Anyone burn wood who grew up when parents burned wood?

We had a VC during the oil embargo later switched to a Napoleon coal stove to the kids relief. Load the Hopper shake it down 3 times a day reload! When oil prices came down Mom made it disappear! A few years ago dad ran some black pipe up from the basement and installed a HD cheepo gas fire! must say for the price it looked great and put out some heat!

Then September 11 th happened,I got married and sold my life to the bank and got a big mortgage in Queens,oil shot up to the moon, so off to the wood stove guy I went! As a NYC firefighter a often prayed to my friends and family who perished that day and promised them that I would limit the amount of money I would send to people who think we should convert to Islam or die! I was always the type to drive American cars and the last thing I wanted to do was support the middle east!

Sorry for the rant! Anyway mom heard that I was putting a wood stove in and told me I was crazy! She remembered all the drawbacks! I'm happy to say most of the drawbacks are no longer an issue. I had Thanksgiving that first fall and my dad was eyeballing my wood insert and mom said don't even think about it!

My dad burned wood haphazardly but it was great and we were always there to help and even as little kids we go around and gather wood without being told. But the fun was going with Grandpa! The things he would get into! Logs so big we could barely move them building logsplitters out of odds and ends. He couldn't stand for any of us grand kids to have out hands in our pockets. But he was always there to help and made working fun. He also felt if you wanted to do something work wise you should do it. And me my cousin Jimmy and brothers were running chainsaws by age 10. I burn wood 24-7 and hate it when it gets warm enough to have to stop.

And I carry on the tradition with my niece and nephew. They come over and help out here and at the farm. Its fun for them and I try to teach them to think about why I have them do something pointing out the good and bad points and get them in the habit of thinking things through for themselves. And praise them when they do good so that they become self confident and see that work is something good and can be fun if you look at it right. Like Grandpa did with us.

My niece Lauren helping me with slabs. I was cutting and she was loading them in the back of the atv hauling them to the trailer and stacking them while I cut more.



My nephew Robby splitting wood at age 3 he's 7 now. I used to bribe him to be good. Telling him if he was good he could come over and split wood. And it Worked!



I can't see me ever not burning wood.

Billy

Apparently when I was really little, my dad burned with wood periodically in an old Consolidated Dutchwest wood/coal stove, and he had a small wood pile on the side of the house (probably about 1 cord when it was full). But sometime around when I was age 4 or 5 my dad decided to use the hearth to pile up his junk he would buy (he was a packrat antiquer .... yeah) and stopped using the stove for obvious safety reasons. I have distant early memories of holding onto the fireplace fence watching with anxious eyes for him to open the door and stoke the fire or add splits and it was so neat how warm we felt when it was burning.

When I bought my first house last year, and it had 2 older woodstoves from the 80's inside, I decided to investigate using them for the first winter (last winter) and ended up using a biobrick-like product which I'm happy with so far. But I am also very happy to have rekindled that old childhood memory of sitting by a baking hot woodstove. Maybe someday when I have a larger property and/or wooded lot I'll burn regular cordwood.

I was another child of the oil embargo. My parents both had memories of wood burning they wanted to forget. For my mother it was Winters on Plum Island, with my grandfather cutting up pallets and broken furniture to heat a camp stove so my grandmother could cook. The frost in the bedrooms would stick the curtains to the windows so you couldn't draw them open. The room was dark untill it warmed enough to open them. My dad spent his Summers cutting wood on the farm, gathering sticks from the orchard, cutting dead wood and dragging it "about a mile" in a cart to the woodshed 'till 2pm, which is when he was relieved for few ours before Supper.

Then came the 70s, and my dad put a wood stove in the living room. I don't remember the name, but it was hot. It would melt a candle 20' away. No glass, shaped like a cone, almost no control over the flame and would choke an 8" pipe with creasote in about 2 months. At least the house was warm, but "new" homes were for central heat and wood stoves were for old homes. They didn't play well together. My bedroom was in the basement which was kept reasonably warm when the oil boiler was lit but now with the wood stove upstairs it remained between 50 and 55 degrees. My mother used to fret, she didn't want me down there but I wasn't sharing a room even on the coldest nights with either of my sisters. Wood heat meant a cold house to me. It was My father after the 3rd year finally got ahead on wood, which seems to be the magic number for all woodburners. Then came the indoor boiler, which didn't really burn wood but kind of sweated the heat out of it. Creasote stalagtites that would drip untill they cemented the door shut, and your only prayer was to open up the air and hope it would burn off enough to get the door moving again. The whole house was full of smoke when you loaded, but it was warm. I think my parents figured it out just in time for Reagan and the oil glut. I can understand why they didn't keep up with it when heating oil goes back to $.59/gallon.

