Bottom line is Brother ya said ya love doin it. As long as your happy and healthy I say have at it. damm the torpedoes.
I'd be interested in how an indoor gasification setup, with and without storage, compares. Those are pricey setups too but generally use less wood than the typical OWB. All of this depends on the house that you are heating as well. Smaller, single level homes with open floor plans are a piece of cake with one stove. Other houses are not so easy. Of course there are stoves that allow ducting heat to other rooms even.
Our situation having a 2600 sf colonial and a 36x40 garage all on radiant oil was kicking my a$$. Wasn't bad the first couple years when it was cheap but when it started getting close to $2 a gallon I had enough. 2000'gallons and burning 4 or 5 cord in a wood stove in the basement we said no more. The OWB fit the demand but it was hungry, it could eat 15 cord a winter easy enough. Had it from 2003 to 2014. A guy in town here has a renewable heating business and I looked at his setup in his own house, he convinced me a indoor gasser was the way to go. Fired it last October and ran it until about 6 weeks ago. Haven't put in storage yet, hopefully this fall I can. We burnt close to 7 cord. It wasn't a bad winter so I'm sure we could have burnt more. Storage they tell me will cut the use by 30%. As I said earlier I'm fortunate enough to have what I need and the property to cut all I want. I always try to take the cull wood out so it takes me more time but on a good weekend I'll get 12-15 cord out. Then the fun part is over.
Sawdog, there is no reason for either of us to disagree! As I had stated, I intended to offend nobody but only attempted to point out a few things for others to consider. Although we perhaps do several things differently, that makes neither you nor I better than the other so nothing to disagree about and I hope you will agree with me on this one. EDIT: btw, you have no idea how many times I erased things before posting and also several times considered not posting at all for fear I had worded things wrongly.
Welcome to FHC FAMILY GOD GUNS & STIHL Would love to read about your situation, maybe in a new thread for Max exposure.
I pizzed away plenty of money when I was a hard core alcoholic and were there any benefits to me from my drinking? Not a one. Even if it costs more than it really has to, cutting and feeding a wood boiler has many benefits. Keeps you out of trouble too.
If you're spending 2k a year you are doing it wrong. Free or cheap is the way to go. Take care of the equipment and stretch out its usefulness so it costs less. A maul and cheap chainsaw is all you really need. Anything else is a luxury so it shouldn't be counted. Take the money you save every year( I spend maybe 150 for 5 cords gas oil) and reinvest in the wood game or out it towards something else.
Just because I disagree with what you wrote, Dennis, doesn't mean that you offended me. No offense taken, we just don't see it the same way. I respect what you wrote and thanks for your reply. Overall, I was just looking for some discussion on the expenses that we all have, that's it. Seems like more than a few have taken this way to far. In either case, doing what we do is a personal decision and will remain that way. With that said, I'd like to see some of these guys (not necessarily you, Dennis) work the wood I do with a cheap saw and a splitting maul. Take that cheap saw (10 year old 12" Poulan should do it) and that maul and come on over - you can hack and carve away on all the 24"-40" elm, white oak, hedge and locust all you want, then go to town splitting those 30" long bucked rounds with that maul. 20 cord and 6 months later, we'll see how that worked out for you. Then we'll talk about the value of decent equipment and the time it saves in processing fire wood. Bottom line is if I was retired or only worked a 40 hour week, burned a cord or two a year, had access to all the 10" rounds I could get my hands on, I'd be getting by on much less. But, wood size, the amount I process, the square footage I heat (3 buildings) and the time I have available to dedicate to firewood dictates that i make the process a bit easier. If having an OWB is too much to ask to heat 3500 sq/ft, it's on me I suppose. If asking for some power behind a bigger bar to handle those 3' rounds is too much, than so be it. If having decent hydrolics capable of handling those 30" elm, hedge and locust rounds is going way to far, than so be it. Thanks to all those had some positive things to add to the thread. I appreciate the knowledge and maturity level of some here, learned a bunch so far and maybe someday, I could help someone else. Some good people here - a couple, not so much. Maybe someone will take me up on my offer and I will make another friend.
Could you supplement with some precut slabwood or blocks from a pallet shop and not process your large wood down so small as to save time. My dads OWB is set up with a jib crane ,trolley hoist and log tongs so the 200-300 pounders go in easy. Fill in around the honkers with slabwood. I'm kinda in the same situation you are time wise. I don't have time to cut wood anymore. I Have a source for mostly oak and maple lumber cutoffs that I burn mixed with coal. Works well.
