After a winter of using wood as my only fuel for
cooking and heating I'd say getting energy through
powerlines or fuel through services is more efficient
than cutting my own firewood, but the cost in dignity,
freedom, health, and heritage is far to expensive. I
have to work for someone else to get the money to pay
for commercial fuel and I far more enjoy the fresh air
and exercise when cutting my own firewood, not to
mention the freedom to manage my own heating source and
ties to our recent history. However society is
conditioned to just throw on a switch to get their heat
and cooking done.
It takes about a solid week to cut wood for the
winter, if that's your only source of heat, and if the
wood is conveniently located and you put all available
daylight to work. The btu numbers show it takes about
one cord a month to heat five hundred square feet of
living space. That can be stretched, but to do all
your cooking, washing, and heating with a wood stove
takes a minimum of five cords for a winter, maybe three
if you live in a tent.
A wood stove has an advantage over a commercial
heat source with the versatility in that the heat from
the wood stove can be used for multiple purposes
interchangeably. With a wood stove the heat can be
used for cooking, drying clothes, heating water,
dehyrdrating food, distilling water, sterilization,
etc. with implementation from an individual with local
interest rather than industrial management.
Not to many people have an extra week to spend
cutting and stacking wood (and in reality it takes two
weeks when a little leisure is added). Plus there's
title to the wood, hauling, storage, etc. that people
generally aren't prepared for.
There's a guy who lives about a mile down the road,
I hear, who makes all his own biodiesel, and cooks and
heats his home with it. He has a five hundred gallon
tank he hauls around with a diesel suburban and picks
up used cooking oil from restaurants. He's been doing
this for years, and has developed it to be part of his
life style, at sixty eight years of age. He doesn't
have any electricity or fuel delivered from commercial
sources. He does however live in a remote area and
owns a large plot of land, secluded by trees.
The biggest threat now, to using your own fuel, is
the EPA. Air quality standards, designed for
commercial regulation are being targeted at the
individual wood burner. While bio mass facilities are
being built, and natural gas is being fractured, the
individual wood stove burner is being targeted by the
EPA and local State ecology departments. Burn bans are
not sympathetic to cold weather and the public, in
general, doesn't understand how wood heat, as part of
our heritage, was used for multiple purposes. A waft
of smoke is now a dangerous threat that the authorities
will target your home for pollution and violation of
air quality standards, if there's a burn ban in effect.
The EPA has mandated that States implement
enforcement regulations, and one state, Washington
State, has just passed a bill, that if weather
indications are of such that stagnant air is predicted,
a burn ban will be put into place; not if testing shows
particulate matter exceeds standards, just if they
anticipate it. The State is now making the wood stove
operator, in essence, a potential criminal, when in the
past he used to be amongst friends, out of the cold,
next to a cozy fireplace.