I looked at wood heat from a numbers point-of-view. My first flirtation was a fireplace in my last house. I put a $5.00 bundle of firewood from Cumberland Farms between the bricks, opened the damper, lit the paper, and proceeded to chill my house down. An insert to my liking was $2500+installation, and something called a liner which I was positive was just a sales gimick. I was roaring through about 600 gallons of oil @ $1.45/gallon. I had zero trees on my property, wood was $200/cord and I had nowhere to put it. Wood heat made no sense.

I now have an over-abundance of trees, a much-too-big house, and an air-tight insert with a great view of the fire. I love the house @ 60 degrees and the family room @ 80F. Its less about the money at this point and is becomming a moral issue for me. I think everyone who heats their home should know what it takes (energy), and what the real sacrifice in terms of lives/treasure costs us, just as I think everyone who eats meat should have to go hunting so they know what that takes as well. Too much of our lives is turning a dial an tearing open plastic containers.

I'm another child of the oil embargo. We had a little antique parlor stove, then my dad got serious and drove up to VC and loaded a Defiant in the back of the Buick station wagon. The kitchen was HOT then. Aside from loving a hot stove, the two things that stuck with me the most from those days were the joy of swinging a maul (well, joy when splitting ash, but we had a lot of elm to wrestle with, too) and the hazards of poison ivy. We'd go out in the winter and not pay attention to the vines, but after my eyes were swollen shut a few times I started paying attention.

After years of enjoying fire pits, fireplaces and old camp cookstoves, it was really exciting to discover EPA-stoves a few years ago and put one in. And now that I'm working up four cords a year instead of a face cord or two, I'm getting that same sense of satisfaction and accomplishment I got as a teen (which is good, because I don't get it from the "job" much lately). I remember as a kid I'd open up the front of the stove, look at the huge bed of coals and think, that's MY wood keeping us warm... I made that happen. I felt like I was an integral part of the combustion process itself! It's nice to relive those childhood feelings, and actually look forward to winter again instead of just grudgingly accepting it.

My Grandfather built a house in Norway in 1924, designed for wood fuel. The chimney in the center of the square house rested on a beehive oven. My grandmother baked all their bread in the beehive until she died at 97 years old. She got three batches of loves from the pine fires she made there. Burn the fire down, rake out the ashes, first batch took minutes to cook, second bath 1/2 hour, third batch close to an hour. There were always ahes in the crust. You didn't mind the ashes because her homemade plum jam was so incredible. She also cooked on the wood range in the kitchen. They intalled a coal parlor stove in the dining room at some point. That thing kicked heat! The bedrooms were cold, but each bed had a wonderful down comforter and pillows that kept you warm. My parrents burned coal till this year. My father has demensia now, and can't remeber how to run the stove. My mother never learned. I have burned wood all my adult life, minus a year or two, here and there, either in my shop or home, always to save money. I wore out a V.C. defiant, now I like steel stoves better. The longer I burn, the less work it is. I seldom fell trees anymore, between free wood from the dump, craigslist and pine that tree services deliver for free. Slowly I also devise ways to reduce handling as well. When I someday make the leap to passive solar/wood back up only, I will not miss stacking wood, the most onerous part to me.

Grew up in homes with open hearth fireplaces burning split hardwoods.
My last home (of 14 years) was a grand Victorian with three fireplaces, which were my family's primary heat source.
We recently relocated to a ranch, where we have two stoves (classic parlor stove and Morso 1bO) which we plan to heat the home with this winter.
There's a central propane-fired furnace, but we prefer not to have to use it.





Cheers
Tinker

Maybe not exactly on-point, but I grew up in a house in Pennsylvania heated for many years primarily with a wood/coal stove (a Much Wenlock), although we mostly burned coal. My dad had sectioned off a portion of our basement with large pieces of plywood as a coal bin, and I remember having to go downstairs with my brother holding the walls of the bin up each time the coal delivery truck came and dumped coal into the basement on a little ramp through a basement window. And many trips downstairs to the coal bin to lug up fresh buckets of coal to feed the stove.

