Anyone heat with wood?

[cfabe]

I'm thinking about installing a woodburning firplace insert to provide supplemental heat this winter and hopefully keep the nautral gas bills a little more managable. I also really enjoy having a fire going on a cold winter day, but with the open fireplace it's just a waste of heat. The house is a 1960s center hall colonail, 2600 sqft, and the firplace is in the center room downstairs. Anyone have any advice? How much wood should I expect to go through? Is the $1000-1500 price of one of these inserts even remotely worth the heat they put out?

[jefnvk]

Grandparents have one.  They do put out a good amount of heat, although certainly not enough to heat the whole house.

[Larry Ashcraft]

We supplement the heat of our 1933 Craftsman house with a Vermont castings catalytic wood stove.  The stove is over 80% efficient and will heat the house if someone is there to keep it stoked.  However, we both work all day so the stove only gets used evenings and weekends.

We installed radiant heat in the floor a few years ago, but the lack of insulation makes it marginal.  I use about three cords of wood a winter (Southern Colorado) but would easly double that if someone was home all the time.

We've had our stove about ten years and paid around $1800 for it.  I'm sure they are higher now.

Unless you have an unending supply of wood (we do), I would consider a corn stove.  You fill the hopper once a day and they will give off heat all day.  If you know a farmer close by, you should be able to get corn for $3.50-4.00 per hundred.  A neighbor has one and says his house stays at an even 70* all the time.  Corn stoves run $2000 and up.

[stevelyn]

I generally don't care for the fireplace insert design. I would prefer to seal up the fireplace and install a free standing woodstove and tap into the existing chiminey.
I heat with wood when I'm home (not this rain-soaked treeless hell I'm in now). The trick to wood heat is keeping the air circulating either with a box or ceiling fan. Also rooms need to stay open to allow the air to circulate through them. With a home such as you describe, the woodstove will be used to take the strain off your current heating system, not replace it.
Hardwoods have higher BTU value and burn longer than softwoods. You also want to make sure you have a damper system on your stovepipe as it helps regulate the rate burn along with the draft and prevents the heat from escaping up the chiminey. You can also install a 'stack-robber' on the stovepipe that collects chiminey heat and uses an electric fan to distribute it throughout the house.
You should used seasoned wood that has been allowed to dry for a year. Avoid using green wood as it will cause excess creosote build up in your chiminey. If you absolutely have to use green wood, put an equal amount of dry wood in with it or at least a good sized dry log.
Creosote is another animal you need to be aware of. Excess build up is the major cause of chiminey fires. Build up is caused by green wood and contant burning at low temperatures. Two ways you can minimize creosote build up is to avoid burning green, sappy wood when possible and the other is at least once a week allow the stove to burn hot for a half-hour or better to burn out any build-up inside the chiminey. Of course in the off season you'll want to call a chiminey sweep or run a giant bore brush down the the pipe and flue to loosen any build up that may have occurred and inspect it.
If in the unlikely event you have a chiminey fire after taking all the preventative maintenance measures, don't panic when you hear the jet engine roaring in your stovepipe. A chiminey fire can be fought by dumping a couple cups of water in the fire box and shutting down the draft and damper. The resulting steam will put out the fire.
When you install the stove, you'll want an air-tight as you can get. This contributes to efficiency. Make sure you seal the pipe joints with stove cement.

[Guest]

I'll tell you one thing, unless you are talking about an honest to God wood-bringing stove (free standing made of cast iron, ben franklin looking thing) you would be lucky if you could heat even that one room during the winter. Fireplace inserts send the vast majority of their generated heat right up the chimney with the smoke. The heater in my house went out last winter and no matter how much wood we pilled into the fireplace it was damn near impossible to get even that part of the house up to a reasonable temperature. Also, the fireplace design is *very* inneffecient when it comes to how much wood it requires to keep burning.

[cfabe]

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately the room is not laid out well to install a freestanding stove. It would stick out into the main walkway through the house. Looks like the wood heat will have to wait until I build my cabin out in the sticks.

[Stickjockey]

You might try a pellet stove.

http://www.quadrafire.com

[K Frame]

CYeager, do you have a fireplace, or an airtight fireplace insert? It sounds as if you're mixing the two.

