I got the part and put it in the boiler and the heat came on. The house is still chilly, but it is warming up.
While I stayed up all night tending the woodstove these last two nights, I did a little calculating. Wood costs about 50 cents a billet (billet=chunk of split log). 400 billets to a cord. My woodstove is old and the gasket came off. I bought a new one, but didn’t get around to replacing it, so the woodstove is not very efficient. It burned about a billet an hour. If I had a new gasket, figure less by as much as half
The woodstove costs 50 cents an hour and can heat our small house, about 1000 square feet on the first floor and 600 square feet on the second floor. I built the second floor and it is over insulated, so it is easy to heat.
I figure that the woodstove is putting out the equivalent of 3 kilowatts so that at 13 cents per kwh, it would be cheaper to use an electric heater to do the same work. (I found the 13 cents per kwh on the internet and I am not confident in the figure.)
With an airtight stove the wood is cheaper than electricity, but without the gasket the electric heater is cheaper.
2 Comments
My wife says I over analyze everything, I guess I’m not alone. As far as the amount of wood you use it would depend on the type and moisture content, the dryer and harder the wood the more BTU’s you get. One rental property I have they use about 1 ton of coal a year to heat a 4 bedroom/2 bathroom 1800 sq.ft house. Her son can pick it up at the mine for $150 a ton, cheap heat. Another rental I have, a smaller house used $300-$400 a month in propane, so I bought them an eden pure quartz heater which heated the house and they said they didn’t notice an increase in their electric bill? I have an outside wood furnace to heat my 4500 sq. ft house. I get all the wood I want from my farm. I have a small woodstove in the rec room for emergency and with nice dry wood it will keep the whole house comfortable but like you said, you have to feed it every 2-3 hours. The outside wood boiler I load 1-2 times per day depending on weather.
We have three sources of wood this winter.
First, I cut up some downed Green Ash trees. The ashes are all dying, which is a shame as they grow fast and are good to burn. They are also a nice tree for my woods. They are shady, don’t have many lower branches so they create a nice park-like area. The ones I cut are mostly dry but a couple of trees are a little rotted I am guessing not a lot of BTUs left in them. These are mostly gone.
Two years ago I bought 3 cords at a discount and I’ve been using them off and on. Last year I only used wood in the evenings just for the aesthetics of a nice wood fire. There has been a tarp over this pile for most of the time, but it has blown off regularly. The mice and insects are having fun there, but the wood is mostly nice and dry without any rot. It is an odd mix of oak, ash, wild cherry and other trees. Not much maple, which I like, and they snuck in some red pine. The pine is fine for a short hot fire, but doesn’t really give off much heat for long. I have about 1/2 a cord left.
The third pile was a cord that we bought this fall. It is less than a year old, but dry enough. It is mostly large heavy billets that my wife finds hard to lift and load into the stove. It is maple, with some oak and I have found a dozen pieces of cedar. Cedar is only just OK to burn for heat and produces creosote, but it is a nice aromatic fire. We burned a large chunk Christmas eve for the smell of it. (We have a combination – Jotul #6 that opens to a fireplace.) I have about half a cord of this left.
In all, I have enough wood to make it well into March, and maybe more if we rely on the furnace more. The boiler uses natural gas, which is quite cheap here compared to the rest of the country. The gas lines in the road were place there in the late 1800s and since lined with plastic so the depreciation costs associated with utilities are quite low.
I get criticism that the wood stove is bad for the environment. It uses a renewable resource and the pollution is mostly particulates (smoke) that cools off and settles as invisible dust around the neighborhood, acting as fertilizer for the neighbors lawns. I think it is greener than heating with gas or oil, with about the same carbon footprint.