reduce heating bill with Wood Stove

[okclumberjack]

i have a new 1750 sq. ft. home in central oklahoma, winters don't get as bad as it does for some of you, this is my first stove it is a lopi (endevor) & is the highlite of my new home, like someone else stated burning wood is work but if you love what your doing it's not as much work, like the person that compared burning wood too a garden he's right. over size the stove, can build a smaller fire or open a door but if the stoves too small it's too small, i did what i thought was alot of research about the stoves & was very impressed with LOPI, there heavt quality stove with secondary burners on them, there is specs too installing one don't want to get to close to stuff with one because they get hot, i don't have a fan on mine, but i bought a VORNADO fan & point it @ the stove plus my ceiling fan it circulates very well, just got done building a 220 volt electric log splitter which is a blast too operate, the stove burns alot better with split wood, it just amazes how much heat you can get from a couple of logs.

 

[beenthere]

okclumberjack
Have you posted any pics of your splitter build? Point to your thread if you have, or start one if you haven't.
Would like to learn about what you did.

 

[dmccarty]

We heat entirely with wood. We have an Osburn stove that is supposed to heat about 2,200 sf but we have 2,450 sf. But instead of 8 ft we have 10 ft ceilings so there is more house than stove. AND we have lots of big windows aka holes in the walls. They are energy efficient windows and they do no leak air but they still are holes in the walls.

The stove is on one side of the house and we have a fairly open floor plan so the heat from the stove moves very quickly to the back of the house.

The stove does keep are house very comfortable most of the time. The exception is when the temps get into the teens and the highs stay in the 20's or low 30's on cloudy days. We have passive solar heating so lack of sun will keep the house cooler. But given those parameters the stove keeps the house very warm for most of the time. A second stove would be nice but we cannot justify the cost since we would only need it for a couple of weeks a year.

In your floor plan if you close the bedroom doors any heat flow is going to be stopped. This is true in our house as well. Our ceiling are flat, not cathedral ceiling to trap the air. If you have flat ceilings it looks like the heat will flow to the other side of the house but those back rooms are still going to be colder than the rest of the house unless you get a much bigger stove vs house size.

We do not like using the ceiling fans to mix the air. The slight movement of air makes us feel colder. But if you have the fans try them in reverse and see what happens.

Tis better to have the chimney stay inside the envelope of the house for as far as possible to draft easily. I think the rule is that the chimney should NOT have more than 180 degrees worth of turns.

You also need or should have an outside source of combustion air. We have a six inch PVC pipe that runs under the floor and pops up behind the stove. If the stove is burning you can feel the air being sucked into the house by the stove. But we do not feel the cold air since it is either used up by the stove or heated by the stove. There are adapters that can go through the wall to bring in combustion air. Some stoves have connections for combustion air.

Money wise I am guessing we save a $100-150 a month by heating with wood. If we had to pay for the wood I am not sure it would be worth the cost. In our case we save quite a bit of money burning wood. Not only the heating savings but we always have trees to clean up. If I had to pay someone to take out the down trees that would be big dollars. We already had a great chain saw and tractor. The only tool we have specifically for burning wood is the hydraulic splitter to split wood. It paid for itself quickly.

With just me cutting the wood into round and splitting I figure it takes me about 8-10 hours and at most $15-20. I need the exercise so splitting the wood is just a bonus. Saving money and burning calories.

If I had to pay for the wood and I did not have our own downed/dead trees to clean up I do not think burning wood would be worth the money.

We lost power for 2-3 hours twice of the holidays. Sure was nice having a nice warm house even if the lights were out. :thumbsup:

Later,
Dan

 

[clemsonfor]

After heating one room of my house for 2.5 winters, i finially convinced my wife to get a wood stove. I have had it in for 3 or 4 days going steady. As it slowly warms up the house (all the cold walls and funature in the unheated part) she cant beleive we waited so long. She loves that you can see it and the heat it puts out(well its an insert). I burn the same amout of wood or a little less than i use with the fire place. The difference is i heated just the tv room by fireplace and i started the fire when i got home between 4pm and 6pm is when i started it it every day, would be coals and about out of heat at 11pm that night, and the room would dip into the high 50's in the mourning. Now i burn the stove all day and night on the same amount of wood and the room has not dipped below 70F. Untill i damped the thing down the other night it was 76f and i think the paint was about to runn off the walls! I purchased a used High valley model 2500. It has the cats in it that will burn all the smoke before it leaves the chimney, so when there engaged you wont see anything but heat waves out of my chimney.

