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126 comments on Old Sunlight vs Ancient Sunlight -An Analysis of Home Heating and Wood
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I actually heat with wood, but its an old fireplace and VERY inefficient and Im looking at buying one of those external burners so I can burn crap wood not useful for much else. This could also pipe heat into a greenhouse. Most of the companies that sell these are not concerned with emissions, but this one has at least looked at the issue.
I know that in certain areas of the country there are no-burning laws that forbid woodstove use during periods of inversion or high air pollutant days. In Vermont last winter, you could see dense smoke in the rural valleys that weren't connected to the nat gas pipelines.
Thanks for your comment -its another example that its a mistake to look at one variable in isolation in addressing resource depletion - there are so many moving pieces that comprise the system...It will all come down to being happier with less (and using less because we want to is better than using less because we have to)
Outdoor wood boilers burning trash wood, trash and construction debris are already serious environmental problem here in Maine. Some towns are trying to ban them and state DEP is wrestling with it - wrestling because their charter is to help businesses, eg sell more boilers.
Maine's large forest areas are already spoken for. Woods get chipped for pulp and electricity. They have been heavily cut. Smaller private landholdings provide a substantial amount of firewood; whether or not that gets reported or estimated I don't know. There are certainly not large amounts of woods waiting to become firewood.
One of the things about heating with wood not mentioned is zoning. I've got my 1500 sq ft solar home but really only heat about half of it to maybe 60 during cold dark stretches of weather. I'm cutting that down this winter to just the living room and kitchen - about 500 square feet - and I'll be beefing up the insulation between that area and the rest of the home and adding external shutters.
Even though I only have two acres, my wood pile is growing for now because I have to fell trees that shadow my garden. That's not going to be true long term.
cfm in Gray, ME
State law in Vermont now requires that new outdoor burners meet particulate requirements (which only a few makes do at present), and have a chimney higher than the roof of the house they're serving. They can be smokey; it would be rude to run one in a dense neighborhood, especially without that tall stack.
Is cordwood really going for $260 around Burlington now? Here in SE Vermont it's around $160. With a century-old 1800 sq. ft. house - reasonably weatherized and insulated - I'm going through about 3 cords plus a bit under 600 gallons of oil per year - the oil also being year-round hot water. However down the street, in a house that doesn't look a lot larger, they're managing to burn "1,700 gallons of oil and more than four cords of firewood". And that's in a house owned by a contractor.
What a lot of people around here are adding to their homes is pellet stoves. Those have the advantage of essentially using wood waste. However the pricing of the pellets is more in line with oil than cordwood.
The guy I buy my wood from sells it currently at $170 green and $270 dried. The green you can get in a week - the dried there is a waiting list. He processes 2000 cords a year - Im going to write more about this next week.
I think this price is a little high, as it is the same prices as of 2 winters ago when gas was sky high.
Really speaks to the questions of PO and GW when one doesn't bother to think 4 or 5 months ahead and let the sun and air save a hundred bucks a cord for him (or her). Also says something about how high gas prices are rationalized when it is a matter of comfort or convenience. Lots of room before demand gives way on the gas front I think.
Found this Boston Globe article from 2005 indicating the value of wood vs. fuel oil
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/09/11/cutting...
A cord of drywood had the BTU value of about 200 to 225 gallons of fuel oil. Wood was cheaper heat. Had to work to keep the woodstove fueled.
I heat my home with a Taylor outdoor wood boiler. It does smoke a lot when it fires up. I burn about 20 to 23 16” face cord a year. I would normally burn around 1000 gal. fuel oil with the house at 68 degrees & 1200 gals at 72 degrees. Split wood is $50.00 a face cord, you pickup. I paid $600.00 for load of logs delivered this spring, yields between 20 to 30 face cord, depends on the guy loading the truck. I have had to tip the driver to get good red oak going to the mill. I also heat my hot water through the OWB. Fuel oil is 2.68 gal. & propane is 2.69 gal, today’s prices. I live in Broome County, upstate NY.
jbunt
Dryki - I agree, I can see from the map upthread that Maine is practically devoid of trees, especially on a per capita basis. I guess that fall foilage trips are out of the question.
Anyone looking at using or upgrading to a wood heat system might consider a masonry stove.
TempCast is one such brand that is very efficient, clean burning, has a bake oven option and can also be configured with a water heating element. Purchase and installation cost is not cheap, but sometimes you do get what you pay for. In this case a very functional wood heater that doesn't fry one's indoor air quality and can be aesthetically faced in a variety of materials. I have one and the chimney emmision (apart from the begining burn stage) is clear heat vapor, not smoke.
Thanks for the article.
I heartily second this suggestion.