We'd only burn wood during the shoulder season and so my memories of that are fewer, and we never cut/split our own wood. My prejudice until recently (without ever having really looked into it) was the wood didn't give off enough heat to heat a home all winter. Of course, I know now that's wrong!

I do remember many winter nights after dinner laying down on the floor near the hearth and falling asleep near the warm stove ... good times! And the sound of us cranking the stove with that little tool ... and frequently checking the "stack temp" ... And my dad having to temporarily hang the stocking for just a few minutes on Christmas morning for the photos (and then we had to take them down or the gifts would melt!)

We stopped using the stove sometime when I was in high school I think ... my mom got tired of the dust and I think my parents finally had enough money to fix the boiler or whatever for the central radiator heating system. I was pretty much neutral on the idea until recently, when it came time to put some heating into an unheated rural cottage in my wife's family. Based on everything I've learned, I'm already considering how a wood stove can work in my own primary house here in the USA!

I grew up lugging the wood into the house for our wood stove, my dad has some slides of me splitting the wood back when I couldn't lift the splitter that well.
I would burn wood if I had the land to do it, I don't even have the space to store it without loosing my backyard, another issue that got me to burn pellets is the fact that I can leave my OPB for a week without loading it, with wood my wife would have to feed it a couple times a week.

Just visited with Father in Law. He grew up on a farm, and didn't have electricity till he was about 17. He seems a little amused by our wood heating adventures (wood shed building is the latest) and he asked if we have a chainsaw. We said yeah, and then he talked some about how they had to cut down trees with a crosscut saw, and I guess they used like a big circular saw to saw the logs to shorter lengths. He said they used oak for heat and pine for cooking. I asked why the pine for cooking, and he said he figured because it burned fast and hot. Interesting. He sure wasn't too interested in doing anything of the sort when his kids were growing up, guess I can see why.

My parents burned wood for a while. The wood stove I have was my grandparents.

Burn wood as a kid?? Heck no!!
My parents laughed at all the neighbors who started burning wood during the embargo.
My introduction came when I dated my wife-to-be. Her father burned wood solely for heat.
He swore by his Ashley, and was so proud he could eek an 8-12 hr packed burn (smokey).
Years went by until we revisted wood when we moved out into the country, and the price
of Propane went over $1.50/gal - wood was going to save us!!

The rest is history and partly addiction.......

I grew up burning wood in an old heatform/heatalator fireplace that heated the family room and kitchen while the rest of the house was pretty cold. I enjoyed it and was in charge of the fire most of the time because my dad was gone working on the railroad. We had oil heat and I remember back in the 70's having to turn the thermostat down to around 60 and keeping the fireplace going most of the day due to shortages and cost of oil. I think my dad mostly bought firewood from his buddies but I do remember when he purchased an electric chainsaw and I helped buck and split quite a few cords. That fireplace must of burned pretty hot and clean because I can't recall my dad ever sweeping the chimney.

There is just something about the self reliance thing and the feel of the wood fire on that cold winter day that will keep the home fire burning with me for as long as I can keep hauling wood.

My dad burned some during the 70s and early 80s, too. I remember being ticked off that we no longer had the fun-to-watch and throw stuff in fireplace, and instead had the ugly, ugly wood stove. It had glass slats on the front but they were always black. It got too hot for that part of the house and the rest of the house was still cold. He overfired it and warped the door. I spoke up for it when he moved and ended up moving it twice myself but never using it. Thank goodness, unloaded it on his friend, who had the same ugly stove, and wanted it for parts.

Remember there was always a cord or a little more wood in the back, but I have no idea where he got it. He definitely didn't expect us to help with it.

It looked like this one, pretty much, but I think this one has a canted top, ours was straight. Pretty unappealling. The gold lion was a funny touch.

Yes, I am one of those who had to help dad do all the work when I was a kid. And I burn now. In fact, my dad just replaced the stove I grew up with a couple years ago. We moved into what is still there home back in 82-83 and he put in a VC Vigilant, so that stove worked well for ~25 years, and I am sure he could have kept it going if he wanted to do some maintenance. My dad never made things much fun, about the only fun I had was the very few times I got to run the splitter. He never even taught me how to use a chainsaw, had to learn that on my own when I was 30... Usually I was loading the wood, throwing it in the basement, throwing it to the other side, stacking it. Then every other day I'd have to make several trips to the basement filling up the log hoop. Only thing I hated worse was weeding the garden... maybe dishes too.