 

[clemsonfor]

I had a Jotul 3 model, about the same as your pic, very .

It's the amount of coals you have that matter, not how much wood you put in before bedtime. It's a mistake to put in a lot of wood and close the damper down - that's a creosote factory for an indoor stove.
Dave.

Thats why i got a catalytic model. They are designed to be dampered down, the cat will burn the smoke to create extra heat and will wurn off almost all of the creosote before it leaves the stove.

 

[clemsonfor]

Here in Oregon with our mild weather it is false economy to burn wood when the outside temp is much above 40 F. That is heat pump weather.
We burn about one cord annually, sometimes 1 1/2 in cold years.
And for those that like to brag about all of the many, many cords of wood bured each year:
INSULATE YOUR FLIPPIN HOUSE!! STOP KILLLING YOURSELF!!! :confused2:

HAVE AN ENERGY AUDIT DONE!!!

If you like cutting all of that wood every year; insulate your house and then share some of that wood with your eldery neighbors. :thumbsup:

I was wondering about some of these huge cords folks use each year, i was also wondering if everyone knows the difference between face cords and cords? I also just figured most folks live up north.

As far as the insulation thing goes, id love to, if it were that easy. I bought my 60 yr old house with only insulation in the celing. There is so much duct work and wires under the house floor insulation would be a pain and i dont have the money to tear all my walls out to put it in. I ahve a brick house so i cant really use the blown in stuff and to blow in from the inside i would have 4" holes all the way around my bedrooms and other rooms to fix. One of the rooms has that cheap trailer like plywood/vynal wall board so id have to redrywall those walls atleast. I cant afford to totally remodel the walls of my house to put insulation in them but i can pay a little higher electric bill and use more wood each month and just have a cooler house, which were use to.

 

[dmccarty]

I was wondering about some of these huge cords folks use each year, i was also wondering if everyone knows the difference between face cords and cords? I also just figured most folks live up north.

We use about 4 to 4.5 full cords a year in our wood stove. My FIL has a much smaller house and uses a big stone fireplace that is used as a room divider in the center of his house. He mentioned that he has used 5 cords this year so far. His fireplace mass does warm up but our last visit it was colder than usual in his house. Course it was COLD out that day so maybe they were not feeding the fireplace enough. It does seem that this year has been colder than usual.

We run the heat pump a couple of times during the winter to just run it. Stove runs all winter. Wood costs me time and $10-20 a cord at most. Power is expensive. The house was at 80 yesterday.

Later,
Dan

 

[Treemonkey1000]

Just tossing my hat in the ring here. I hate to see that much wood go up in smoke at one place..It was hard to insulate the walls at my last house because originally it had been a barn made out of concrete blocks. Then a wood shell was built around that. In the attic crawlspace you could see the original barn roof. There was no insulation between the inner and outer wall. So the first floor walls were about 14" from the inside to the exterior side. Where I ended up saving money was having vinyl siding put on. They first started with a layer of thin insulation to control drafts. Then the siding. After that I replaced the double paned windows which were aluminum frame and not sealed. That made so much difference for outside noise and heat loss. The place I am in now I replaced the aluminum framed windows with good vinyl framed windows. That is saving me a lot of heat loss. Nothing like a warm fire and kicking the heat seeking cats out of the way to sit by the wood stove.

 

[wrath]

With the help of the fine posts of the people here, I was able to make decision on an insert. I've been lurking here for years but decided to register not long ago.

I bought a Pacific Energy Super insert and a Olympia chimney liner kit for my house (it's about 1,200 sqft ranch built in 1963 with 5 year old vinyl windows) in December. I put it in New Year's Eve Day.

