How much money have you spent to save on oil???

begreen said:

Not a penny spent for heating oil since 1984.

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Do you guys even have oil out there in the PNW? I'm originally from CA and I never heard of heating oil til I moved to MA.

begreen said:

Yep, next door neighbor has an oil furnace. No nat. gas on our road and unlikely to show up ever due to low population density.

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In the house I grew up in, we had 2 gas heaters that were built into the wall in the hallway and living room. We used to jockey for position in front on cold mornings, ended with many burned shoulders.

burning wood is not an investment but more so a means of survival. For us as much as everyone (kids) hates it we make it family time together. Wife and step daughter run the splitter and myself and the boys do the cutting and stacking. We cut on our own land so we drop trees in the winter and go back in the spring and do all of our gathering. Our equipment is basic. A quad, trailer, and a couple of saws. We have some straps and chains, and a saw buck we built. Our splitter is the "elcheapo" HF 5 ton electric splitter. And the wife always has something baking to enjoy after the hard work is done.

Our family hunts and fishes so we see some cool things while in the woods cutting. I think the big thing with harvesting wood for your heat source is to be practical and think things through.......if you let the internet do your thinking then yes you will indeed go broke

Jags said:

https://www.hearth.com/talk/data/attachments/148/148008-8435a891f33271190c2b1a2c3fbccb56.jpg

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Yes, let us chant to the wood gods:

Ohmmmmmmmmm...

At this house we have heated with wood for 4 years. I had all of the tools. The stove cost 4k to install. We would go though abou $800 every two weeks in oil, it's hard to keep an old house on a ridge warm with just oil. We burn 10 cords of seasoned wood a year in a stove. I take a week off from work to harvest and process my firewood. If I had to buy fuel, I would probably swich to a stoker boiler, Axeman-Anderson is only a couple of hours away.

Even with my change from the Greenwood boiler to my in house woodstoves I am still ahead of the game. The 1st year I built this house it cost $3800 in propane. That was in 1992-93. My propane costs have been about $500.00/year after I started burning wood. That covers hot water,cooking and backup heat. I have 120 acres of woodland 3 miles from home so firewood is easy to get.

simple.serf said:

At this house we have heated with wood for 4 years. I had all of the tools. The stove cost 4k to install. We would go though abou $800 every two weeks in oil, it's hard to keep an old house on a ridge warm with just oil. We burn 10 cords of seasoned wood a year in a stove. I take a week off from work to harvest and process my firewood. If I had to buy fuel, I would probably swich to a stoker boiler, Axeman-Anderson is only a couple of hours away.

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You need to chime in on another thread. After all, if you're taking a week off work to process 10 cords, your time away from work + equipment costs is likely on par with just buying firewood pre-processed. You must be doing it for love of the game.

https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads...fuel-was-unlimited.137728/page-3#post-1851756

Part of it is for the love of the game (I did put down firewood processing as a hobby during one of those work focus group bs things once), part of it is that we do our thinning in the Sugarbush then and I get the wood for free. The other is that I just don't like heating with oil. I dont like where the money goes (oftentimes overseas), don't like the environmental consequences (I have spent a lot of time near the Titusville oil boom area ) and as a blue collar worker, I really have issues with the big corporations running the show.