The Oil Drum

Regarding EROEI on wood.
I loved the book Better Off by Eric Brende and wondered just what the minimites do in the winter.
Of course they chop wood - no wood splitters involved.
In the winter the ground is frozen and it's perfect for
getting in, culling trees, hauling out the logs when they're
mostly dry. Then split them in the cool of fall or spring.

I just ran across this:
http://www.toolbase.org/PDF/CaseStudies/TucsonZEH1Report.pdf
a Rucson "zero energy home" that has a clothes drier! They budget and use 1/3 of the total electrical use of my family of 4 just for lighting! Their actual electrical use seems to be over 2x that of my family.

In our home it was intolerable that the gas fired water heater takes 1/4 of our entire yearly natural gas use (and we live in Ontario where there is a thing called winter and much natural gas is used to heat the house). So we went with a 19 gallon electric water heater. The standby losses are 1/2 or less of the old heater (in dollars) and heating costs are slightly more expensive. We look forward to time-of-day electricity pricing because that'll cut water heating costs by 25%.

At 20,000,000 BTU/cord of mixed hardwood and given our home burns the equivalent of about 350 ccf/natural gas in the winter that means it would take about 1.8 cords of wood to heat our home. I wonder how many trees that would be and how many years it would take to grow that much wood.