Reducing my dependence on fossil fuel

[crazyal]

I'm lucky. I built a timber frame house with foam panels for insulation. I heat both the house and the domestic hot water with oil. 3 years ago I put in a soapstone wood stove. I burn about 2 1/2 cords a year and less than 200 gallons of oil and I'm able to keep my house at about 75 all winter long. Of course having 40 acres of hardwoods also helps the budget.

 

[jinjimbob]

Put that wood in the ground with any other greenery, it becomes fossil fuel.

 

[peterc38]

Yep, been burning wood for years, don't like payin' the oil man.

 

[oakwoods]

Put that wood in the ground with any other greenery, it becomes fossil fuel.

Burning wood is considered carbon neutral. Yes, it does emit carbon into the atmosphere just as fossil fuel. The difference is that the carbon in a tree will go into the atmosphere whether it is burned or dies and decays. In theory that carbon will be captured by the new tree that replaces it, so the carbon is in a cycle. The carbon in fossil fuel has been sequestered for millions of years, so when it is burned it adds "new" carbon to the cycle.

 

[radair]

I'm with you guys. I've been building a new house the past couple of years and have no central heating system. The downstairs is open concept with a bedroom and bathroom and a Vermont Castings Vigilant heats it all well. I had the whole house spray foam insulated and the stuff is amazing. I do have a Rinnai wall-mounted heater but only use it on cold mornings like today when the woodstove would be too hot in a couple hours. I also put electric radiant mats under both bathroom tile floors and electric baseboard units in the kids' bedrooms upstairs but haven't needed them at all (mostly put them in just to satisfy 'the establishment'). I have 13 acres with plenty of hardwood, so the BX has been a workhorse. I only burned a little over 2 cords last winter, pretty good for northern New England. I'm using a "palletized" wood storage system so I can keep the wood in a sunny spot away from the house in summer and then move it with BX & forks close to the back door in the late fall.

For domestic hot water I installed a 30-tube solar collector feeding an 80 gallon storage tank; no conventional water heater. It works incredible, actually heating more water than I can use so I'm thinking of tapping a baseboard unit off it to dump some heat. I am super happy with my design, it's been working great. I love not paying for gas or oil.

 

[BeezFun]

I also burn wood and always thought it was great until someone built a house on the 5 acres upwind from us and also started burning wood. It really smells and if you're outside it's very unpleasant. They have a new, high efficiency stove and burn mostly scrap lumber from pallets so the wood is all clean and dry. So I'm no longer sure this is the best approach to heating, unless everyone lives out in the country and we can control which way the wind blows. Maybe there's some kind of scrubbers you can put on the chimney to clean up the smoke. I was in Steamboat skiing one year, which is down in a valley, and the smoke from the fireplaces was so bad on a still night you almost couldn't go outside. I'm not crazy about living with that kind of pollution problem.

 

[Just2quickz28]

I burn wood as well. Generally I order a truck load of log lengths around February and have it cut, split and stacked, by mid March. This fire wood heats both my house and my fathers place as I truck the wood to his house as needed. My raised ranch has electric heat and I would hate to see how bad that bill would be.

To figure pollution and fossil fuels into the mix between heating types, one must also figure in the transportation of fuel from location to location.

I read some where that a new Hybrid car like the Prius would have to be around for 20+ years before it paid back its pollution footprint, due to the ore in the batteries being shipped on barges and then the car being shipped on a barge ect ect.

 

[chucko]

I am in Fla I need to get my AC to work on wood

 

[drag_slick]

We built a few years ago and put in a geothermal heat pump. The heat pump has a de-superheater in it which pulls water from the hot water heater and uses the heat produced by the compressor to heat it and shoot it back into the tank. We get off peak rates from the electric coop.

 

[CHDinCT]

We pulled our old Insert stove out last fall after finding 4 good sized cracks in
the firebox. We paid dearly for that this past winter. There's going to a woodstove
back in this house by this fall one way or the other.

Curious what happened to your firebox and how you fixed it since we are considering putting a wood stove insert into our masonry fireplace by next winter. Is this a common issue with wood inserts? Got to find a way to use less oil.