One Hundred Dollars a Month

Fact:  One day, I’m going to have a cast iron woodstove.  I have always loved them.  I love the look.  I love the dry heat that pours off of them.  I love making a fire and stoking a fire.  I love it.

At our last house, we had a wood-burning fireplace.  I miss it.  It wasn’t cast iron, but it did make a nice hot crackle in the wet winter.  I found the key to heating with wood is making the time and energy for getting the wood, drying the wood, and storing the wood.  Once you have those skills on lock down, you’re good to go.

The biggest expense is the wood.  If you get creative with acquiring the wood, you can save yourself some major moolah.  There are a couple of ways to get wood on the cheap.  The first requires manual labor and time.

Get yourself a permit, and tredge out into the wilderness to fell some trees.  Chop, dry, stack, and burn. If one major wood haul isn’t in your future, you can scavenge for trees that have either become victim to a strong wind, or have been chopped down to make way for a new Starbucks.

Either way, once you start looking, you’ll see dead/fallen wood everywhere.  While I don’t recommend pulling over and grabbing it on the fly, I totally do recommend contacting the land owner and asking if you can take it off their hands.  Who knows, the deal might be mutually beneficial.  They don’t have to haul the stuff away, and you get wood.  Finally, surf sites like craigslist.  People with trucks and time will often sell firewood for a fraction of the cost of commercial wood delivery.  While the idea of soliciting chainsaw-wielding strangers on craigslist might deter a few, I am personally one of them.

After you have gotten yourself some wood, you want to make sure you burn it as efficiently as possible.  The key to burning wood efficiently is making sure it is dry.  Wet wood, no good.  To dry your wood, make sure to take the time to split it.  Big ol’ logs will take forever to dry out.  Split wood, not so much.  Leave it out in a sunny spot to dry {this is why getting your wood for winter in early fall is best}.  As it dries, the wood will start to crack.  This is a sign that it is ready to be tossed into the fire.

Once your wood is dry, or mostly dry, then it’s time to stack it.  When you stack your wood, make sure that it is covered from the elements, but that it still has air circulation.  This will help keep it dry and burnable.  It’s also best to stack it up off of the ground.  You can get fancy and get a firewood rack, or you can use pallets or two by fours. Whatever blows your hair back.

Procuring, drying and storing are the biggies, but there are a couple of smaller tricks that keep your stove burning efficiently.  For one, don’t use magazines, plywood, treated wood, plastic, etc.  They emit nasty toxins and don’t burn efficiently at all.  They can also damage the interior of your stove.  Stick to newspaper, kindling and logs.  In the long run, they will burn the most efficiently.  When you do build a fire, make sure that plenty of air can circulate.  Air will stoke the fire.  Finally, clean out your stove regularly.  It will limit the crappity-crap that builds up in your stove AND make each fire burn a little more efficiently.

Do you have a wood burning stove?  How do you get the most out of it?

~Mavis