We had purchased the house this fall and the day after Thanksgiving I had 200 gallons of #1 fuel oil delivered. The house has a Beckett AFG burner and a Utica boiler from approximately 1995. It is way out of adjustment, it is running too rich. When looking in the inspection hole it looks about right but the chimney is not dry and you can smell a hint of fuel oil when it runs. It has a .85 GPH nozzle in it. By the time I put the insert in I had used around 125 gallons. Or $375.

Since then, we've used roughly 30 gallons of fuel oil. The insert has had wood in it every day. I clean it out every Monday after work.

I've also insulated all the hydronic heating plumbing with R3.4 Thermacell insulation. Recently I put a 21st century thermostat in also. It had the 1963 original bimetal/mercury thermostat. The house still lacks window treatments, all moulding, and all receptacle/switch covers.

About two weeks ago I put in an outside air intake. It uses 4" 30 gauge ductwork that is fully taped. It delivers to the insert via the ash cleanout. The house is much easier to heat and I never have a draft problem. Prior to putting the outside air intake in, the basement would get into the 40s and the basement garage would get so cold water would freeze. If a bathroom fan, dryer, or range vent was turned on before the chimney got hot I would get a puff of smoke in the room when I opened the door. The outside air kit has also helped with humidity loss.

The boiler runs usually twice a day. If I don't wake up in the middle of the night to feed the insert the boiler will bump up the temperature in the house to 67 at 6:00am. If I don't get home by 5:20pm the boiler will heat the house up to 67. As I've addressed each issue as listed above, the boiler runs less and less.

The insert will go for about 6 hours on a pre-heated full load with the air turned down to the minimum. Pacific Energy's calculations must be based on unobtanium wood. Even if I fill the insert to the brim with beautiful red oak I still only get about 7 hours on minimum air.

Our chimney/insert is located in the exact center of the house. Our bedroom is the farthest from the insert (around the corner down a hallway) and it is usually 4 degrees cooler than the living room. If we turn on a small fan we can get it up to 2 degrees different. We prefer our bedroom in the low 60s so most of the time we keep our bedroom door closed.

So far, we've only burned felled wood from our property. It has ranged from punky river birch, red oak, elm, and recently I found a couple ginormous ash trees that died years ago due to insects that I cut down. The ash we've been burning for about a week now and while it's not as clean as red oak it sure does heat nice.

We've burned roughly 1.5 cords of wood in 1.5 months. Now, this is not prime wood. I've had quite a few pieces of wood end up in the insert that basically just boiled off water. If you were to do the math, we went from costing around $10/day to heat the house to roughly $2/day to heat the house. But there are catches:
We get our wood for free.
The $2700 I spent on the insert/chimney liner wasn't included.
We don't charge ourselves an hourly rate for cutting/splitting/stacking the wood. Or the monstrous mess clean up that comes with sourcing wood.
I didn't include the cost of durable goods (chainsaws) but did include consumables like gas/oil/chains.

 

[Michelle K linnane]

After this winter when I have the money in the spring, I am installing a wood stove and I think I will go for a big one.

Before we had some snow I was going through about 7 gallons a fuel oil a day(weather was bad wind cold temps and no snow). The foundation of crawl space is cement block uninsultated. Finding this out is what started the post orginally. My kitchen water froze one night. Wind blew hard.

To help with fuel oil bill I took round bales and placed them against the foundation to seal in between the bales once we got so powdered snow I took snow blower and blew it inbetween bales. Then I took tractor and started bucketing snow till I had almost 4 feet on the west side (wind side). It stays warmer and I turned down the temp to about 67, I used to do 70 and was still cold sometimes.

We have had some very cold days since I did this and a couple of times it dipped 20 below here. Well I went looked at fuel oil consumtion again and I am down to about 4 to 5 gallons a day. So there is alot to be said for insulation even if you are getting your wood for free. I just do not want to work that hard. I plan on having blown in insultation placed sprayed on
cement block walls. I do not care if I can get my wood for free I would not mind heating this place with a candle!

But there is something to be said for coming in from the cold and sitting by a wood stove at night before dinner looking at the fire and drinking a bourbon! I think that is as good as it gets.

This thread has been very good! thank you guys.