Posted on 07/14/2009 1:06:09 PM PDT by decimon
MADISON, WI -- JULY 14, 2009 -- The stress of rising natural gas prices is leading many consumers to rethink how they heat their homes. For some this means moving towards modern alternative energy options, while others have been turning to a more traditional method for a solution to these rising costs. In Canada and the United States, wood burning stoves have been reevaluated as a potentially viable option for home heating.
The case for modern woodstoves has developed with the improvement of the products on the market, as wood heating technology has substantially advanced in recent years. With the advanced secondary combustion systems on Environmental Protection Agency certified woodstoves, they are now 95% more efficient than their predecessors.
Dr. Paul Grogan, a plant and ecosystem ecologist and Canadian Research Chair (II) at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario conducted a case study on the benefits of woodstoves with the help of final-year undergraduate and first year graduate students. He determined that adding a woodstove to the home can help both consumers heating costs as well as the environment. The results were published in the latest edition of the Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education.
The environmental sustainability of woodstove use is dependent upon the consumption of wood from sustainably managed woodlots, as the carbon released is reused as the next generation of trees grows. Annual gross CO2 emissions did in fact increase from 12,610 kg (i.e., ~2.5 metric tons CO2/person per year) to 17,330 kg after the installation of the wood stove. But while this gross amount did increase, the net carbon released by the combustion is negligible, the only surplus coming from the harvest and transport. Based on an average growing time of 130 years before harvest for local Ontario tree species, a woodlot or forest 3.5 hectares in size would provide an indefinite supply of wood heat for a household without a net increase in carbon emissions.
In the case study, adding a woodstove to the ground floor of a 3200ft2 home reduced the mean annual gas cost by 60%; from $2260 to $880. The annual cost of the wood fuel for the woodstove amounted to $1330 for 5 full cords (a cord is 8 feet long by 4 feet high by 4 feet wide - 128ft3 ). This was a yearly savings of $50 at market fossil fuel prices of 2005-2007 without taking into account rising fossil fuel prices or the impending carbon tax. Should these variables come into play Dr. Grogan estimated that the domestic heating costs would be reduced by 25%. This translates into a potential savings of $920 in the first 3 years.
(Do I really need the /s?)
You don't need the '/s' for the babies but some get mighty upset about their pets.
Plus, if the crap hits the propeller and the grid goes down for extended period of time you are assured of heat, stove top cooking, and the ability to boil water.
Uhhh...do you do cremations on the side?
Yeah, but they are taking credit for 130 years of plant growth to offset the carbon emissions from the wood burning.
Unless someone grows 130 trees for every tree they burn annually. It’s a substantial net carbon increase.
Of course they could buy carbon offsets, assuming that someone really is planting new trees to sell credits, and not just selling credits for trees they already have.
But the point is, that wood buring is not regulated, only utilities. And cap and trade is going to drive the cost of utilities up causing consumers to turn to wood burning. I predict the increase carbon emitted by woodburning will dwarf any utility reductions of carbon emissions. And initially will also cause deforestation.
Yep - that’s the way it works with our Lopi Answer. Great little wood stove. Heats our great room very, very well without having to run it full tilt.
Reminds me. Go to get a few cords in before the Fall.
I was thinking of installing a stove that could handle coal.
I grew up on wood heat. Three stoves in the house: main one in the family room, small one in the living room, and a rarely-used extra in the basement. A non-trivial part of the year was spent cutting, splitting, stacking, moving, stacking, moving, stacking, and burning wood.
Thing about wood heat rarely considered by those who haven’t lived it: unless the stove is hooked into a heat-distribution system (hot water, forced air), all that heat is concentrated near the stove, diffusing away. My bedroom was friggin’ cold in winter, while you’d get cooked out of the family room directly below. Oh, I was used to it (didn’t really know better). Upside is you can warm up - really warm up - by getting closer, and cool off by just walking away; the absence of this drove me nuts when walking into a friend’s house shivering and couldn’t get near anything to get warm.
It’s also high maintenance. Cleaning the stove, cutting/splitting/moving/stacking the wood, cleaning the chimney, adjusting temperature, preventing/stopping chimney fires, putting up with smoke, etc. One time dad got his Christmas present early when he had to disassemble a still-hot stove and we gave him his to-be-gifted stove gloves (designed for handling burning wood) early.
Wood heat has a lot going for it. It also takes a lot of work. Yeah, it’s attractive for assorted reasons - but there is far more to it than throwing a switch and setting a dial. Understand that.
Frankly, having a stove made out of wood does not sound like such a hot idea.
In Michigan, with the economy sucking, everybody and his brother has gone into the firewood business. (There seems to be a few trees around here.) The price of firewood is going for something like $120 a full cord and, in some cases, less. That’s half what the estimate used in the published example.
Not according to the experts. A tree rotting on the ground releases the same amount of carbon as burning it in the stove. The woodburning advantage is that the carbon is not extracted but already exists in our environment unlike coal and oil.
Deforestation is not likely either, in our country there are a lot of low value trees that go unculled and present a forest fire hazard. An acre of forest will grow the same amount of woody biomass yearly no matter what is growing on it.
The one thing that goes unnoticed in the initial planing for a woodburner is that wood means work.
Sure, firewood grows on trees but it takes work to make it heat my house.
not when the Obama ACORN Carbon Police follow the smoke trail to your front door
An excellent disclaimer from one who knows. There are a good number of wood stoves in my area but that’s not for me. Maybe when they drive fuel oil to twenty dollars a gallon.
That's funny that they are trying to ban wood burning in the land of uncontrolled forest fires.
On the contrary. Having a stove made of wood ends up being an EXTREMELY hot idea. ;^)
I heated with wood for 20 years.
The big, unmentioned downside is dirt. Lots of dirt and dust. The logs come from the forest dirty and with lots of hitchhiking insects, spiders and the like. They come out of the wood inside your house and migrate everywhere. The bark comes off and crumbles into a large-grained mess.
Even better, every time you open the door of the stove to put in a new piece of wood, out comes a small flurry of ash. The house is constantly coated in wood ash, makes everything dusty. Think about what all that dust does to your computer. When you clean out the ash in the stove, it is even worse. A small duststorm right in your living room.
When our family moved out of the huge turn-of-the-century house we lived in and into a new, smaller house back in the late ‘70s (in Virginia), my dad literally built a wood stove for it—welded it together himself. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a big black iron box up on legs with a couple of spinning drafts on the front, but his trick was to put a bonnet over it that connected it into the heat pump’s ducting, and add in a fan so the stove in the basement could push warm air through the whole house.
We never used it exclusively, but it made the heat pump run a lot less. And in the winter, that thing would get hot enough to practically run me out of that half-finished basement!
}:-)4
If I have it right then coal stoves have also become much cleaner then they were years ago.
We had a coal furnace for the first few years of my life and that was in NYC. The law changed around 1950 and we had to convert to fuel oil. I have to say that particulate pollution went way down after coal was phased out for commercial buildings in NYC. But that was then.
“Denver is a great example: its location is prone to temperature inversions that stick around for days at a time, and the inversion traps the wood smoke ... and when you throw the smoke from several thousand fireplaces into that, it can be a real and significant problem in that case.”
The new secondary combustion stoves are EPA certified and can be burned in the Denver area all year around. They emit hardly any smoke at all. Wonderful heat source and much cheaper than gas.
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