the wood, which is really nice! I let him use the splitter sometimes but I love running it, so I hog it most of the time. I'll see how it goes tomorrow but I'll likely let him split some to give my shoulders a break.

Eli on the splitter...

 

[frustratedearthmother]

There are a lot of outside chores I like to do - but I can't imagine chopping/cutting/stacking firewood would be one of them. I might like having that chore complete - but the actual doing - not so much!

However, try to get me off of the tractor or the mower and we might fight, lol!

 

[sumi]

We put some peat briquettes on the fire yesterday evening. I slipped the last one in before 11:00pm, then left it for the night. Yesterday evening

I went to clean out the wood burner now, I'm late today, it's 01:40pm, and found this:

The peat doesn't burn as hot for me as the sticks do, but for keeping the fire going unattended for hours, it's wonderful!

 

[Lazy Gardener]

We need to order wood. Last winter, we used a lot more than normal b/c it was so cold, and our furnace died early in the season, so we used ONLY wood throughout most of the winter. Yesterday, SIL and DD dropped off a strong 1/2 cord of aged ash. We'll get a lot of good heat out of that. He split it by hand. The chunks are huge, so we'll need to rent a splitter to "double split it". We have to do so with even the wood that we buy as "cut and split" anyways, b/c our wood stove has such a tiny fire box.

 

[baymule]

Any time we have to cut a tree, it goes to firewood—for somebody. Not us because we don’t have a wood burning stove.

 

[wyoDreamer]

We always like to keep a good supply right on the porch in case the snow is too deep for moving wood from the shed, but mostly we cart wood in each day from the shed all winter long.

Like my Dad always said "Firewood warms you up many times!"
Cut, split, stack, move, burn, clean out the ashes ...

 

[Beekissed]

Yep...have been doing so for most of my life. Lived in a few houses along the way that I didn't have it, but have had for the last 10 years. Love it, hate any other kind of heating.

We use a barrel stove...folks have been using that same style~and stove kit~ for 40 yrs now and are real happy with it.

We've got in all the wood we'll be getting for the year. We like to start early and get it in along the way so it's not such a big chore in the fall.

What kind of stove are you using, Sumi?

 

[Beekissed]

I love everything about wood heat...the type of warmth it emits, the smell of it, running the splitter or splitting wood by hand has a satisfactory feeling about it, love that we can use resources that we currently have on the land, and being independent of the power grid for our warmth. When the electric goes down~which it does quite often here~we are still warm and can even cook meals on the stove, though we don't need to due to having a propane range.

I even love having the ashes to place on my garden, love that a stove needs very little repair and it can be done by us, and I love the frugality of it all...it's the cheapest heat source out there for us, so it feels wonderful to live so cheaply each winter compared to other folks.

 

[Denim Deb]

I think someone forgot to tell my dad that! At 86, he's still cutting and splitting firewood!