My aunt and uncle heat their home very nicely with an air tight fireplace insert.

They have roughly a 2K square foot ranch built in the 1950s.

Friends when I was growing up had roughly the same type of house and also heated very nicely with an insert.

Other friends had an English style house, with fireplaces at either end. They had fireplace inserts in both fireplaces in a roughly 5K square foot house. The main floor was very nice. The upper floor got kind of chilly, but that didn't matter as much.

You can recover a LOT more heat with an insert if you get a blower assembly with it.

An insert won't put as much heat into the room as a freestanding woodstove, that is true, but it will put a LOT more heat into the home than an open fireplace.

If I ever manage to get back to Pennsylvania full-time to live, the first purchase I make for the new house will be a coal stove to burn anthracite.  It has a tremendous BTU output for volume taken up by the fuel.

The best thing about coal are the very long burn times.

[Larry Ashcraft]

Our stove sets out in front of the old fireplace and vents into it, sticks out maybe two feet.  Our house is a 1500 square foot story and a half.

Here's how a catalytic stove works, no it's not like the catalytic converter in your car.  Smoke burns at 800* and most stoves don't burn that hot, so most of the smoke goes up the chimney.  The catalytic combustor converts something in the smoke so it burns at 500*.  It rolls through the combustion chamber until it is all burned up, hence the 80%+ Efficiency.  The smoke our stove puts out is the the equivalent of three cigarettes an hour.  Another advantage is that there is virtually no creosote build up.  After 6 or 7 years, we had our chimney swept.  There was almost nothing in it.

The temperature on the top of the stove stays between 500* and 650*, depending on the outside temp.  The colder it is, the better the stove draws.  It heats the downstairs quite well, without any fans.  If we are home all day, it will heat the whole house quite well, and only takes about a 5"x16" cottonwood log about once an hour.

We use mostly cottonwood because that is what we have.  But I have a stash of elm and ash that I use for my "all night" logs.

[Penman]

Stevelyn is right on with his advice. As Larry noted, a catalytic stove or damper is a great idea for both heating efficiency and safety in reducing creosote. I have a stove that's too large for the place, and need to shut it down overnight. I just plan on brushing out the stove pipe every few weeks in the winter. We've had little slow these last several years, so that's not much of a challenge. Red Fir is about teh best wood we can get for heating where I live, good solid Yellow Pine is pretty good as well. Use about 4 cord for the winter.

[igor]

I've got a house with two small stoves in the bedrooms, a fireplace of bricks in the living room / kitchen area, an ancient iron stove in the kitchen and a wood-burning sauna stove... complemented with thermostat controlled electric heaters in every room. The more wood I burn, the more electricity I spare.

Reading through the thread it seems that retaining heat in a stove and chimney seems like an odd idea there. I mean, I'm writing this in Finland and building, insulating and heating a house is a bit demanding here. All of my timber burning devices except the sauna and kitchen stoves are built to retain the heat. The chimneys have a valve in them to shut the chimney after a couple of furnacefuls have been burned... sound familiar, anyone? Or do you still have those wide open fireplaces like in "The little house on the prairie" with an outer wall chimney to _ensure_ that anything but the house will be heated? ;-)

My brick fireplace is a prime example, it's about 2 by 1½ by 1½ meters and weighs several metric tons. The smoke channels go up from the glass-doored furnace, down the sides of the fireplace and together in the back of it on floor level and into the chimney from there. The chimney shut-off plate is almost at ceiling level. I burn a basket of pine or birch for less than an hour, shut the thing down and enjoy over 24 hours of pleasant heat for my whole living/dining room and kitchen area before the thermostats start clicking, even in the middle of the winter. I bought the pre-cut bricks and iron/glass doors for about 2000¬ and it took a bricklayer master two days to put it together. Obviously, the house stands on bedrock...

The chimneys are swept yearly as per fire ordinance. The sweeper guy says ours would do fine if cleaned every other year. Once you get the fire going, there is no visible smoke outside.

[Larry Ashcraft]

Igor,

Your ideas are not so odd here, they are being implemented here and there.  The main drawback is cost, especially retro-fitting to an old house such as ours.  The idea of a huge mass of stone holding heat for our homes is hard to grasp, after using natural gas furnaces.  But the time is coming.

