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I'm surprised to read that so many people heat their home with oil up there. I'm currently living in CT and the last little Cape I owned down here I heated with a wood stove. We'd put a splash of oil in the tank in the beginning of winter just to keep everything working but we'd heat the whole house with wood (free for me since I cut and split it from my own property). Cost of heating my home? $0.00
Now I heat with oil (renting a place temporarily until I move to NH) and WOW.... $300 every 5 weeks
I don't know where you're looking but just about everyone on my road has a wood or pellet stove. I have both.
What he said...
I don't really know ANYONE that heats with just oil. heck we practically have our own wood burners club here at work where we all talk about scrounging firewood, cleaning our chimneys and cutting splitting and stacking.
A back-up heat source is essential in New Hampshire for power outages. Usually that means a wood stove. I heat with wood during October, November, March, and April. I use oil Dec, Jan, and Feb because the wood stove isn't sufficient to heat the whole house consistently when the temperature is below 20 degrees.
Heating with wood is very labor intensive. You handle each piece of wood many times. Here's my scenario: Unload truck; split; move to end of wood pile; stack; regulate plastic tarp on a daily basis to dry wood; load week's supply in wheelbarrow; move to garage; resplit into smaller pieces; stack in garage; load box; move upstairs; stack by woodstove; load into stove. That's a minimum of 12 steps, plus similar steps for kindling, plus constantly cleaning the garage and the area around the wood stove.
Wood heat has other drawbacks. The heat never really makes it all around the house. Cold upstairs. Risk of pipes freezing. Blackens walls, ceilings, windows, curtains, and furniture. Smoke bad for your lungs. Air pollution. Fire hazard. Labor and danger of cutting wood on your own property. Constantly feeding the wood stove. Wear and tear on the body.
There are problems with wood suppliers: cheating you on the quantity; "dry" wood that's actually green; failure to deliver; deception about the price.
There are ways to overcome these problems but you have to be dedicated. In the end oil heat is far simpler and more comfortable if you can afford it.
Current cost comparison:
1 cord of wood: $300
175 gal of oil (equivalent to 1 cord of wood): $525
I find that if you buy the wood, you're not that much better off than buying oil. A lot depends on whether the wood is pre-cut, split, green or dry etc. We store it outside so getting wood means a trip to the storage area. Heating with wood also means you have to deal with the mess of cleaning out the wood stove fairly frequently.
It's not that I am averse to physical labor of cutting, splitting and hauling. At my size and age I just can't handle it as well as I could a few years ago. So now I keep a stash of wood when for whatever reason the oil burner or electricity go out. I got pretty good at cooking on top of the woodstove.
Here in the "CONSTITUTION STATE" Harrdeharrharr... the all but outlawed out door wood furnaces.
I really can't wait to move up to my property in NH where I can:
1.. work from my own property, thus saving $8000 a year in rent / elec / heat which I now pay for in my shop.
2. Heat my shop AND my little "tiny house" with wood from my own property and SAVE about $3000 a year.
3. SAVE over $1000 a year in car insurance....
I actually enjoy (yes, you read that right) splitting wood with a maul by hand. Especially if it is harvested from my own property (free). I might pay some locals to down a few trees each year and cut them into 18 inch lengths... but hey, I figure I can contribute a little bit to the local economy by doing that....
So yea, moving 150 miles away from where I am now gives me a nice raise in pay. ....and yes I did take property taxes into account and picked a little town with no PD, no FD, no Stop lights, no traffic, 5 miles away from a food store etc....and a one room school house with a few kids in it.
For my money, harvesting is the hard part. The bigger the hunk of wood, the more strength and endurance you need.
Felling trees is not for dummies. A lot can go wrong. If you pay a total stranger to come onto your property and cut down trees with a chain saw, you might want to make sure somebody has insurance. Once the tree is down, you have to cut it into manageable lengths. Hubby would usually cut to about 6' lengths. I could handle getting the smaller diameter ones onto the back of my truck but had to leave the larger ones for hubby to load. Getting them off the truck to where the cutting to 16-18" gets done is easy. Splitting isn't too hard once the wood is dry. And stacking is the easy part. All that has to happen though is one person has a back injury and then there is only one person to do the work.
Like I said, splitting is the easy part. The maul weighs about as much as I do but I don't mind splitting.
My husband and I live in a large colonial in NY and heat our kitchen/family room (not bedrooms) with a wood stove insert. We are middle aged and honestly, I don't think it is that labor intensive. We do have someone deliver the wood. We do stack it ourselves but get deliveries spread out starting in July. On the coldest days, we need to take several trips to the wood pile - my husband can carry more at one time than I can, but I look at it as a way to get outside and get some exercise.
As far as the cost - we pay $200/cord (suburban NYC) for beautifully dried split logs. We use 4-5 cords per season and run the stove basically from Nov-March. I have calculated that running the stove saves us about $3000/year. Because we have an open floorplan, the heat goes right up but doesn't reach the two bedrooms at the other end of the house. Now that no kids are home and those bedrooms are empty, (which is why we are looking to move!) I would think that it will not be necessary to turn the heat on often upstairs.
Yes it is dirtier. Without a doubt. There is never a smoke smell in the house except maybe the first time the stove is started in November. A major benefit is that I am warm. If we didn't have the stove, I would feel pressured to keep the heat no higher than 64 or so and I would be freezing and not happy.
We love our stove. The benefits far outweigh the negatives for us.
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