Warming up to wood heat.

A big concern of many people trying to live a more natural lifestyle is the environmental impact of home heating. When I say environmental impact, I'm not talking about whether carbon emissions are raising the global temperature or not. I'm talking about the here and now effects of smog from power plants to produce electricity, or oil, propane and natural gas burning furnaces.

My husband and I live in a relatively small (1000 square feet) home which we heat primarily with wood, with propane as a back up heat source. Natural gas isn't an option because there are no natural gas lines and our house isn't set up for natural gas. Although propane is one of the cleaner fuels, for both cost and renewability we prefer wood.

So how do we make our stove as efficient as possible, and why do we prefer wood? In terms of heating ability, our wood stove, one of the smaller models, can easily heat our entire house to 75F+ while using about 2-2.5 cords of wood a year. Our propane furnace, forced hot air, struggles to keep the house at 62F without being on constantly during the colder months. We burn hardwood, which is in abundant supply out here in the east, and burns longer and hotter than pine. Hotter is better because the hotter the fire (within safety limits, of course) the fewer emissions it produces. How can you tell if your stove is burning hot enough? If you look out your window at your chimney flue, you should see little to no smoke coming out of it. So that classic image of a chimney puffing smoke is charming, but polluting. A proper fire should be hot enough to produce primarily water vapor and hot air. We also prefer wood because wood is a renewable resource. Tree farms can be planted to provide wood, and forests can be sustainably harvested to continuously produce a source of heat. Propane, oil, coal and natural gas are non-renewable resources and I have to say that I trust burning wood, which burns in nature, more than burning oil, which resides below the ground where it doesn't catch on fire in its natural state.

Shop around for a wood stove, as there are a lot of different models available. The newer models are becoming more and more environmentally friendly and are designed to reduce the emissions of a stove even more than before. Consider combining a wood stove with other methods of renewable heat, such as passive solar heating and, most important of all, good insulation!

Tip of the day: To get a really good fire going in your wood stove, even on a busy day after you get home from work, you need to layer the kindling well. I use three sheets of newspaper folded in half and rolled up into newspaper "logs" for the base. Then I put little pieces of tinder and bark on top of the newspaper, thin pieces of kindling and large strips of bark on top of that, and finally I finish off with two or three logs about 1.5-2" across, placed crisscross on each other. Light the fire in a few places, shut the door and you should have a fire going in about 2-3 minutes without any extra effort!