Whole Lotta Wood
We got a whole lotta wood. Two cords seasoned cut and split yesterday. It did leave us the not inconsiderable task of stacking. As darkness fell last Thursday, we had to resort to hurling the wood into wheelbarrows and just dumping in the back yard to get it put out of sight for the night.
Whew. It is a relief to have this supply laid in. (Here is a video showing what two cords of firewood look like stacked.
Last spring when we saw natural gas prices rise precipitously, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to convert the then unusable fireplace on our lower level into a functioning heating appliance. I have long wanted to be able to heat the house without relying on the power grid. So we purchased and had installed a modern fireplace insert. These burn efficiently enough to - hopefully - qualify for a 26% tax credit for heating with renewable biomass (on both the fireplace and the professional installation). 75% is the IRS cutoff.
Much more important than any potential tax benefit, however, is the security of knowing we can heat our house off-grid. In the unlikely event that we suffer a Texas-style infrastructure collapse, we will stay warm. That crisis left 4.5 million households without power, and killed, directly and indirectly, as many as 702 people.
Burning wood in a modern, efficient fireplace reduces greenhouse gas emissions vs. natural gas because of how it is sourced. While the actual burning of natural gas is cleaner than a wood stove, it's important to remember that natural gas fracking and refining releases much of the same material. Wood is not a fossil fuel, but a renewable. It doesn't come from crooked, murdering regimes like Russia or Saudi Arabia.
Just recently, people seem to be waking up to the fact that natural gas is not, as the natural gas industry (for some inexplicable reason) would have us believe, "clean." Summer '21 when we replaced our gas stove with an electric one, we were questioned by the plumbers that we contacted (to disconnect the gas) and the electricians we contacted (to fit a proper electrical outlet), "Aren't you going backwards?" Not at all. (This was the subject of a previous post, but once again, the alarming facts about gas stoves are coming out - particularly re: benzene exposure. The World Health Organization has concluded that there is no safe level of benzene exposure, and it has "conclusively been linked to leukemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma."
There's a lot of what is now rubbish out on the internet about natural gas being less expensive than wood for heating. First: If it is going to spread cancer and warm the planet, who cares? There are people, I suppose, who are willing to take their chances with blood cancer and have been brainwashed into thinking that there's some kind of "debate" about human caused climate change by the organized campaign of fossil fuel industry lies.
But even if saving a few bucks is more important than having a habitable planet, that information about the costs of natural gas is all hopelessly outdated if it is more than a year old.
If our $720 for two cords of wood is able to heat the house for the winter, that will be about $100 a month. Back in the day (last year, or 2020), gas was about the same.
But now, thanks to reduced supplies because of the war in Ukraine, gas prices are up 80% since just last September. At the end of last winter, we received a gas bill near $200 (for roughly the same amount of gas we'd used the year before - I checked - which had cost ~ $100). That is not getting better.
Our cost should be half as much this year. We'll supplement with electric space heaters, which will run about 85% on solar that our panels produce.
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