What and how do you heat your home and possibly shop during the cold winter months??

[ultrarunner]

We were 'uptown' last night eating out, we eat out about once a week lately and I was somewhat taken back looking at the fuel price sign on the Speedway Gas station across the road. Gas prices took a very healthy increase in a matter of a day. Up to $4.48 here. Didn't see the diesel price but I'm pretty sure it was well over $5.00 a gallon so I imagine heating oil here is at least as high as off road diesel which usually runs about 45 cents below the on road price.

$7 regular and higher norm today...

At the cabin heat is wood using a built in place ceramic tile oven...

Wood is loaded once a day from the stair house to the basement keeping the living areas smoke and wood free.

When temps drop to the teens or colder the oven is loaded 2x a day.

The downside is it takes hours to get first heat when first firing...

 

[kenmac]

I heat with heat pump ! No power, nat gas logs, or generator back up. My choice

 

[Eagle223usa]

I use almost 100% wood, we have a pellet stove back up.

 

[dodge man]

One thing that seems to be rare in my area is heating with fuel oil. Must be an east coast thing.

 

[LouNY]

It is and always has been a fairly high btu per gallon value, easy to ship by most methods road,rail, water ways, ect. No high pressure tanks or regulators required, no pipelines required.
Available for a reasonable price most of the times, it was the fuel of choice for many years as homes converted from wood/coal heating with it's associated shoveling cutting splitting, ash hauling and constant tending to setting a thermostat and enjoying.
Almost no natural gas lines around here once you leave the cities and larger Villages.
#2 Fuel oil has approximately 138,690 btu's per gallon,
#1 kerosene has approximately 135,000 btu's per gallon,
Propane is only around 91,333 btu's per gallon.
Oil is an easy fuel to store and move around.

 

[jyoutz]

One thing that seems to be rare in my area is heating with fuel oil. Must be an east coast thing.

I have never seen or heard of anyone heating with fuel oil in my country, even though we have local refineries. The fuel of choice is natural gas where available, and propane or wood where NG is unavailable.

 

[TractorTYMe]

Wife and I work full time, so in 2001 we had an electric furnace installed that has worked well, we have a $300/month electric bill but I pay for convenience. However when it goes below -20F the furnace has a hard time keeping up, so I always have a couple of cords of wood ready to go for those instances. I started using IBC totes for easy hauling with my tractor. We have a full working mill in the background. So I could easy have another full time job.

And now I've got this exceptional tool for gathering logs that can be milled or used for firewood.

 

[John_Mc]

Fire Wood in my area is basically free. Its the work involved and can you do somthng else with the time to make money, as apposed to saving money. I certainly didn't see this till later in life. Working, I can just have someone else deliver wood at a lesser cost in time, then if I collected and cut it my self. This year we are doing the experiment to see if the wood stove is even worth it, aside from the esthetic reasons.

Firewood still standing in the forest here goes for about $10/ full cord - and that's if the access is easy. If you are working far from a road or with otherwise difficult access it may be worth nothing. All of the real value is what is added in the harvesting, processing, and delivery.

I'm not the most efficient firewood harvester. I do it in my own way and at my own pace. If I kept track of all of my equipment costs and billed my hours at what can can make otherwise, it would most likely not be the cheapest way to heat. I do it because I enjoy the work (well, I enjoy it other than the splitting and stacking part.) I also plan my firewood harvesting to accomplish other goals, such as improving wildlife habitat or timber value or putting in recreation trails. The logs I take out for firewood are just a byproduct of that activity. Most are not good for much else: too small or poorly formed or diseased to use for lumber, though I do occasionally harvest trees to turn into lumber or logs for construction projects (some of the structures in the obstacle course in our woods are made from logs/lumber I harvested here.)

 

[5030]

Far as I can tell, if you want a wood stove or outside wood fired boiler, today you now have to deal with the EPA and their catalytic combuster stuff to contain particulate emissions and I've read that in some areas, wood stoves have been outlawed.

None of that happens with a biomass stove because they all meet or exceed the EPA guidelines for visible and particulate emissions and biomass stoves are carbon neutral as well (not that I care), but they are and quite a bit of pelletized fuel comes from Forestry slash and discarded wood products like old pallets and skids that would wind up on landfills.

One of my favorite companies that uses their forestry slash and excess lumber (from the trim of their flooring mills is) Somerset Hardwood Flooring in Somerset, Kentucky. What started out for them as fuel to heat their boilers and plant has become quite a value added business. Somerset hardwood pellets are sold all round the Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan area. Even have their own fleet of delivery semi's.

 

[IndyIan]

We heat with a mid size woodstove, and a bit of electricity if we are away for a few days. I use a 5lb Collins maul, or a 4lb Fisker maul to split, and if they don't work, the chainsaw splits it...