How am I doing on wood consumption

[cjgoode]

Have the Osburn 2200 for a few years, used it here and there. Came to the cabin 1 week ago, used it for pretty much the only heat for a 2400 sqft house with vaulted ceilings so a lot of space. Been running almost a week straight with letting it go out a few times to clean the ashes. House temp has been kept around 65 during the days and its in the upper 50's in the morning. Inside was 45 when we got here, so its a lot of material and stone work to heat up. I think I am burning less now then when we got here to keep it about the same temps. I would call the insulation in the house mediocre at best. Outside its been on the low 20's at night, and low 40's during the day and cloudy and damp till today.

I have gone through a stack one row deep about 5 feet wide and 6 feet tall, logs between 12 and 16 inches split to various sizes. About 60% a very light soft wood that burns quick and 40% black locust that is like cement and burns slow and hot. All stored in a dry garage and aged for over a year.

Am I on course for a normal wood usage or using way to much. This is my first time truly heating the entire house for a week straight, and I have no clue about wood usage, but it seems like a lot when I see how much is gone from my stack.

PS I do have two new heat pumps I need to install, so in the future it will not be my main heat source, but for now it pretty much is.

 

[Nate R]

I have gone through a stack one row deep about 5 feet wide and 6 feet tall, logs between 12 and 16 inches split to various sizes. About 60% a very light soft wood that burns quick and 40% black locust that is like cement and burns slow and hot. All stored in a dry garage and aged for over a year.

Say 14" average length.... 35 cubic feet of wood storage used, about 0.27 cords. Generally wood is about 2/3 of that space, (air in between the stacked pieces is the other 1/3) so 23.5 CF (Cubic Feet) of wood burned.
Lets say 40% at 42 lbs/CF dry weight, (black locust) and, and 60% at 22 lbs/CF..... averaging about 30 lbs/CF.
30 lbs X 23.5 CF = 705 lbs of dry wood burned. My ROUGH guesstimate is about 5100 BTU/lb delivered to the room, (efficiency losses, water heating losses, etc.)
So 5100 BTU x 705 lbs = 3,595,500 BTU into the house. Over 7 days, that's 513,643 BTU/Day, or 21,400 BTU per hour, on average.

For a 2400 SF place, not super insulated, with the temp differences you mentioned, and bringing some thermal mass up to temp, doesn't seem like a crazy amount of wood to me. Maybe a bit high, but hard to say..especially if you're using less now that things are up to temp.

If I were you, I'd track indoor and outdoor temps over a day or 2, and weigh the wood you burn over that time, and measure the moisture content (approx) with a meter. You can get a better guess how much wood you're going through, the heat loss of the building, and how much you'd need over a season, or X weekends staying there, etc.


Lotsa math, but that's how I think about stuff like this, and figure out what seems "About right."

 

[stoveliker]

You'll get more usable heat out of that locust if you let it sit for 2 more years. One year is not enough.