How did you get started with wood heat?

Hellif I cut myself, wood splinters shoot out! You mean to tell me that there' are other ways to heat & cook?

 

I built our first home in summer/fall 1978. We had a bunch of old elec heating panels taken out of my folks farm. I installed those but we didn't want to use them if we didn't have to. We bought a used Ashley woodstove with the air intake thermo dial on the front. I was on the road from Tues-Sun and my honey was literally manning the fort with our first lil one, while working full time at the hospital. Crazy. She'd get home, stir up the bed of coals and put in just enough to have a hot burn and be ready to load again before bed. Same in the morning. The Ashley never failed and did a good job on that small house. We hauled all of our firewood 100 miles from the farm. My Dad would work up wood all year and he let us come and take loads back in a 5'x12' tandem axle trailer I built. About a cord per trip.

She always says she loved those years... and a fire now always takes us back... but, she'd had enough of dealing with firewood herself a long time ago.

 

Heated this joint with propane for the first two years we lived here. Cost way too much for my taste so switched to wood. Last year they brought NG down the road so I had that brought to the house. At some point I may hook into the NG meter.

Love wood but doubt I would have ever messed with it if we had NG from the start. 7th season heating nearly 100% minus some holiday traveling.

 

Dad built an all electric house. New build on fifty acres with a fireplace. Family room was to hot to bein but rest of house was to cold. 45 years later I found a friend to supply me with free firewood and Iinstalled a wood furnace. My last natural gas bill was 45 dollars. Never looked back. Btw 76 degrees Iinside 25 outside

 

Forgot to mention he built it in 1970. Ouch.

 

I grew up in a small 3 br rancher with a fisher double door grandpa bear I think they called it. From age 6 or 7 until 17 we hauled wood in the spring and burned it in the fall. Wet. Smoky. And very uneven heat back in the day. My dad would make the living room so hot the stove would often glow red and it would be impossible to sit and enjoy any time in the living room. We moved when I was 18 to a 2000sqft cape cod with a slammer timberline insert with a blower. It heated well and the blower helped even out the heat. Now back then I swore off wood heat. I told myself when I moved out and got on my own I'd never be bothered with cutting splitting and hauling wood. So in 2003 my wife and I bought our first home in the middle of town with a propane furnace. The first year we lived there the heating bill topped our mortgage. We spent roughly 1k a month from December till mid March keeping the house close to 60df. Very disappointed in my thermostat and comfort we bought a k1 space heater and spent the next 10 years heating that shack for roughly 300 a month. I was a slave to the 10-12 hour filling cycle. The living room was kinda warm but the rest of the house was chilly for sure. Fast forward to 4 years ago. I lost my dad to a sudden heart attack and I had the opportunity to move out of town and back into the cape cod i once lived in. The slammer insert was still there but the masonry chimney had settled and pulled away from the house rotting the entire end of the house. We decided to remove the whole deal and use the secondary wood stove as primary heat until we finished renovating the house. First year we burned a free standing Sierra smoke Dragon that yielded 3-4 hour burn times and ate wood like a kid through skittles. Second two years we used a larger dutch-west everburn down draft. It cut back on a little wood usage but burn times still suffered. We understood our wood supply suffered but continued to stash away a little extra year by year. This is our first year with the ideal steel and 1.5 year seasoned mixed wood. Next year at this rate I'll have an excess of 2.5 year seasoned wood because we haven't been through a half a cord of our supply yet. Loving the extra heat and the extra sleep we are getting with the ideals bigger box and cat to slow the burns down

 

About 10 years ago in the spring after a winter of high propane prices I told my wife I was thinkin about putting in a OWB. Her reply was you are not putting one of those ugly damm things in my yard!
Fast forward to Oct. and propane was still going up in price and one of my drivers was looking OWB's and I told him I would ride along with him. I was telling my wife this and she said you better buy one! Got it installed around Christmas that year right after the Propane company had filled my tank. Never bought another tank for 3 years. This was going from using a tank a month for about 3 months of the winter!

Gary

 

Marked for later

 

Built a new home in 1975, electric heat. Ugh. I just got home from 8 years in the military, and went to work for the VA and going to school full time. Electric bill was $275. I knew that wasn't going to work while I was making $6,600 a year and had a stay at home wife with two kids then. Second year there, we had the stove installed. It was an Ashley. Later bought an Allnighter. Wood was about $60 a cord tree length. Burned 5-6 cords a year. Even had a collar that gave us hot water. My parents and my wife's parents never had a wood stove. I learned the hard way. Still have all my fingers and toes, and no house fires.

