The other thing when it comes to wood burning....IF you cut 5 cord of firewood a year and it cost you nothing but $20 in saw gas....most people view that as cheap heat that only cost them $20.
BUT, that 5 cord of firewood has a value (around here) of $1000.
You too the time and effort to produce $1000 worth of product just to burn for your heat.
Haha, total straw man there. For some of us anyway.
I dont run a firewood production/delivery business. I dont have a means for sales or distribution. And i sure as heck don’t want to deal with a bunch of flaky, whiny customers. Kudos to anyone who manages that.
My 1650 sq ft house only requires 8-12 face cords per Michigan winter…. That’s not a business. Heck it’s barely a hobby.
The key is to design your home as a low energy
system, not just a nice looking floor plan that you piece components into (not directed at anyone). Super insulated & sealed, zero thermal-bridging walls, engineered passive solar design and orientation, earth-sheltered/bermed, etc.
Our firewood burning invites no bugs or appreciable mess inside (wood stays outside in screen porch 10 feet from the stove). No smell either (no draft issues). Nice even heat from our heavy stove full of firebrick, surrounded by 3 half-walls of paver bricks. A couple ceilings run on low to even out the house. We dont worry about blasting it overnight unless its in the single digits outside; probably peak at ~76f in the great room in the overnight and it drops to 70-72 by morning most days. If its sunny, no fire again until evening.
10 minutes of daily effort in winter, 30-40 hours of hard labor every spring or fall to cut and split. In our case it was an extremely deliberate house-planning decision, and kind of an experiment - but I wouldn’t trade it for any other climate or setup in the world. Well, unless i was a multimillionaire maybe, lol.
Sorry that turned into a rant. I just want to share how well this dream of ours worked out, because its definitely good for all of us, if we can each be more energy independent and stop supporting highly subsidized but also grossly profitable energy companies. Our houses shouldn’t use nearly so much energy!