Jags said:
Sumting ain't adding up here.
Lets see: Cord of hardwood, lets just use maple as a middle of the road example (hard maple) 3680# seasoned.
1/3 of that is 1227#
@ 6930 btu per pound thats 8.5 million btu.
@ 80% efficiency - thats 6.8 million btu entering the home.
You can buy 6.8 million btu of natural gas for 14 bucks and change???
Something else is going on here.
Looking at my bill I used 8 Therms less this year then last year. 1 Therm = 100,000 BTU. Now it was also 3 degrees colder on average this year (last Nov was very warm) so lets say I would have used 10 more therms then Nov 2009. So using this I saved 18 Therms this year or 1,800,000 BTUs. I figure the red maple kicked out 6,000,000 BTUs. The problem is that 4,200,000 of those BTUs were spent heating the stove room and
some of the house to a temp above what I would prefer ie 85 degrees.
So I used 6,300,000 BTUs in gas for everything this months and it cost me $86.06. A third of a cord of red maple would give me that same amount of BTUs for less money even if you were paying for the wood. The issue is that I can't heat my water with the wood and the wood stove doesn't distribute the heat as efficiently as the furnace and central air system so there are too many BTUs being wasted in the stove room and not enough in the
far corners of the house it seems.