Yep, it was disheartening turning the heat on in October, knowing it will run till May. I rent, so I am stuck with oil heat, which wasn’t too bad when I kept the thermostat at 50 all last winter. I decided life’s too short, though, so this year will keep it at 55 except when I am home, when it will be 62. I still have most of a tank from last year so I hope to fill up only once ~250 gallons. The landlords put in new windows last year which I think helped a lot.
I have a co-worker who switched to a pellet stove, and those are selling out around here. My friend replaced his wood/oil furnace with a wood/propane one. And my boss changed to one of the ones that heats a tank of water outside the house and then pipes the hot water through the house for heat.
We’ve just come out of winter. I have a small electric fan heater which I pull out of the cupboard three or four times during each winter. It’s more than adequate.
We have our usual oil furnace for heating and hot water, but we keep the temp low and make the main heat while awake wood … but the bio bricks sound interesting.
I found my ultimate woodstove at lehmans, it has the fire box above a baking oven, and space for 4 pots on top, so i can heat and cook =)
When the former owners built the addition to our house where our bedroom is, they didn’t route heating ducts. This is actually helpful. We have a nice wall heater in the room, and we can set the programmable thermostat real low overnight. (In the Bay Area it never gets very cold anyway.) My wife works at home, but she has a space heater for her office, so the heat is on in the morning and evening, and that is about it.
I’d be nervous about depending on any sort of wood burning stove, since fires are beginning to be banned on spare the air days. We have natural gas.
We haven’t had to turn our heat on yet. We try to delay until Thanksgiving, at least.
An ancient natural gas furnace and a programmable thermostat as usual. We keep the house cold, too (around 65ºF when we’re not up and around) and wear sweaters. The funny thing about our ancient furnace (it’s a Coleman that is original equipment for our ~ 40 year old house) is that our heating bills are lower than people with high-efficiency furnaces. We’re definitely of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset.
Pure, cheap, 100% electricity. I only pay half the normal residential rate because it’s a “green” system, and most of the heat comes right out of the earth. This year should be better than the last year (first year), because I’ve been pumping heat into the ground all summer.
My house utilizes electric heat from a coil. I don’t plan on making any changes. Since I’m on my utility company’s level payment plan, my heating costs aren’t going to be much of a concern, since I pay the same bill every month, regardless of the season.
These bio bricks intrigue me and I see that there is not a Michigan area dealer.
I am looking into finding corn for burning. I’m wondering if I can burn the corn cobs used for deer piles that I see all time. Any thoughts?
We heat at night via our heatilator fire place. The wood comes from various sources. Supplementing with propane.
Also, I get the fire started via burning the plethora of paperwork coming home from school, junk mail, election crap and newspapers swiped from the recycling bin thing near school.
Here in the NE, corn is never a competitive fuel-we can’t grow enough for feed needs, and import it from the midwest.
Petrol here contains 10-15% ethanol, corn derived, and demand has driven up feed prices which surely affect you?
Cobs burn well, if sufficiently dry. Not sure of BTU, but free fuel is good fuel.
I’m in Australia and have two homes that I commute between: one in the suburbs and one in the bush.
The suburban house is heated via a natural gas wall-furnace that heats the living areas only, and the bedrooms stay pretty damned cold in the worst of the winter chill (never below about 10c though).
The bush cottage is heated through an electric underfloor system AND a semi slow-combustion fireplace. The electric system warms the floor overnight and the ceramic tiles ‘store’ the heat well enough during the day until it turns on again the next night.
Wood for the open fire comes from fallen trees and dropped limbs across the 160ha property. There’s enough to last a few hundred years I reckon.
In the depths of winter (many freezing nights in the bush) the fire is a godsend and such a delight to sit by and while the hours away…then waking in the morning to a toasty-warm floor is pretty damned nice too.
I have a little studio-size log cabin (actual logs!) in Idaho, at about 5800 feet in the mountains, and do we ever have winter here. In fact, it’s pretty much arriving, we’ve gotten our second snow and more is on the way. Last night it got down into the teens. Brrrrrr!
That being said, my place is teeny and seems to be well insulated. Most people around here have baseboard heating, me included, so I’m using plain 'ol electricity. I’m told that power bills in the winter tend to be about $80 for these houses (there’s a few of them built right here) but I don’t mind a coldish house and I have the heat turned on very low and am perfectly comfortable.
Shirley - I heat with wood pellets, which are also a timber by-product. I bought mine in the summer, at $200/ton, in conveniant 40 lb bags. According to the Wall Street Journal, pellet stoves are far more eco-friendly than woodstoves because they produce a fraction of the particulate emissions of woodstoves. I figure the pellets will cost about 1/2 what I was paying for propane.
It would be cost-prohibitive to convert our fireplace over to a pellet stove, and then we’d just have something that burps out heat into the living room - a room we don’t often use unless company is over.
And then, we have “Spare the Air” nights, where lighting fireplaces and wood stoves for mood/atmosphere or even for supplemental heat is forbidden.
I put a wood stove in the basement 3 years ago. Otherwise I have a forced air electric furnace. I’ve been keeping a monthly tally of my furnace run time for 14 years now and plotting it. (Easy to do with a programmable thermostat that monitors the cumulative hours for me.)
Since putting in the wood stove my yearly runtime has been almost exactly half: ~1200 hours versus ~600 hours.
I never used to heat, or use the basement in the winter. Now that I do, I have doubled my living space (bungalow) and am probably spending the same amount on total energy consumption since putting in the stove. (Wood’s not free.)
