Heating with wood burners/fire places only?

[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!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

That's pretty awesome! I don't guess I've ever had any experience with peat...except for peat pots to start seeds in, lol.

 

[sumi]

I had to wrap my head around this peat burning idea at first. Then I moved into a house where the previous tenants left some briquettes, so I burned them and found they burn o.k. Same as wood really, slow and hot and almost smoke free. It smells interesting though!

 

[wyoDreamer]

That purple hue makes it look radio-active, lol!

We had 2 woodstoves in Wyoming and burned over 8 cord of ponderosa pine every winter. We had a furnace, but only used it as back-up heat. Many nights I got up around 2 am to stoke the fire. My bathrobe has the burn marks to prove it, lol.
The first couple of years we were out there, we drove 2 hrs west to get Lodgepole pine. Dh split that stuff with a splitting maul and I stacked it. We bought a small limbing saw for me to use, he would cut a tree down, then as he cut the next tree down, I would limb the first and stack the branches out of the way. He would chunk the first tree as I limbed the second one. Then I would move the chunks of the first tree and stack them in the trailer when he chunked the second tree. repeat until too tired to think, then do 2 more trees.
then, I met a nice lady that had a whole bunch of beetle killed pine that she let us cut up and haul off for free. She lived 8 miles away. We became good friends and helped her with projects quite often. Her husband had died a couple of years before we met her, so I think she enjoyed having a handyman she could consult with.

Here in Wisconsin, we installed a pellet stove insert into the old fireplace. We went with pellets because our land is pasture and field, very few trees, and DH decided he didn't want to cut firewood for the rest of his life. He thinks we are going to get old.

 

[Britesea]

We bought a little grate that fits in a wood stove and will burn pellets. We use that during the evening, then add chunks of wood to keep the fire going longer into the night. It's nice, but I didn't want a pellet stove because they need electricity and I'm all about low-tech.

 

[sumi]

So far, though we had an usually cold winter, I've managed with only the stove for heat most of the time. I did turn on heaters in our bedrooms a few times, but it was usually only for a few minutes, to get the rooms to a more comfortable temperature. I found burning coal in the stove gives off a lot of heat, to the point where I cannot sit or stand close to it for too long without burning!

 

[Beekissed]

Been using this cool weather to get in firewood for the winter. A few trees came down in a recent storm, the wind uprooted live oaks that took other trees down when it fell. It's green wood, but I'll split it anyway and hope it dries out before winter.

In case it doesn't, I'm placing it into the wood shed along with dry pine that came down in storms last year. I split that last fall and tarped it so I could seed it into the hard wood collected this year. Dry pine makes for a hot fire and will help more moist wood hold a good fire. Our type of stove can burn pine easily, even green pine, whereas other wood stove styles would form too much creosote from burning it.

Yesterday, Eli, my son, also took down some standing dead wood and some trees that show signs of heart rot, though still mostly green. Also more pine that came down in recent and past storms, some hung up in other trees, etc. Eli brings them down and I'll follow along behind him and trim them up, stack the brush and cut them into stove lengths. Then I'll move the splitter down and split them, then place them in storage. Right now I have a mountain of wood right here by the splitter that is needing split and placed in the shed.

This summer we intend on building a pole shed extension to the wood shed~if the Lord wills it~ so as to store more wood at a time.

Feels good to have the wood shed getting filled and to have good, hard work to do. God has blessed us with these fallen trees~that's one step we don't have to do and often the most dangerous step.

Any of you getting in wood yet?

 

[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.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

That's awesome!