Anyone burn wood who grew up when parents burned wood?

We burnt wood when I was too small to help, I have burnt wood for over 30 years and am not tired of it yet. No brain no pain.

Grew up with it, use it now, parents still use it. Good stuff!

My Dad put a Jotul, I want to say 118, in our basement. He worked really hard, one might to the point of obsession, to split wood for the winter. There were five kids, so a veritable child army for stacking wood, shoveling snow, etc.

As a young adult I rented a place with a woodstove. That first winter I started burning wood the month after I paid a $500 electric bill. Fast foward through many, many years of renting and mainly living in tropical places. Three years ago I moved back to cold winters, and two years ago I bought this place with this beautiful fieldstone fireplace and immediately started planning for a stove. When I burn with oil I am super stingy and keep the thermostat between 57 and 62. My parents were super practical and frugal old salt New Englanders. I guess a bit of that trickled down. Two winters ago when oil was $4 a gallon I had to borrow money to heat my house. The choice for me is haul wood or be cold. I like the wood option :lol: Heck, when the revolution arrives :coolgrin: I can harvest from my own partially wooded acre. I also like that there is local control over the cost of the wood, and my money is spent locally. I like stepping out of an oil economy. Of course now I own a truck that is terrible on gas so that I can scrounge for free wood. :red:

Most of my siblings live in warm locales. The one left in New England does not use wood heat, but has considered a pellet stove.

This is a great question and has caused me to go back and inventory when it began for me.

When I was about 8 mom and dad brought home a Fisher Baby bear that they installed in an addition to our mobile home. I am not sure if they actually got any heat into the mobile home from the addition but it heated the addition nicely. I have a very clear memory of learning the hard way that just because wet mittens will dry when placed near the stove does not mean that placing them on the stove will be better.

When we moved out of the mobile and into a 2 story home the baby bear went into the basement as an emergency back up unit which got used a fair amount. If I recall correctly it was a really bad installation.

When we moved from that house into a really rough old farm house a "shop built" wood furnace was used to heat our home. We burned anything and everything for wood. It was there that I had a twisted four year love/hate relationship with a Sotz monster maul. !7 years old and I thought I was something else swinging that wedge of steel.

When my bride and I got married we entered a 5 year break from wood heat until we rented a farm house with a fisher clone. At that stage I knew enough to season our wood at least a little while before bringing it into the house. I also became very good at scouring small poplar bluffs for very dry standing dead wood.

When we moved out of that house into a very similar old farmhouse to the one my parents took on in 1986 we were able to find ourselves a sweet deal on an Olsen Coal/Wood/electric furnace. That furnace kept us from going bankrupt trying to heat an uninsulated story and a half house. I am ashamed to say that some of what we burned in there shouldn't have seen a spark for at least a year and a half but we kept throwing the wood in. When we could get coal we used that and what a difference it made.

When that home was done its usefulness and we started this house, a log home we relocated to our acreage, we started a three year battle with the insurance companies to be cleared to install a wood stove. If you have the patience go ahead and read my earlier posts about these battles.

Now we are using our fireplace and a Drolet Jasper. We are hoping and dreaming of the day when enough dollars can be scratched together to install a large fire window insert in our open fireplace.

A big part of what motivates me at this point is how much I have learned from my experience and from hearth.com. In hindsight I regret spending thousands of dollars installing far too much ductwork for a central electric furnace and AC. What we should have done was go with a simpler setup as a back up to a proper set of wood fired heat appliances.

What I should have done was to budget for a fireplace unit like the larger BIS stoves in the basement and had it be a part of simple ductwork throughout the house. I could have paired this with a good small insert in our fireplace.

For AC, on the few days of the year that it is really necessary we could have installed portable room units or ductless AC units and spent the extra money on insulated blinds for the South and West windows.

Bottom line, yes my parents heated with wood and the years we have been without it have been frustrating. By the way, my wife's parents heated with wood when she was small, then they went without a stove for 15 years before installing a home-built outside wood boiler. We know so much more about wood preparation now than either set of parents knew. They both still talk about taking one weekend every fall to "get the wood in for the winter".

I wish that there was a way to run "heating with wood" education classes without having to cover one's rear end with liability insurance and legalese.

BrotherBart said:

My parents were both raised heating with wood. They thought natural gas and a thermostat were the greatest inventions in the history of the world. And thought I was insane to do it when I don't have to.

When I went over sixty I started seeing their point.

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Looks like I am good for one more year.

