Wood Pellets Stoves - Wood Heating - Popular Mechanics
Is Wood the Best Renewable Fuel for Heating?
Wood heating isn't what it used to be. It's now clean, efficient and, in the right stove, high-tech. And, as it's always been, it's a renewable resource. Here is what the future holds for wood heating.
Lee Richards lives with his wife in a 1957 brick rancher in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter homes in Charlottesville, Va., where he works as the city's commissioner of revenue. In the past decade, he decided to become a more self-sufficient consumer of energy. He commutes to work on foot and by bus. He powers his home with 18 solar panels bolted to his roof and sells the excess electricity back to the grid. He heats his water with a solar-thermal system. And he heats his home in winter with biomass—in this case, firewood—using three small but highly efficient Jøtul wood stoves in the living room, sunroom and basement. He spends $1200 a year on wood—five truckloads, split and delivered—and gets up at four o'clock each winter morning to stoke dying embers so his wife will be warm when she wakes. When he returns from work, he throws on a few more logs, and the stoves whoosh to life. His gas-fired central heating system remains installed as backup. Yet he saves over $1000 per year on fuel costs, and his utility bills rarely total more than $100 a month. [...]
Full article at popularmechanics.com
Even for those of us for whom heating with wood sometimes means climbing through a couple feet of snow to carve up that fallen tree (which would be of no use with a pellet stove), it's an awesome way to go.
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