I heat my house with natural gas, but I augment that with wood.

I can’t remember how much wood costs per cord, I think more than $200. I thought that it might be nice to compare that with heating with gas.

There are a great many variables here. One is the number of BTUs released by burning wood and the efficiency of the woodstove that I use.

A seasoned cord of wood contains about 24 million BTU, but when we order a cord, they usually drop off about a half cord so I will say that we get about 12 million BTU for our $200. This comes to about .0016 cents per BTU.

Around here natural gas costs about $12 per 1,000 cubic feet. There are 103,000 BTUs in 100 cubic feet of gas, or 1030 BTU per cubic feet.

A BTU of gas costs about .0012 cents per BTU. Natural gas is cheap around here because the infrastructure is mature and we are near distribution pipelines.

For comparison, a BTU of oil costs about .0026 cents a BTU.

My wood-stove is very old and relatively inefficient. My boiler (when it works) is much more efficient.The cost of wood is roughly the same as gas and it could be cheaper if I had an efficient stove. My stove might make 60% efficiency on a good night, but my high tech boiler (not working right now) is rated for 92%.

I have to fix up the boiler this summer because it looks like the wood cost 2 or 3 times to heat the house than using natural gas.