I have 18 years left then. Same time some people say we will run out of oil.
Maybe I should save my wood. :lol:

Not only did my parents heat with oil, my mother cooked on an old wood stove. That wood stove also had a water reservoir and that is how our water was heated. It was one very happy day when they put running water into our house. Besides the hot water, we no longer had use for that little path out back.

My parents did start heating with oil after all the kids were gone but at that time heating oil sold for around .11 per gallon so it was not a huge expense.

I guess I'm beyond hope BB.

I was 14 when the "oil embargo" hit with full force. My dad was a plumbing/heating contractor and he was totally convinced the world was coming to an end, lol. He went nuts turning off lights in the house and even went so far as disconnecting the thermostat to my bedroom in the (1/2 basement) of our home. It sucked! being cold in the only place that is "your's" in the house was a total drag. Did he bother to INSULATE the walls of that room? ummm... , NO. (my bedroom was 56 degrees... sorry! "put on a sweater?", gimme a friggin' break, Dad!). NO wonder I spent so much time in the barn with my horse.

He bought some butt ugly enamelled stove and installed it in the living room, too. It was just beyond UGLY. Mum was horrified by it, but she had to "deal with it"... though she steadfastly refused to have any part in actually "using it" (her personal protest). I realize now, with the hindsight of 18+ yrs. of wood burning experience, that it was not properly/safely installed, and her resentment of it was was not simply based on aesthetics. It was sold shortly after Dad's death and that was a happy day for her!!

I thought wood heat was a total drag! it was too hot in the "living room" and too cold everywhere else in the house. I equated "wood heat" with COLD and relentless WORK and MESS. But with time and some research I began to realize that you could exert more control over heating with wood and it didn't have to be so HARD and so much work. DING! I steadfastly refused to allow a "smoke dragon" in my home, I "stuck to my guns" even in the face of spousal derision. It was the incredibly good man who chose the Woodstock Fireview in 1991. I choked at the price (nearly double what I'd bugetted), but it was the stove he wanted and it was the stove that met both our criteria. We saved longer to buy it. Everyone in the household has to be "on board" if wood is going to be part of the heating equation. And LOOKS COUNT, guys!

I wish I had a nice picture of Mum near the stove in our home... . She was frail and elderly, and she loved sitting in her armchair near the woodstove, poring over magazines or just SITTING and dozing off in the warmth. I don't think I truly appreciated the stove until I was faced with caring for an infirm, frail, elderly woman who was perpetually "cold". I can see her now, in my mind's eye, basking in sunshine pouring through the south windows facing the stove... comfy and safe. Wish I had it "on film". sigh.

Wood heat doesn't have to suck; it shouldn't "smell bad", be "messy", or require a ton of your time.

Now that you mention it, my Dad must have put in that stove just about the time of the oil embargo.

Nice story about your mum by the stove.

Great story about your Mom, Bobbin !!

We went with coal during the oil embargo. I talked to my Mom not to long ago, and she reminded me that oil was 12 cents a gallon, and she wasn't going to stand for it We burned wood during shoulder season, and coal during the coldest months.

I still find chunks of coal when I'm digging a flower bed, etc. Brings back memories

I grew up around wood and coal, furnaces and the old Warm Morning stoves. I always liked cutting wood and everything that went with it. When I got married, this house was so cold that after one winter I knew something had to change. So I had a new liner installed in the chimney (I don't do heights anymore), got an old Sierra stove and it made all the difference in the world in this house. I'm currently preparing to replace the old smoke dragon and still enjoy cutting wood.

My parents never had a wood stove or fireplace but my wife's family always had a woodstove and still does. When we were planning to build our house she said "We should put a wood stove in the basement" so we had a double flue chimney put in the house. We really only planned to use it in case of power outages and maybe on weekends. Now after 3 years of burning the stove all winter long and all the free wood I need I wish we had designed the floor plan of the 1st floor with a nice hearth but at least we are able to have it in the basement where it heats the 1st floor very well and some heat makes it to the second floor. Some day I'd like to add an addition on the house as a large family room with a nice hearth in it....someday.

We burned wood when I was kid but it was a sideline, oil was the real heat. Rented 2 different apartments going to college where wood heat was it and my house now is wood heat with oil back up

My parents did for a short time, during the oil crisis - not a good experience. A spark caught the carpet on fire and termites did a number on our living room floor. My dad still laughs at me for heating with wood; he didn't think I would last after the first year; I'm on my third.