 

I grew up with wood heat. My dad bought an add on wood furnace in the late 70s that guaranteed that we were either sweating or freezing. Once I was big enough to carry wood I was helping throw it in the basement. As I got older, I'd go out in the woods and stack while my dad cut. He passed away when I was 13 and my mom went back to using the oil furnace, but somehow the wood heating bug stuck with me.
When I bought my house I messed around with trying to get heat from an open fireplace which didn't work so well. I eventually got an insert and a stainless steel liner which helped a lot. Once I figured out that wood burns better when the leaves have been off it more than a week, I was all set.

 

We bought our first house three years ago and it had an open fireplace upstairs and a Country Flame wood stove, not hooked up, in the gutted basement. I cut wood for the fireplace with some coaxing from a coworker. Even got my own chainsaw and everything (I'd never used one before). The fireplace just made the rest of the house cold though.

Fast forward a few years and we finished the basement ourselves (almost done) and hooked up a used Quadra-fire 3100F we got from the in-laws. Passed inspection today and had our first fire this evening. It was a smoky mess getting it going but once it started drafting the stove was fine. We did a small fire to start things off. Stove top temps were about 230.

 

I've been burning wood since i can remember. My family introduced me to it when they brought me home as a baby.

I distinctly recall helping in earnest with the processing of wood at around 7 years of age.

We had a slammer insert, and an add on wood furnace in that huge house. There was 8 acres of prime shagbark hickory, sugar maple and beech with some oak and cherry, with a few other species. The house was sold, but the land was divided and I still have the woods to cut from.

We've got a lopi endeavor at the newer cottage way up north, since about 1996, and wood/ coal boiler in the basement there as an auxiliary heat source plumbed in with a crown lp boiler as well. The old cottage next door which we don't own anymore had a great FP that I'd process and burn wood in since I was a young boy.

When my wife and I bought our house in 08, we both insisted there house we'd buy would have a fireplace.

We burned every winter fall and spring in that open FP with a heatilator rack until last Thursday, when I pulled that our and installed my Quadrafire 4100 on Saturday.

 

These are awesome stories and a lot to learn here! I recently just got started, we just bought a house that had an open fireplace and we wanted a way to heat the house without the gas heater, my wife grew up with only a wood stove in her house so we decided to get one, it has been awesome! Still trying to learn how to best operate it. It's a century cw 2900

 

I was born in 64 so I was pretty young when the 70's "gas crunch" hit. My parent's house had 3 fireplaces in it! My dad used sheet metal to block off the one in the living room and basement and we build out the hearth to support a wood stove and ran the pipe right into the damper on the fireplace. He bought two big stoves and we burned wood the entire time I lived there.
I got married in 88 and we bought a small ranch house that had electric heat. My wife grew up on wood heat too so we put a chimney up and put a stove in the basement.
When we built our new home 12 years ago, we figured we were done with wood, but wood gets in your blood and oil fluctuates so we installed an OWB a few years back and love it.

 

My parents bought an old mansion that was divided into two apartments. The coal boiler had been converted to oil, but burned it like crazy. It was 77 or 78.
After one winter our only heat was the gas (NG) heater built into the stove. (The city couldn't shut us off until spring) my dad put in a Tempwood stove.
Eight years later we built a new house with oil heat. Some of my earliest memories involve cutting, splitting, stacking, and dragging the firewood in for the stove.
I put an outdoor pellet boiler in to heat my first house.
Now I'm a caretaker and we have an old Fisher grandpa bear to keep from burning 600 gallons plus in oil a year.
Four years in I think I might have some of it figured out.

 

Growing up all we had for heat was wood. In the winter we would run three stoves, the wood cookstove and a couple Shenandoah stoves that heated the back of the house. I eventually went off to college got a job there and got married. We lived in an apartment with some sort of baseboard heat (heat was included so I didn't ask) so I got to see how the other side lives lol. Fast forward a few years and my wife and I decide to move back up this way and we move in with my dad for a year to save cash to get our own place. While there my wife got a crash course in running a wood stove as it was new to her and she was finishing up grad school (online program so she was home for the most part while I was out for the day working). After a year we managed to get our own place and have stuck with wood as much as possible to keep the oil bill down. This year with the Keystone (and the mild start to the winter) the furnace has come on once and that was only because I had intentionally let the stove go out. I do like having the oil for when we take off for the weekend but I do have dreams of maybe eliminating the oil and getting a couple minisplits to keep things from freezing when we're gone (and cool things down in the summer if we choose).