Masonry stoves, similar to or AKA 'Tulikivis', Russian or Finnish stoves, are better known in Scandinavia and Russia than here, but they are like a flywheel for your woods' calories. The mass carries the higher heat from a fully combusted fuel very slowly into the living area over a much longer stretch of time, so you are also not wasting firewood by OVER heating your space during the burn, as happens with many wood-heating situations.. people will open windows just to keep from being uncomfortably hot, and later, the place cools off too quickly, inspiring another load to be burned.
As with many smart investments, this technology is very pricey up front, but pays back steadily and reliably for decades.
Bob Fiske
I really like those masonry stoves (though they need a ton of support structure cuz they weigh alot)
But heres the question: how many people could afford these and how much energy would it take to scale them?
So this to me is another dichotomy of what works best for some (TOD readers?) may not work for all (society).
How much of a masonry stoves effectiveness is due to it being an integrated approach to home-heating, as opposed to woodstoves that often seem bolted on almost as an afterthought? I have seen many examples of where a woodstove has been installed on an exterior wall at one end of a house. The flue promptly exits the building and then runs up the side of the home heating the outside. This also necessitates an expensive insulated double-wall pipe instead of a cheap single-wall flue. Such placement of a stove also prevents it from effectively heating one side of the house.
If you placed a woodstove in the middle of a building, ran the chimney up to the highest point of the roof, and surrounded the stove with a brick or stone fireplace, how close would it be to a masonry stove in terms of heat loss? Masonry stoves are said to burn hot at over 90% efficiency, but many woodstoves now get close to 70%. Thats worse, but not by that much. Presumably here both figures ignore the heat used to evaporate the remaining moisture in the wood. Do all masonry stoves have a dedicated inlet to prevent them drawing cold air into the house through gaps? Is that a major factor for the comparison with wood stoves?
I considered fitting a masonry stove to my home, but I think a woodstove might be better for us. I'm thinking of the compact size, flexibility, ambience of sitting watching the flames for longer, and familiarity contractors have with them compared to masonry stoves which noone has around here. We've got a big wall of south-facing glass, so we'll need greatly varying amounts of backup heat. The thermal mass of a masonry stove must be great for a passive solar house like ours, but they don't strike me as very adaptable to changing conditions. It either takes a while to get going and is then warm for a long time, or is off. A lot of people have solar hot water here, but they back that up with small instantaneous gas or oil boilers capable of supplying only the required amount of extra heat. A woodstove sounds closer to that ideal than a masonry stove.
Oh, and does anyone on here have a totally passive unheated house like a Passivhaus? That sounds like the ultimate integrated solution.
We heat our house entirely with a single woodstove. An imported Vermont Castings from your dear USA, excellent stove, 85% efficient. The house is 1900 sq ft, and our indoor temperature ranges between 21 C in the morning to about 25 C when we start up the stove in the afternoon. The bedrooms keep a nice 21-22 all day, as they are furthest from the stove.
And you can cook on the stove when we have blackouts.
We have our own forest, and also sell about five times our own firewood needs, all sustainable. Also about the same amount of lumber and paper pulp wood.
On the other hand our house is properly insulated as most Swedish houses are. It doesn't require much firewood to heat a house if it's insulated, and the temperature doesn't drop especially fast. Some heat is stored in the masonry chimney, but the rest is simply stored in the air and last long enough.
As for the nonsense on emissions, a modern stove like the Vermont (or a Swedish Nibe) produces very little emissions and very little ash as they burn clean. On the plus side for the Vermont is that it can be choked for higher efficiency and longer burn, and still not leave much ash or give emissions.
In fact, people who burn wood live longer and are healthier. One of the reasons is the excercise, another is that it's more common to live in the countryside and thus get fresh air, but also that anti-oxidants from the smoke is good for you.
Anyway, first measure is to insulate your house. We have almost a foot thick insulation in the walls and 1.5 feet on the roof, and high windows that bounce back the energy into the house instead of leaking.
In Finland there is a law stipulating that all single houses should have at least one wood stove or similar, as a backup if nothing else. Not so here in Sweden, although most do.
I know dozens of people who heat exclusively with a wooden stove, although it's supposed to be impossible and they are counted in statistics as using direct electric heat, and many, many more burning wood in a central heating furnace (usually with water tanks for energy storage and efficient burn).
But on the other hand, there's plenty of forest in Sweden, always has been.
Tell me more about the antioxidants in wood smoke, never heard about it.