Seems the Europeans are way ahaid of us when it comes to energy conservation.  On-demand water heaters are finally gaining in acceptance here.

[K Frame]

Igor,

You do see thermal mass systems in the United States, mainly in older homes (pre-central heating) in the colder climates (New York and above).

My ex-wife had family in Maine. They had an old farm house that had a MASSIVE central chimney stack -- probably weighed all told 20 tons or more, with 7 fireplaces.

It would keep the house quite cozy.

In the US, homes built in largely German  settled areas tended to have central fireplace stacks, while those influenced by English architecture tended to have fireplaces on the ends of the house with multiple chimneys. I guess it had a lot to do with the different climates as much as anything.

After cheap iron stoves, and then central heating, came into vogue, fireplaces fell into the realm of decorative, and people didn't use them to heat. They didn't even start thinking about heating with fireplaces again until the 1970s. That's when the wood-burning stove saw a real renaissance in the US, as well.

I don't think of a fireplace when I think heating.

I think of a Harmon or Jotul airtight wood or coal stove.

If I ever get back to central Pennsylvania and get a house up there, the first purchase I make is a coal stove and several tons of hard coal.

[caseydog]

If I ever manage to get back to Pennsylvania full-time to live, the first purchase I make for the new house will be a coal stove to burn anthracite.  It has a tremendous BTU output for volume taken up by the fuel.

The best thing about coal are the very long burn times.

Ahh one of the few benefits of living within reasonable trucking distance of the heart of anthracite country

Cfabe , northeast OH , should still be in reach of reasonably priced hard coal up there , listen to Mike , if you can squeeze in a freestander, a Harmon Anthracite stoker is the way to go. Yes the price of deisel will affect the price of coal some , but it still beats nat gas or heating oil by leaps and bounds, or corn or pellets or even wood unless it's free and you need a lot of exercise.

Last year rice grind anthracite was $128 a ton ,in the coldest spells I use a ton a month , most times I can go six weeks or so on a ton. This is with a full size boiler heating a small house and a detached garage, the furnace is in the garage and the water is piped underground to the house where it hits a heat exchanger and becomes forced air heat (i know , but I wanted central air and the place was already ducted).

Could be even more effecient without the switch from water to air, but this is a good compromise. Hard coal isn't dirty like the old soft coal systems , a little fly ash to contend with and the ash quantity is about 4 - 5 gallon buckets a week.

Just poured a heated sidewalk from the parking up to the steps , piggybacks water off the boiler, hopefully that will eliminate shoveling that this winter.

Next on to the Mother in laws next door to put my old Harmon from the garage into her basement to try and save her from bankruptcy at the hands of her heating oil dealer this year.

Ray

[K Frame]

Word to the wise...

NEVER try to burn soft coal in a stoker stove, especially a gravity fed stoker stove, unless the literature specifically states that you can do it.

[igor]

Mike, Larry, you concentrated a lot of information in your replies. Very interesting - I've never gotten familiar with this aspect of living in the different areas of the US at all. My only visit has been in the Great Lakes area.

Europe would be just as diverse in this aspect too. Think about the climates of Greece, Britain, Scandinavia... Finland is so high up north that our building style is very much concentrated on insulation, as in Sweden. We get regularly -10 to -20 degrees C for months in the winter. What is known to you as a German style, with a central chimney with several channels in it would be what was traditionally built here as well from the early 1800's until the 1960's, I'd say. During the 1990's and now everybody is going back to that style. In between there were all kinds of weird experiments, especially around the 1970's energy crisis. Still, up here nobody lives like, say, in Britain or France, where dwelling heating _must_ be complemented by wearing layers of clothes when it gets close to zero... we Finns have this "Japanese" -style thing up here that shoes are always taken off at the door and everybody goes in their socks indoors. So a pretty comfy and even temperature is called for everywhere and around the year.