With that being said I still remember standing in front of the stove when it was below zero out and loving that heat. And knowing it was saving the family a ton of money. And even though I didnt enjoy the hard work as a kid I do enjoy the work now... even if doing it all myself sometimes proves to be back breaking. Maybe down the road I wont want to do all the hard work (guess I could always have it delivered and stacked, instead of going into the woods myself) but for now I enjoy the challenge. Just hauled some pretty friggin heavy Locust rounds into the back of my truck this morning. I didnt work hard enough if I dont come home with the @$$ end of the 1-ton draggin...And we spent about a grand last winter in propane just a backup heat (thermo usually set at 55), it only ran when we were out of town, and maybe if the stove went out early overnight or something. Standing infront of the stove kinda takes me back now. Its been almost 15 years since I lived at home (with my folks I mean), and until we moved into our current house 2 years ago we never had a stove. My friends think I'll get tired of it, but its on its 3rd year and I say bring it on.

I was a child of during the oil embargo too. Dad had sense to buy a Jotul and put it in a back mud room of our house. He had an oil furnace in the basement. It was toasty back there. He had grapple loads delivered probably to save money. I do remember spending lots of time splitting and stacking. Me and my brothers were the labor force. He now uses the stove only on the coldest days of winter. I tried to convince him to get an epa stove but he will not hear of it. Maybe some memories in the Jotul with the warped back plate and all. Many pots of soup cooked on that stove. He did his best for us in that crisis.

I did enjoy climbing the pile in the backyard that was as high as the fence. It was a drag losing a G.I. Joe action doll into the abyss. Seemed like there was always dead grass from the sawdust and bark from the processing.

I grew up with a Heatilator fireplace also. Loved to sit by the fire and watch the flames but knew that it meant that my bedroom upstairs was going to be freezing! My windows always had a thick layer of ice and the drain in the tub was usually frozen so it would fill up with water when taking a shower. I like my stove much better!

I grew up in a house that had a fireplace that we used a fair amount, but more as an ambiance thing than a heat source. Did have a friend whose parents put in a wood stove in the late seventies oil crisis.

My wife and I have never been without wood heat to varying degrees though except for the first winter we were married and living in a dumpy little apartment. The next year we moved into an old farmhouse with a fireplace that we inserted an old Sears box stove into, taking it out occasionally to use the fireplace (until we almost burned the house down by setting a floor joist that ran right under the hearth on fire during the blizzard of 93). After rebuilding the hearth we only used the stove.
When we bought the farm we have now we traded 3 bushels of tomatoes for a Bengal Blue Jet cookstove which we installed in the kitchen. That took a lot of pressure off of the oil furnace during the daytime, but about 2 hours after we'd go to bed the little cookstove firebox would be burned down enough for the furnace to kick in. Then we moved the cookstove out and replaced it with a Carmor I found in my parents barn, which would carry most of the way through the night. Then last year we started an addition which made it necessary to tear down the chimney that we were using, so we ended up getting a Jotul Oslo and installing it more centrally in the house. Last winter was the warmest we have ever been (I keep the oil thermostat set at 60), and I think we only burned about 100 gallons of oil with the backup furnace. Now that the addition is nearly finished we have a second Oslo installed in there (liked the first one so much, plus I only wanted to have I length of wood to cut).

I have decided to allow myself the luxury of buying firewood in the form of triaxle loads of logs. A local logger drops them off for $550 a load, and I get an average of 8 or 9 cords of wood out of a load. I like cutting and splitting, but we don't have much woodland and I can live without spending a day wrestling a half a cord of standing deadwood out. Especially after I got my tractor stuck last year up to its axles, and ended up breaking the steering arm on it and having to get a neighbor to come over with his 4WD tractor to pull me out.

Anyway, I can't imagine not burning wood. I always felt like the stove was the heart of the house, so I guess I'll be burning till I'm too old to manage, and by then maybe I'll have some eager to please son in laws to help my daughters with the cutting, splitting, and stacking. Either that or they'll ship me off to some old folks home so they don't have to listen to my endless criticism of their firewood handling skills.

