Sitting here, the last week of March, watching a snowstorm dump inches of white stuff while the thermometer sits at 32 degrees, I can't help but think about firewood. I'm wondering if we have enough to finish heating the house through a cold April, how long the supply inside the house will last, and when I need to refill the wood furnace. I don't want to dissuade anyone from homesteading or moving to the country, but I think a lot of books & magazines diminish the amount of work that is required just to heat your house.
Let me start by saying, I love heating with wood and so does my family. Most years we have a constant fire going for roughly 6 months a year, from mid-October until mid-April. Our house is a 200+ year old farm house, around 2600 sq.ft., and we are able to keep it at a consistent 71 degrees. Because our wood furnace is in the basement, our floors are warm all winter, which makes the hardwood floors much nicer to walk on. Where we live the options for heat are: heating oil, propane, electric, geo-thermal, or wood. Our house had/has an oil furnace and we didn't want to buy a new furnace since ours was technically fine, it was just expensive to use, so we opted for wood. Even if we had natural gas available, we would still heat our house with wood most of the time, opting for gas during the late fall/early spring times when it is difficult to keep the house from getting to hot with the fire.
So lets assume you decide to move to the country, grow your own organic vegetables, raise some animals, and heat your house with wood. The cheapest way to heat with wood is to cut your own. Your goal for the first year is to cut enough wood for 2 or 3 years, that way in subsequent years, you will always be burning at least 2 year old wood that is well seasoned. Your first winter will tell you roughly how much wood you need each year and chances are you will underestimate by a cord or two. (in case you don't know, a cord of wood is a stack of wood, 4 feet high, 4 feet deep, and 8 feet long) We burn roughly 8 cords of wood a year, so my wood shed is built to hold 16 cords, that way I always have 2 years of dry seasoned wood.
First thing that you need is a place to cut your wood. If you don't own land that is wooded, then you will have to find places to cut. I drive around with my chainsaw in the truck after strong storms, cutting up downed trees & branches for people whenever I see them. You can also usually find local landowners that will allow you to cut on their property. Sometimes the deal is only for trees that are dead or already down, or you may get lucky and be allowed to cut anything and actually manage their woodlot for them. Either way, if you are moving to a new area and don't have your own wooded property, finding wood can be a challenge.
Once you've established a place to cut, now you need to get the wood out and to wherever your are storing it. In the spring, I will try to cut & haul out 5 truck loads a week until it gets too hot to cut. cutting the wood is easy, the chainsaw basically does all the work. Once its cut though, the real work starts. You will handle each log several times before it's actually burnt: carrying to the truck, unloading, splitting, stacking, carrying to the house, and finally putting it into the furnace.
After you have the wood hauled out of the woods, the next thing is to split it into pieces that will fit in your furnace. I
used to split by hand but after doing that for enough years, I broke down and bought a hydraulic splitter. I always like how the movies portray the country guy out back splitting wood. It seems like a very pleasant task and at first, you won't mind doing it. But when you are looking at splitting 8 or more cords a year, it gets old fast. What you don't see is the bigger logs where you swing a heavy maul over & over or use a wedge & sledge hammer to split them open, or nasty knots that stop all progress. When you split your wood, you should end up with 3 sizes of pieces, not counting kindling. You'll have some smaller pieces, useful for getting the fire going in the mornings or any time it has died down; your average sized pieces, what most people picture when they think of firewood, which is your most used source of fuel; and your large, long burning pieces, used to keep the fire going all night or times you are away from home for long periods. We have a 15-60-25 ratio of small-average-large sized pieces.
Now you have your wood cut & split, it's time to stack it so that it dries. We built a 48x8 lean-to on the side of the barn last year to store our firewood. Prior to that, we stacked it out in the open and covered it with tarps. If you do cover it with a tarp, make sure that air can still get underneath the tarp, otherwise you are locking in all that moisture. When you stack your wood, you will want to make sure you have a good mix of small, medium, and large pieces throughout your stack, since you will be burning some of each every day. Even when we bring wood into the house (which we keep stocked with several days of wood), we make sure that smaller stack has about the same ratio.
Remember, you are cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking during the spring/early summer, the same time of year when you will be planting your garden. There will be days you wake up planning on doing firewood, but the garden will need watered, weeded, harvested, etc., so the firewood will be put on hold until that is done.
It's starting to get cold and it's time to get wood into the house. We have a wood room that can hold 4-6 weeks of wood, which is nice, except that it will take the better part of a day getting it stocked, and once winter is here, we generally bring in 1 week of wood at a time. You will need a mechanism to transport the wood to your house. We use a 4-wheeler with a heavy duty cart that we purchased at Tractor Supply attached. The cart is rated for 1200 lbs and has large enough tires that I can take it across the creek and into the woods if needed. The one thing about wood heat is when you are out of wood in the house, regardless of how cold, wet, windy, snowy, or late it is, you will have to go out and get wood. This transporting of wood from wood shed to house goes on from the time you start burning in the fall until you are done in the spring. People have asked why we don't store more wood in the basement, and it's an easy answer .... BUGS! Wood will have bugs, either inside, under the bark, or just on it. My house is warm enough to make the bugs active and I don't want to bring them all inside for a party.
Before you are done burning the last fire in the spring, you will start cutting again for the next year, and the cycle continues. Again, not to dissuade anyone, but you will likely be handling wood 9 or more months out of the year, only getting a break during the hottest months. But we love heating our house with wood. The heat is consistent and always on. A normal furnace heats the room up, turns off when the thermostat hits the key temperature, then cools down until the thermostat kicks in again. So you have constant highs & lows. We have noticed that 67 degrees with wood feels a lot warmer than 67 degrees with the furnace. The conclusion I've come to is 2-fold, 1) the floor is warm because of the radiant heat coming off the wood furnace; 2) there are no dips in the temperature when the thermostat kicks off, so it's a constant 67 degrees.
I hope that I've shed some light on the amount of work required to heat your house with wood. It is a lot of work, but it is also very rewarding.