I know nothing about the economics of wood burning except what it costs me and may save me. It cost me to buy my saw and buy fuel for it. It also cost me money for my chaps, splitting wedges, felling wedges, X-27, 8 lb sledge and even my flippy chain sharpening guide and files. It also cost me money for a stove and chimney along with the rest of the goodies to make a stove a safe option. When I decided to set up to burn wood it was because I was moving out into the country and I knew the power co-op out there had a reputation that was not exactly encouraging. My choice was to hope for the best and get a room in town during any blizzard or get a more reliable heat source for when the power goes out. A wood stove requires no power at all to keep me warm so it was a viable option that I found easy to sell to SWMBO. Fortunately, when it comes to wood heat, my house is taking longer to build than I expected so I am enjoying the luxury of getting well ahead on CSS wood. As a strictly emergency heat source I am guessing even a severe winter would demand all of a half a cord of splits to stay warm during those rare storms. Now that I have been working with wood I realize that I enjoy the work. That adds a whole new dimension to my desire to burn wood. Now I am envisioning always holding back that half a cord of dry wood for emergencies but also running the stove for any extreme weather so that my geothermal heat pump doesn't have to work as hard and especially so that it doesn't kick on the supplemental heating strips in the ducts. Those heating strips can really suck the money out of a bank account. The way I evaluate wood burning for economics is I consider the stove, tools, etc. as minimal emergency equipment and no way do I figure that into my costs. The cost to me to go beyond an emergency wood supply and equipment really becomes bar oil, fuel mix, an occasional chain replacement and similar items to let me produce more than that emergency supply of wood.
My buddy owns a saw mill, firewood and mulch business. He has a lot of slab wood, but he also gets good money for that wood selling to the area campers, small time burners, etc. It's good / extra cash for him, so I don't even bother him for it. Most of the wood I get, I get from him. I get it because it is too big for him to process efficiently (costs him too much money...IMAGINE THAT! ). I'm greatful for what I get because I don't have a lot of time to scrounge the woods around me. I can cut on that ground, but getting the wood out is another story because the way the creeks run.
I cut and burn firewood because I like doing it. I've grew up burning firewood at my parents house my hole life. In my honest opinion, there isn't a dollar amount put on good warm wood heat. I don't care how much money I spend a year on it, it's what I like to do. If u really wanna look at a financial deficit, look at my decifictits!! (I call them investments) Cb6048-9700$ 372xp 800$ 550xp 600$ Dump trailer 6500$ Infloor heat (attached garage, basement, polebarn) 4000$ish Plus a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. I'm looking at 25-30k in the hole, call me stupid or what u want, but guess what!! I don't give a sh$t!! Atleast I'm not out spending 20$ a day on booze like I used to. I'm getting good excerise and I love doing what I do! I read through all these previous posts and there wasn't one second that I thought about heating with anything besides wood!! THIS IS MY OPINION ON IT. To each his own. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
The dollars and cents economics of my situation is far too complex for me to wrap my head around, and I do math stuff professionally. I've spent an awful lot on chainsaws, but they service 2 hobbies for me: making firewood to heat my home, which saves me money; and lumber for my woodworking hobby, which makes me money. I certainly haven't made or saved enough yet to offset my equipment cost, but the hobbies these have replaced were 100% cost; and the only gains I was seeing were in my waist line. If nothing else, it's cheap entertainment. But when I think about my wood hobbies, I don't really care about the dollars and cents - it's about superior quality. The quality of heat is better: I can keep my house in the mid-high 70's all winter long, even on the coldest nights, and never think twice about what it's costing me. This was not the case heating with oil. I wouldn't have dreamt of keeping the thermostat that high, can you imagine what February's bill would look like? And you can kiss that money goodbye, you will never see it again. My tools still have an intrinsic value - if I should sell them, then the only real cost to me was in depreciation. The quality of my lumber is also vastly superior - indeed the stuff I have produced would be difficult to find anywhere for any price. 30" wide red maple slabs? Ash 4x4's? I've got dozens. How about an entire tree's worth of curly English Walnut, that came from a tree that used to belong to my great-grandmother? How could you even put a price tag on that? Pardon my presumption - but this right here is the root of your problem. If I had to feed my stove 15 cord/year, I'd start to question whether it was all worth it as well. 15 cords would last me well over 3 years in my stove, and that 3rd year wood would be seasoned beautifully. It's hardly a surprise to me that so many OWB guys don't bother seasoning their wood - how would you find the time? Then it turns into a losing battle of sorts: as you end up wasting so much of the BTU potential of the wood since it's not seasoned, which means you need to feed it even more. If I were you, I'd sell that OWB, get on the "3 year plan", and then have another look at your economics. I'll bet you'll be much happier. Plus you'll have more time to spend doing other things than feeding that greedy pig.
Every OWB I have seen or heard about has missed out on a good portion of the fuel that our post-EPA indoor stoves and the gasification units utilize. That's the wood gas. All of that creosote that forms is all fuel that never got used. It is a problem inherent to having the firebox surrounded with a water jacket. There is plenty of value in not having the mess from the wood in your house however, not to mention the ease of heating multiple buildings with a single boiler. I have a co-worker that heats with an OWB and he feeds it every pallet he can get his hands on. Equipment crates, pallets, even just general scraps. It's all free, relatively easy to process and kiln dried to boot.
The wood mess is easily remedied with one of these. A couple Christmas' ago, my sister made me a "tote bag" for my firewood. Most of the bark and other junk that used to end up on my living room floor, now stays contained in there. I re-read some of the OP's posts; and now I realize that I never considered that he's heating 3 buildings full time with the OWB. I wonder if the OP has ever heated all of this with oil and considered what that might cost.
