For those of you heating your home with wood (whether partial or fully), are you purchasing wood or cutting your own?

 

 we have a wood stove in our basement that I am ashamed to admit...we have never used.   The reason we haven't used it is because we didn't ever spend time downstairs, but now that it is newly painted and carpeted, we might spend more time down there. We do have some wood that we cut this year...but does it need to age first before it is used?  Also  do you think that the stove would heat the rest of the house even though the chimney is outside and does not run through the house?  If we can't useour wood we will probally be buying some.

I am definitely not the person to ask wood questions. I was curious as I never have used wood for much heating. I wondered if it was really an affordable solution.

 

 The longer wood has been cut , the drier it becomes...the drier the wood, the more heat it puts out. Newly cut wood is called green wood. You have to clean your chimney more often if you burn a lot of green wood.

We paid $1800 for ten cords of wood this year. This wood will do us two years and part of a third year. If we had bought oil, we would have paid around $5000. This will be our first year of only heating with wood.  We also paid $130 to have our chimney cleaned. Babs 

like babs said the green wood wont burn as hot and is better to let dryout til next year.  but if you do decide to burn wood downstairs then even though your chimney is outside it will still help warm the upstairs up also.  we burn in our kitchen and our upstairs bedrooms even away from the kitchen end of the house stays warm.  we are lucky that our son inlaw is cutting almost all of our wood for us from his new yard so we dont have wood expense this year.  heating oil if we even get any is another story.  i would like to get a nice fireplace like electric heater for my sunporch since we use it in the winter also.  we have always had a kerosene heater on it but this year its 5.60 or more a gallon and thats just crazy for us right now. 

We heat with a wood/oil boiler in our basement, and a wood fireplace in the tranditional months of spring and falltime. The boiler also heats our water.

We purchase a state wood cutting permit for $20 and that allows us to harvest enough for our yearly heat.

egads, babs....wood is $55 a cord here this year. Some a little higher, maybe $65.

wood gets aged a year before we burn it. Green wood causes alot of creosote buildup on the chimney that can cause chimney fires.

 Ours was actually cheap for here. It is going for $200 to $230 right now. We paid $180 becuase it is froma friend and we took 10 cords at once. We agreed to let him deliver early so he didnt have to bring it out of the woods to his place then reload it to ours. It has been down about a year. We had two or so cords of two year old wood. We were given about half a cord this week or three year old wood for free. Babs

Brandy:

I wondered if it was really an affordable solution.

 

I think it depends what people consider "affordable". It is certainly not affordable if you have asthma, or any serious heart/lung medical conditions. It would be like living in a house with someone who smokes cigarettes. It is second hand smoke. The wood smoke inside your house permeates everything! Your walls, carpet,furniture, draperies, all your clothes smell like smoke. The wood is expensive and you have the cost of that, plus trying to keep everything in your house clean. Any doctor will tell you that it is not a good environment to live in.

 I think a lot depends on the kind of wood stove that you have. They can smoke or not smoke. There are airtight ones, some with catalitic converters, soapstone, cast iron. All burn differrent. I dont feel that I have a lot more dirt other than ashes when I clean my stove. Then it is my fault if I make a mess. Babs