Grew up on a farm in western PA and parents burned wood in a warm morning wood stove in the basement. The chimney that went up through the house was the warmest spot in the house as the thermostat was never above 65. Wood was split by hand with a splitting maul or with a sledge or wedges. Seemed we always cut wood during winter with snow on the ground, which resulted in cold feet and wet gloves, and not much fun.

As an adult, moved into a house in December in northeast ohio 1989, that was 2100 square feet, all electric heat, and 11 acres of woods. Froze every day and had $300+ electric bills from baseboard heat. Venturing to Pennsylvania on weekends for deer hunting or holidays, froze when coming home after being gone for the weekend as it took forever for the house to warm up with electric heat. shivered under electric blankets til morning.

Enough was enough. Bought the VC Defiant Encore the following year, installed a chimney up through the roof, and eventually bought a wood splitter, and cut wood in the fall after the summer heat passed but before the snow falls. Wonderful steady warm heat. Still resulted in a long time to warm up the house after being away for a weekend as the fire had gone out, so installed a propane forced air furnace. Could quickly warm up the house with the propane and then hold the temp, mostly, with the wood burner. Goodbye electric bills and hello warmth. Kids would complain that it was too warm in the house in the frigid winter; I would only smile quietly to myself as they were too young to remember the cold, electric-only days of our home. Did I mention when the electric goes out on occasion we stay warm and toasty with the wood stove?

Putting in an Oslo F500 in a few weeks(thanks to reviews and advice on this excellent web site), sharpening the chain saw chains, and looking forward to being in the woods when the leaves are changing, cutting wood, and looking forward to a toasty winter. The wood gets a little heavier each year and takes a little longer to split and stack -- c'est la vie. Still a country boy I guess.

PastTense said:

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

Click to expand...

Yes

Dad designed the house I grew up in for wood heat. Burned a VC Defiant when they first moved in ('76 I think) and around '94 ish put in a cat VC Encore and have been using that ever since. I always enjoyed cutting firewood with him. He enjoys it. We both like burning. I've never been sick of it even when I had the duty of starting the stove everynight from about 6th through the 12th grade so my mom didn't have to and the house would be warm by the time Dad got home.

My dad grew up in the farm house I'm in now. It was just assumed I was going to heat with wood. The question when I moved in was not, 'are you going to get a stove?' it was rather, 'where are you going to put a stove." So now I heat with my Hearthstone Heritage and we still cut wood together. As a matter of fact, we like cutting so much and have such good access to lots of it, we sell some now too.

And now that we got up over 20 cord a year, he finally broke down and bought a hydraulic splitter. Been doing it all with a maul and wedges up to this point.

Except for a break during college and a couple years in my last house, I can't remember not burning wood.

My dad burned wood and still does. My grandfather burned wood and now that he has passed away my grandmother at the age of 84 will still have a fire in the old stove when it is really cold out !!

I grew up in a house that was heated by 2 stoves, a Jotul 118 and I forget what the upstairs one was. We had electric baseboard heat as backup, which I remember being turned on a grand total of 2 times.

For the first 4 or so years my dad didn't even have a chain saw. Every thing was cut up using a bow saw and split with an ax. Those were good times... :lol: We did most of our cutting on 'rangeland restoration' projects (which they don't do anymore 'round here :sad: ) where they would take 2 D10 Cats with a section of huge anchor chain between them and pull over huge tracts of pinyon/juniper trees. After a couple of years they would let people go in and cut. Ready access to seasoned wood. I miss all that good juniper.

When I was a kid I used to visit my grandparents in the winter sometimes. They heated with a gravity fed wood furnace. My grandfather used to cut all the wood and keep the furnace going. The furnace room, in the basement, was the only warm place in the house. The kitchen, directly over the furnace room, wasn't too bad.

In high school we lived in Army officer quarters, which were built in the early 1900's I suppose. Big old formal houses, complete with fireplaces. The Army used to have the guys in the stockade cut wood to keep them busy. Just put a little red flag out front when you wanted some and they'd drop it off. We had to move it around and stack it on the porch. I didn't care for it much when he built a fire, because the thermostat was in the room with the fireplace, and I lived in the attic. It used to get mighty cold up there without the heat going.