A few examples of common ways to build here: double to triple insulation on exterior structures, mostly rockwool or such products. Outer walls are mostly timber, since the 1960's often brick as well. Still most wall structures remain timber. Breathability of the structure is highly important, absolutely no dampness indoors is allowed. The windows had double glass since the 1950's on and nowadays it's always triple: an inner frame with double panes, vacuum in between, and an outer frame with a single glass pane. Central heating with water radiators is the norm. Oil furnaces are common as heat sources, as are centralized heat and power stations in cities. No anthracite used except for some power stations, hardly any natural gas either. Fireplaces and baking ovens with considerable thermal mass are getting more popular again and timber-burning furnaces for central heating systems are very economic where timber is readily available. My sister's family has a farm with their own woods, and they have a 1-meter-long furnace and a 3.500 liter hot water tank in their basement. Even in the middle of January they burn wood for an afternoon a week, and have all the heat and hot water they need with a family of five. I'm going to build such a system once.

A couple of other peculiarities - all doors are built to open _outwards_. The cops have no door rams here ;-) and absolutely nothing in these houses can be "kicked in". In addition, the number of saunas in the nation exceeds the number of households... No kidding.

[cfabe]

Guys, this is great information. I guess I'll elaborate on my situation a little. I'm currently living in my mom's house and paying the utilities as rent. As such I was thinking about the fireplace insert as a way to cut down the natural gas bill and justifiy running a fire, which I enjoy. There is not room for a free-standing stove without a significant remodel, and I wouldn't want to put that kind of money/effort into a house I will only be in for one or maybe two more winters. We're in the suburbs right now so I can't cut wood from here, but I have a friend with a 20 acre woodlot I can harvest from for free.

My long term plan is to build a small house on 20+ acres out in the sticks, so all of this information will be put to good use in a few years. This house will definately be designed to be heated with wood, as I think wood heat is great for a number of reasons. The mention of coal is interesting, I hadn't really considered that much, but I'll look into that now.

[K Frame]

Igor,

I thought that infloor radiant heating was becoming a lot more common in Scandanavia. A few years ago a I met a Col. in your army who was over here (GOD WAS SHE HOT!), and she mentioned that most new homes have in-floor radiant.

Having the doors open outwards may make some sense, any wind would tend for force them more tightly shut against the weather stripping.

cfabe,

Have you ever harvested wood enough for a winter?

We're talking a LOT of work. A TREMENDOUS amount of work.

One thing about a pellet stove is that you don't need a traditional chimney -- they're vented through what looks like a dryer vent. That gives you an INCREDIBLE amount of flexibility in where to site them in the home.

By the time you get yourself a wood-burning fireplace insert and have the chimney brought up to current code (most chimneys now have to have stainless steel liners installed when used with an insert) you may very well be better off going with a pellet stove.

Or, with a set of tightly fitting fireplace doors, having the firebox modified so that it draws combustion air from outside the home, and using a heatilator type grate with a blower.

Total cost for those modifications would probably be $300 to $400.

[igor]

Mike,

Electric infloor heating obviously is most common in bathrooms and laundry rooms. Beyond that, the power costs too much here. Water-circulating central heating built into floors wouldn't be as popular here as the ubiquitous wall-mounted radiators. It might be that the Colonel you met was from a neighboring country, though... ;-) Sweden, maybe? You see, Finland opened the armed forces for female volunteers so recently that I doubt there'd be any of the few that even made Major yet. I doubt that she would've been Norwegian, as although they have both such Colonels and a similar climate as us, they still build houses like the British. Hardly any insulation, sporadic heating, damp carpeting...

The doors opening outwards is an old thing here. I would think it has had as much to do with intruders as fire safety. Both of those points very much apply even this day, whereas the notion of the weather aiding in making the door more weather-proof would be historical.

Comparing wood consumption: in my house described above, approx. 150 sq meters, I burn about 10 cubic meters (neatly stacked, not thrown in) of mixed pine, birch and fir a year. That includes heating the sauna at least once a week as well. The electric radiators take about 10.000 kWh per year on top of that. Here on the south coast of Finland we get average day temperatures above room temperature for 4-6 weeks in the summer and freezing cold for 4-5 months in the winter. How would this compare with your conditions and wood-burning technology?

I usually buy most of my firewood at about 35¬ per cubic meter delivered, otherwise it'd take me close to a day per cubic meter to get it from my sister's forest myself. So no point really if not for the excercise.