I grew up with wood heat. We used an inefficient fireplace in the 70's but my parents put in a Quaker free standing wood stove in about 1980. My dad still uses it today but now that he has seen my new Lopi the old Quaker may be headed for a new owner or the metal recycler. Granted my primary residence is heated with natural gas but my mountain cabin I have had for about 10 years has always been heated with wood. The cabin came with an old stove that was of a brand called Centennial.... I can't find much about the old smoke dragon but it appears to be of 70's vintage.

My father always keeps 15-20 cords of wood on hand. He is getting older now and I think it will be wise for him to upgrade to a new stove that will be give him a break and the tired B&S on his old log splitter.

I did not grow up with wood heat, my wife did. One thing I noticed is that a lot of folks I know "force" their kids to help. I "allow' my son to help. When he gets bored or tired, I tell him go play for a while. But I know he cant stay away from using the log splitter that long. Pretty soon hes back. Then when we are stacking he helps with this and that, stack, sit in bed of truck and push wood to tailgate, ect. We have fun and hopefully he wont get a bad memory of it.

I grew up with wood. However, that was only on the weekends when we drove out to the "club" from the city (Vancouver). The "club" had a wood fired sauna and we had campfires that we sung around, cooked hotdogs and marshmellows almost every weekend from May through September. In the winter when we went to the "club", some would start a nice hot sauna after chopping a hole in the ice of the stream fed pool (about 100ft by 50ft). Then sit in the sauna until you couldn't take it anymore, run out and jump in the pool. Quite refreshing, but I never did it more than a few times, it's quite a shock to the system.

I remember playing in the wood shed, which was filled with mill ends. Spent a lot of time keeping the sauna hot, because I was a bit (okay, lot) of a pyro, but that's a different story.

Anyway, just to finish off, "club" equals "nudist camp".

I hated doing it then, and still hate it now. Just I like having the stove and the excersize doesn't hurt either.

my dad is 83 and still heats his house with wood. growing up, we always had a stove to heat the house with. my sister just had the old pot belly stove redone for keep sake, not to be reused but to restore it. i lived in a warm climate for 10 years and when i moved back to ohio and was purchasing a home it was my intention to find one that had a fireplace that a stove would be installed into. i dont think i could realisticaly heat with anything other than wood. i dont mind the work involved with heating with wood. pete

Parents heated with an old "Warm Morning" referred to as the "trash burner," out in the midwest flat lands. Didn't cut would until the snow was on the ground, usually. Would take a tractor down to a pasture with a pond and cut dead Chinese Elm's, Ash and Cottonwoods. We would bring log lengths back up to the barn and hook an old 1937 VAC Case tractor up to a belt driven buzz saw to buck it up.

I then got to split it, once I turned 8 or so. Started with a light ax, got to move up to a 6 lb maul, and always had a few wedges and an ugly chunk of iron on a iron bar that worked as a sledge hammer. I remember despising elm from about the time I could identify it, but that if you waited until it froze, it split a lot easier.

We burned about everything burnable, including most household trash. Not efficiently, but it would sort of heat a very leaky old farm house.

Funny thing, I actually enjoyed the process. Not many great memories about that place, but heating it was almost fun.

Fast forward, to 2003. Bought a place in the California mountains, has a wood stove and electric heat. The electric heat is a nuisance, more than anything, and quite expensive. The wood stove gives me an excuse to play with toys, get a little exercise, and spend time with the extended family. DW loves putting up wood, as well as her father, so we see the wood harvest as quality time together.

Due to the place being pretty well insulated and the stove being way more efficient (especially with the knowlege that I have gained here about burning right) I would say we go through about 25% of the wood that we used to out in the midwest, when I was a kid.

So, in relation to the OP's original thought, is spite of burning wood and having to do a lot of the work to do so as a kid, I still like it today.

My parents burnt wood and still do. Dad has an old Fisher stove and the only seasoned wood it has ever seen was left over from the year before. Dad measures his wood in truck loads and it takes 8 good ones in my F-250 to do him all winter. I have helped him get his wood in for as long as I can remember, but now it's more like he helps me LOL. I am going on my third season of burning wood and needless to say between my home and his, I cut alot of firewood.

PastTense said:

Anyone burn wood who grew up when their parents burned wood?

All the people I know who grew up when their parents burned wood have
absolutely no interest in burning wood themselves (no matter how much
cheaper and even when they can get free wood off their lands). They have
negative memories of the experience (all the work cutting and stacking the
wood, carrying the wood inside and loading the stove, emptying out the ashes...)

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Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of cutting firewood with Dad and 'living' around the stove in the Winter. There has never been a generation of my family that didn't heat their homes with firewood. Occasionally a sibling moved to the city and were unable to use wood heat, but they always comment on how much they missed it when gathering around the stove while back home for a visit.