wood burning – New England's Narrow Road

My New Wood Shed

All of us who burn wood over the winter months to keep the high cost of heating oil at a minimum, must begin gathering and stacking it long before the snow flies. This winter my wood will be stored in my new wood shed.
For me, fire wood is gathered during the summer when my son visits and uses my chain saw to cut up trees. He does what he can during his visit and my other son then splits it for me during the rest of the summer. I do all of the stacking. Up until this year, I’ve stacked the fire wood on wooden pallets along the side of the house, and then covered the wood with flimsy tarps to keep the snow off.
That hasn’t worked so well. We get lots of snow here, and the wood ends up buried. With melting and re-freezing, pretty soon the wood is tough to get to. Also, unless I keep a path dug, it’s hard to even get to the wood to bring inside and burn. Usually I give up and end up leaving much of it to re-stack for the next year when I could be using it to heat my house.
So I splurged and hired my contractor to build me a nice, dry wood shed. Continue reading “My New Wood Shed”

Consider This When Buying a Wood Stove

After living through the ice storm of 2008 without any alternate heating source and freezing for eight days, my main goal when I moved into my new home was having a wood stove. In 2008 I was renting a duplex and the people next to me had a wood stove which kept us somewhat warm, but in my own place I knew it would be up to me to make sure we didn’t freeze if and when a storm takes away our power.

The living room has a fireplace, but the room itself is the smallest one in my house. After the winter of 2008 I had purchased an old, large stove to use in the basement of my rental and that one was far too large to use in the living room of my new place. We would have roasted.
I sold that one and I bought a small wood stove. It fits into the fireplace well, and it won’t cook us when we are sitting in the room. But….

I did not take into consideration the fact that the wood I buy may not fit in it! And that is the trouble I am having.

The little Jotul is a great stove, but much of the wood I had purchased last year is too big. Places generally deliver 16 inch logs – and some of those measure longer. It’s a front loading stove, and the opening is quite small. The pieces of wood I burn need to be narrow enough to easily fit into the opening when the stove is going. Who wants to have to try to jam a piece of wood over an already burning log in hopes that it will fit?
I did not take this into consideration and now I wish I had thought about it and maybe bought another type of stove.

I’ve had to hire someone to come and split the wood for me – I wish I could do it myself. I have some dead trees on my property that I plan to use (and have already used) which means the pieces can be made nice and short using the chainsaw, which is very helpful.
Just something to consider if you are planning to buy a stove for a small space.

Wood Burning Stoves Are the Current ‘Fashion’ (prweb.com)
Turn up the heat with a wood burning stove (greenreview.blogspot.com)
Good (Free!) Wood For The Stove (rubyandwheaky.wordpress.com)

The “New” Wood Stove

wood stove in basement — My new used wood stove

Last year I was lucky to find a good, used wood burning stove to buy and put in my basement. This picture was taken right after it was moved in by a couple of strong guys who did have quite a bit of trouble, since it’s very heavy. That is the hardest thing about buying a stove. It’s not something that you just go and get and bring home, lots of preparation is involved and deciding where to put it is something to consider before bringing one home.

This stove was purchased from a stranger who took out an add in the paper and my landlady is the one who told me about it. The price seemed right, and at the time I didn’t know about the importance of having fire bricks inside. I’d never had a stove with a brick lining. In fact, the previous owner told me it didn’t matter that they were missing. I found out that the bricks are necessary for holding the heat and keeping the sides of the stove from warping when the heat is high and no matter how hard I tried, the fire would occasionally get hotter than it should. I feel that if I hadn’t added the bricks myself, that the structure of the stove would have been affected.

Since buying this stove, I’ve written a page about my experience and all I’ve learned along along the way, including the exact amounts of money I put into the pipe, hook up, and bricks needed to get the stove up and running. And remember that pellet stoves require electricity to run, and that is why I am not interested in them. I need to have heat when the power is out and so went with the wood-burning type.