How long have you heated with wood?

Missed "over 50" by maybe one year. At 19-20 years old I rented a tiny house with a single gas radiant heater in the center. At the time I worked in a roof truss and prefab home plant. Since I could get all the dimensional lumber drop offs that I wanted, I decided to put in a small wood stove. I found an Everett Washington Stove Works medium size potbelly stove and replaced the gas stove. The house had a clay lined cinder block chimney that I was able to hook straight up to. The stove didn't hold fire for a long time but sufficed for a few years. Then I got married and immediately bought property and built my own home complete with a Schrader Queen wood stove as well as conventional heat. We have upgraded stoves a couple of times but have never looked back as far as wood heat is concerned!

 

1.5 years here.
I did help my dad haul wood as a pipsqueak, but he quit that as a primary source late 70's after the oil crisis.
Over the years, we c/s/s for friends who didnt have the pepper to do so, while we lived in apartments.
We bought our hovel in '17, started hauling and stacking in '19 because someone had trees to cut. In '20, we pulled the very old oil burner and put in a gasser.....freeing up the masonry chimney for a wood stove.
A good friend mentioned the JotulF500, and we found one on CL.
January of '21 our son who had helped haul c/s/s those first 13 cord, lit our first fire when home from school on break.

We would have spent $3300 on HHO this season, as well as $600 on kerosene. We too love being warm, and shafting big oil/gas.

I stumbled on hearth.com for their good 'primer' type document. Then I ended up reading here extensively, begining with Dennis' primer. That was in '19 when I really wanted to learn about wood heating, which I knew we'd do some day.

Thanks to the collective wisdom here, last summer we hoarded to the three year plan. Joyfully, I planned for 8 cord a year, I dont think we'll use more than 5 though.......this is the first full season we've heated with wood.

Sca

 

So in all that time..........How many and what kind of stoves have you gone through????

 

I've heated exclusively with wood since 1982 so that puts me at 40 years this year . in that time I've completely wore out a big Tremont stove . I was poor and had no choice in the matter. I split by hand until I had back surgery in 2003 and then treated myself to a splitter.

 

Great question for a guy that's been burning for so long. Could be a whole other thread.

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Growing up we had a Kingwood add on furnace in the basement of the farm house. I lived in the Black Hills area and had an Ashley automatic stove in the ranch trailer house that I cut for and kept fed. In eastern Wyoming I took the manufactured fireplace out and installed a catalytic Earthstove insert and now I've been heating our 2000 s.f. ranch style home in Iowa with a Pacific Energy free standing stove for 20 yrs.
I cannot imagine not heating with wood!!!!

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41 years.

 

have to change this a little, i started getting mom and dad's wood in when i was NINE 9 yrs old not 19

 

That’d be a cool separate thread on wood burners used. My father had an Ashley free standing stove in the 70’s and early 80’s, in 85’ he installed the Jensen indoor wood boiler which he still uses today. I’ve had an Ashley, a Dutchwest, and a ThermoControl

 

We moved into our present house in 1980 and we got an insert in 1982 and have been burning ever since. Burning wood off our own land has saved us from buying close to 18,000 gallons of HHO.

 

Dad put a wood stove in around 1990. I helped a lot with gathering, stacking, loading etc. I lived there for about another 10 years or so. Bought a house with a fireplace in 2010, put an owb in 2011 so I'm right around or just over the 20 year mark.

 

It’s an excellent topic for a poll

 

We started in 1967. Dad was a engineer at the then being built John Hancock now Willis towers building. Every day he came home with a truckload of timber that the machinery was shipped on. I was 2 then and I still live in my childhood home so 55 years. Only 2 stoves a catalog ben Franklin then the first Nashua shipped to this area that i still use today.

 

Mom and dad put in a Franklin stove in the mid '70's. At first dad traded work for wood/people that traded at his service station were allowed money off of their bill for wood. It was my job to split it, stack it and haul it to the front porch and move the wood in from the porch when needed. That Franklin stove was a consumer of wood with little heat in the house. They enclosed the front porch and looked at stoves and the Baby Bear was smaller than our Franklin and even though the lady kept telling mom and dad to buy it they bought the Mama Bear. To big, so efficient, couldn't run it the way it should have been as it would run you out of the house. We (my wife and I) heated a drafty old farmhouse we rented in '88 and then in '92 bought our farm. in '96 or so we bought our first OWB. No other heat source for our home so have to cut and have wood. Year of my arm surgery we bought wood, that was 2014, we kept our house as warm as we did when we cut our wood and the cost was still less (considerably less than our '93 winter of $8,000.00 of propane @ .79!). So since '14 we have bought some wood from older guys supplementing their SS money, some from school kids trying to make some money for whatever and then cut the rest off of our farm. The oak blight has really helped select what trees we cut. That's my story, other than using my pony and a mud boat to haul the wood to the porch and using my team of Norwegian Fjords to pull loads of wood to the stove.

 

Started in the late 1970s with a small barrel stove piped out a window in a mobile home. And I'm still here to tell about it!

After that, spent a few years in apartments, then bought my house, where I've heated with wood since the early 1980s.