 

I was raised in a house in the city without a fireplace. Both my grandparents had open FPs. I loved to go visit my dads parents on the farm. They heated with the FP for a secondary/primary heat source. The other grandma had a huge house and just burned for aesthetics and some heat as well. The latter got gas logs when I was a young teen. I hated them. The other ones I loved the fire.

As I got older and my aunt built a new home with a FP I would cut wood with uncle and cousin for her and my grandma. As I got older I cut for her as I bought a saw right out of college. I lived with her on the farm. I cut wood for grandma and mpg aunt until a few years ago.

When we were first married in 05 we lived in a 1000sqft trailer. It had just electric resistance heat. I was in grad school and wife had no job. I wanted to heat with wood...when I saw that the outside unit did not cut on and the meter was spinning like crazy I threw more wood in the ZC FP and turned the t stat back to like 55. I cut wood and burned what I could mostly 6month max seasoned. We stayed perfectly warm that winter but bedroom was cold and I had to stoke fire all night. It had a blower on it that I fixed as it was not working when we moved in.

We lived there just longer than a year. Moved to another rental, the landloard advised not to use the FP. I didnt but cut wood and had it stacked there. When we bought our house I took what I had left there but the year and a half at the later rental I would haul wood back to my grandmother on visits. The house we bought had a fp in it. I cut wood the year before usually at most mostly though the spring or summer before. We tried to heat for warmth as best we could. Id start a fire at 4-5 pm and stuff it full before bed. Did little for heat other than right in front or unless I had a fire for like 10 hours or more. I tried to convince the wife to get a stove. I started on the forums. Found the hearth and then found a catalyst stove that the wife kicked with a window. And started cutting my wood to season longer and get three years ahead. Then the saw obsession with increased volume of wood used as with the stove it allowed me to go 24/7. I think this is the 5-6th year with the stove. Love it. This last spring I bought an NC30 for a second stove install. Once I build the hearth and put in a new class A chimney in

 

Growing up downstate, the first house I lived in was natural gas heat, we had 9 acres that I spent a lot of time in when I was young and I can still remember how much I loved being in the woods. When I was about 10 years old my folks moved us to a house in a suburb. I hated it, still natural gas heat.
By 13 we had moved again, back out into the country a little bit, 5 acres, propane heat. It was about this time in my life when I realized how much I loved the woods and at the same time didn't really know much about them. I couldn't have told you an oak from a beech if I had wanted to. So at 13 I spent $50 of my own money on a hard cover copy of "native trees of North American landscapes" and that sent me down the path of forest management. I have read that book cover to cover countless times and to this day believe that it has had an impact on who I am as a person. From 13 to 18 years old I managed that wood lot, thinning and culling the crooked and rotten trees and giving room to those with good growing patterns and structure. I worked with an old axe that was my grandfathers, polished the rust off, put a razor edge on it with a file and attached it to a new handle. I would use this axe to fell limb and cut to log length everything I took. Then I would carry or drag out everything that I could and pile it up until I could get my dad to cut it into rounds for me. I would then split and stack it all just for the fire pit
At 18 after I graduated highschool, I got married and we moved to an apartment, electric heat...
Lived there a year, moved up to gods country, another apartment, another year, more electric heat
This last spring the wife and I bought our first house, it has a vogelzang Durango already to go when we moved in. I checked the chimney in the spring, looked like it had just been cleaned. My dad came up to visit us and as a house warming gift bought me my first saw,
Stihl ms271. I have to say, i sure am blessed that he did because I had just put almost everything I had into my down payment. I started cutting right away, everything dead standing, stacking it up on pallets. It was about that time I found FHC and began reading. Making firewood and lighting fires was something I was used to, but doing it in a stove is a very different bear. But here I am, three months of burning in, house is staying toasty, only have used 20 gallons of propane so far and I've only burned about a cord of spruce thanks for making a sweet thread brenndatomu

 

In the winter of '05-'06 the oil furnace decided it had had enough. Of course it was in February. Turned out, the combustion chamber had cracked and we were venting exhaust into the duct work. We knew right away something was wrong because of the smell, but didn't know what. I shut the furnace breaker off and went to Lowe's and bought a kerosene heater to get us through the day and that night. Got a furnace guy out the next day who told us of the crack and gave us an estimate of $4800 to replace it. At that time there was no way we could afford it. So we bought another kerosene heater and finished off the winter with them.

In the spring we decided to look into a wood furnace and found a used Hotblast on CL. I pulled the old furnace out, tied in the duct work, cleaned the chimney and we've been heating exclusively with wood ever since.