Here's the english summary of a Swedish report, funded by the Swedish Energy Agency. The complete report is available in Swedish here:
http://www.afabinfo.com/pdf_doc/fou_rapporter/AntioxidantrapportCTH.pdf
Summary
Increased residential wood burning has been questioned referring to environmental and health
hazards due to emitted smoke components. In this project, the presence of phenolic
antioxidants in wood smoke was demonstrated, presenting a more positive aspect on the
smoke.
The antioxidants are mainly methoxyphenols released from the lignin of the wood.
Dimethoyxyphenols from hardwood are the strongest antioxidants. At combustion
temperatures below 800oC and especially for smouldering wood the methoxyphenols normally
constitute the main fraction of the organic smoke components. Most methoxyphenols condense
on cooling and are present as particulate matter in ambient air. The phenolic antioxidants are
released together with almost as large amounts of 1,6-anhydroglucose formed mainly from
cellulose.
The assessment of components in wood smoke which are positive or at least harmless with
respect to health has met with great interest. The occurrence and proportions of specific
methoxyphenols in wood smoke of various origins have therefore been emphasized in the
project. Comparisons were also made with smoke for food curing, from newspaper burning and
from burning of forest biomass components.
Smoke from residential fireplace burning of hardwood in particular consists of a large
proportion of effective antioxidants and a low proportion of hazardous compounds. Residential
boilers with unsatisfactory combustion may produce a smoke with elevated concentrations of
benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. An environmentally labelled boiler emitted
almost negligible amounts of organic compounds. Wood pellets burnt in free-standing stoves
or in boiler burners emitted lower amounts of both antioxidants and hazardous compounds than
comparable firewood burning.
Thanks, now it will be a real plesure to heat my house with wood.
but also that anti-oxidants from the smoke is good for you
Are you sure about that? I thought smoke mostly contained free radicals, in the form of NOx.
San;
Your chimney alterations would help. The greater advantages in a complete masonry stove includes very signifigantly A) The secondary combustion chamber, raising temperatures within the great mass of the core furnace and burning the wood as thoroughly as possible.. and B) a series of ducts crafted into the stone/brickwork which carries the smoke down through the sides and back of the Massive Block, further extracting heat from it, only exiting to the chimney back at the bottom of the unit.
There are masons' groups that specialise (see my reply to Nate) in these, and work to share info on who is nearest to a potential customer, plus useful knowledge about the stoves themselves. Both Masonry's that my Mother had built were beautiful craftspieces that adorned the heart of the house, they would be cozy to cuddle up against and read or nap, fully days after a burn (often 48 hrs, except in the deepest cold), the cats would sleep on top of it, we baked bread, turkeys, and pizzas in the 'Expansion Chamber' (Secondary Combustion), soon after the 2-hour burn was done, as they had been fitted with oven doors above the fire-windows, for just that purpose.
Even this year, visiting the older of these two homes, the current owner said this has been his cheapest home to heat, in Maine's white Mts, while his other homes had been in New Jersey! It's not excessive to say that this could be a clear advantage in the value of the house, were you to want to sell it.
As far as Solar.. this older home was also Passive solar, in addition to the Masonry stove. The new owner replaced a lot of the south windows with less glazed area, and has decided to use a gas heater as a supplement.. but we never did. It didn't take full advantage of its solar potential, but had it done so, I'm sure the two together would have been enough except for very extreme conditions.
Bob Fiske
(feel free to email.. listed under my account info)
Nate (Great Article, thanks!);
Affordability and accessibility is more an issue of priorities, I think, than of income. I think far too many Americans are taught to mistrust long-term investments, even when the numbers and other experienced buyers can attest to the wisdom of an expensive project like masonry heaters.
Yes, they generally require substructure, even under slab construction (our first in 1980). The cost is high against an Iron woodstove, unless you start to add all the cords of wood that the potbelly will be consuming.. like the watts saved by Fluorescents.
There are groups like the Masonry Heaters Organization, http://mha-net.org/docs/v8n2/v8n2.htm , which often work to connect interested homeowners with qualified/certified stonemasons. People can save some labor by having the Mason construct a Prefabbed Tulikivi from a kit.. and there are books and websites for those who want to take it on themselves, though it would be a daunting project.
Ultimately, it wouldn't cost more than a new truck or a few years of dwindling oil/gas/cordwood deliveries. As a solution that could ultimately cost the owner less in operating costs and fuel dependencies, the high up-front cost is really an argument about financial-education, not one of this being a special option for only the middle-classes, etc..
Regards,
Bob
I am a big fan on new sunlight. I believe solar thermal home heating can take care of most of the needs for home heating in the U.S. southwest.
We are facing a shortage of natural gas in North America that may hit crisis levels about 2010. The gas companies want to bring in expensive LNG. But if people installed solar thermal collectors on their homes, they could cut natural gas consumption in half.