Heating with wood burners/fire places only?

[sumi]

@Beekissed I'm with you there. I love collecting wood, when I get time to, sawing logs, splitting logs, making fires (now I finally learned how to do it!) and enjoying that wonderful heat. In SA we called camp fires "Bushveld TV" It is relaxing to sit and watch a cozy fire burn. I had a love-hate relationship with fire, on account of developing a kind of pyrophobia in childhood, which I finally beat, and I'm now grateful for the cheap heat source. I just wish I had a chance to collect more wood! The weather is not playing along at the moment.

 

[Denim Deb]

Yesterday I went to ID some trees at a county park. (I honestly can't understand why this park is a county park and not a national park since it was where a very important battle was fought in the Revolutionary War.) And, the old house is being used for tours as well as some offices. To get into the house, you go thru the old kitchen. It just smelled so good in there. I wished I could have made a fire in the huge fireplace and sat there and watched it.

 

[sumi]

I started the fire at lunchtime today and kept it idling since then, it's been about 11 hours now and though the house is a bit cold upstairs, it's bearable. Downstairs it's nice now, not warm, but comfortable. It was 37*F outside early this evening, so the fire had it work cut out today, with us in and out the door too.

 

[McCulloch610]

We've been heating our entire house evenly for nearly eight years with this:

Its an Englander 28-3500 add-on furnace. The silver duct you see exiting the top feeds into my existing furnace plenum. The wood furnace has it's own blower and filter box which draws air from the basement, blows it around the firebox, and into the furnace plenum where it gets distributed evenly to every room in the house. I also can turn my main furnace blower on to help it. Regular wood stoves are space heaters and while they can generate a lot of heat, it tends to stay in one room, especially if you don't have a very open layout. As far as I'm concerned, central wood heating is the way to go. We burn 4-5 cords of wood a year and merely use our oil heat to take the edge off during the early fall/early spring. Last year I only burned 50 gallons of oil.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

I didn't know a central wood heater was even available - but living on the gulf coast I'd probably rarely need it. Thanks for posting that!

 

[McCulloch610]

I didn't know a central wood heater was even available - but living on the gulf coast I'd probably rarely need it. Thanks for posting that!

There are many forced air central wood heating units on the market. Some are even combination units that will burn wood or oil. The Englander is a good solid unit but it's not very efficient. I could get the same amount of heat out of less wood if I had a furnace with a secondary burn. There are wood burning boilers as well, but they are much more pricey as are boilers in general.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Good to know!

 

[Beekissed]

We've been heating our entire house evenly for nearly eight years with this:

Its an Englander 28-3500 add-on furnace. The silver duct you see exiting the top feeds into my existing furnace plenum. The wood furnace has it's own blower and filter box which draws air from the basement, blows it around the firebox, and into the furnace plenum where it gets distributed evenly to every room in the house. I also can turn my main furnace blower on to help it. Regular wood stoves are space heaters and while they can generate a lot of heat, it tends to stay in one room, especially if you don't have a very open layout. As far as I'm concerned, central wood heating is the way to go. We burn 4-5 cords of wood a year and merely use our oil heat to take the edge off during the early fall/early spring. Last year I only burned 50 gallons of oil.

But...if it's better than regular stoves, why do you have to supplement with oil heat? I've had wood burning stoves in all kinds of houses and didn't have to supplement heat. A person can use fans or just strategic placement of the stove to insure most of the house is adequately warm and only a few corners a little cool, but still comfortable.

My brother has an outside wood furnace hooked into his vents as well...but he seems to have to supplement that with little gas stoves here and there in his home. If he didn't have free gas at that place he'd be running into even more money than he has to pay for wood.

I like the idea of a wood furnace, with all the wood being outside, but I often wonder at the heat loss with those stoves being out in the cold. Having one in the basement certainly makes more sense but not if it won't heat the whole house...and having to go up and down stairs to tend the fire all the time is not appealing.

I think I'll stick with the simplicity of the plain ol' wood stove, though it has drawbacks of its own, we never have to turn on a furnace no matter how far the temps dip below zero.

 

[McCulloch610]

But...if it's better than regular stoves, why do you have to supplement with oil heat?...Having one in the basement certainly makes more sense but not if it won't heat the whole house.

I think you misunderstood my post. We only use oil heat for very brief periods in the early fall/early spring when the temperatures only drop to the 40s or so at night and then warm up to the 60s during the day. If I were to run the wood furnace in those temperatures, even with a partial load of wood and the air choked down all the way our small ranch would probably still be uncomfortably hot, and I'd have to let the fire burn out during the day anyway. Once the temperatures get below 40 consistently the wood furnace gets lit and really never burns out completely until spring. Sub-zero temps are where the wood furnace really shines. The oil furnace doesn't get used at all from December 1 to February 29th unless we are away from the house for more than 24 hours.

I suppose the perfect solution would be to put small stoves in the kitchen and family rooms so that I could use them in the early fall/early spring and then I could use almost no oil at all, but the 50 gallons I do burn during the "shoulder season" is almost trivial. The family across the road typically burns about 800 gallons a year Also, all we pay for firewood is what it costs us to cut, move, and split it-I've never bought firewood.

 

[Denim Deb]

@McCullock610m, your furnace looks about like what my parents have for heating their house. And, their house is always warm and comfortable. My dad, at 86, finally decided he was tired of splitting wood by hand, so he bought a splitter this year.