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Now that some serious winter has arrived, along with high natural gas prices which must please that industry and its subsidiaries in the White House, many Coloradans are responding in a perfectly sensible way. They're taking a serious look at heating with wood.
As a veteran wood-burner and concerned citizen, I feel compelled to offer some advice here. I should be qualified since I've been heating with wood off and on since 1975.
Some of the off-years came when we lived in a house which had a fireplace, but no stove. What they tell you about the negative heating value of an open fireplace is true -- a crackling fire radiates some heat which you can feel if you're within a yard or two of the flames, but the fire actually sucks warm air out of the house and sends it up the chimney. The result is a net loss. Burning wood in that circumstance makes about as much sense as burning $20 bills.
The other off-years came after we moved to a different house in 1989. It came fully equipped with two wood-burners: a 1924 Universal range in the kitchen, and a 1979 Vermont Castings Resolute in the living room. Neither saw many fires in the latter 1990s, since wood heat is dirty and a lot of work, and clean natural gas was quite affordable in those dismal days before Dick Cheney started implementing a national energy policy.
Then came one gelid morning a couple of years ago.
Natural-gas bills had arrived the day before, and they went
into the triple digits, causing sticker shock
in our
household and many others. I learned that because there was
a line at Gambles downtown -- we were all buying things
like dampers, stove black, ash rakes, flue thermometers,
chimney brushes, pokers, splitting mauls, whatever it took
to get those idle wood-burners back into operation.
Since then, our parlor stove has operated almost constantly from October into April. And here are some useful pointers, gleaned from experience:
1) Have your chimney cleaned at least once a year, preferably by a professional sweep whom you can blame if it isn't done right. Wood smoke generally contains some combustible material that hasn't yet combusted. When this stuff encounters cool chimney walls, it can accumulate.
If it is not removed from the flue, eventually it will ignite. This spectacular event is called a chimney fire. It sounds like a freight train indoors, and outdoors, the roiling smoke is dark and vile. We had a chimney fire once, and I don't know anyone I hate enough to wish one on.
2) Clean out your stove as seldom as possible. Small hot embers can linger for days in ashes, which means that there's a possibility of a loose spark every time you move the ashes. Minimizing stove cleaning minimizes this possibility, and besides, stove cleaning is a tedious and dusty chore well worth all the procrastination you can summon.
3) A new stove-lid lifter may be impossible to find -- no store here had any, and my Internet searches came up empty. You may be able to find one in an antique store; if that's too pricey, a brake spoon will do the job.
4) No matter what you do with stove pipe, it won't fit perfectly, and it will cut and pinch you several times in the process.
5) Attitude is important. Do not look upon the daily wood preparations as chores, but as wholesome exercise. Other people pay to go to gyms, whereas you're saving some money and building your body as you hoist heavy chunks of wood onto the block, cleave them, then pick up the pieces which have flown every which way.
This is also good mental therapy -- my mood, at least, improves greatly when I gaze at a piece of wood, think of Karl Rove or John Ashcroft, then smite it hard with an eight-pound maul.
6) To maintain a fire through the night, drink a quart of water before retiring. You'll thus be up several times, and you can feed the stove then.
7) Ignore complaints from environmentalists. They're right that wood smoke is a pollutant. However, as we learn every summer, our forests inevitably burn and produce great clouds of pollution. So if we're going to suffer from smoke anyway, why not get some use out of the wood first?
And to conclude, one warning: The greatest threat that
comes from using renewable solid fuel results from neither
smoke nor fire, but from what my friend and neighbor Mark
Emmer calls wood-stove narcolepsy.
It works like this. On a cold afternoon, you bring up the wood, then rejuvenate the fire. You're tired from the woodpile exercise. You observe the household cats, all sleeping peacefully near the stove. The urge to imitate them is impossible to resist. Work that should have been done does not get done, which probably explains why high natural-gas prices and a sluggish economy often go hand in hand.
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