I had posted a few days ago that I chose not to get a woodstove now, because it would be unrealistic to get seasoned wood this late in the game. Then I started considering the possibility of paying for oil this year. (We just moved into the house.) We estimated around $2400 for oil for the year. That's a lot.
So I started doing the math. Someone mentioned press logs, and that seemed like a viable option with the woodstove. I finally found a local distributer. We could have run that for a couple of years while some wood set to try.
Then we started considering why we want to burn wood in the first place. We love the look, the feel of the heat, and (a little bit) of the smell. But by next winter my wife will be at home with a 4 year old, 3 year old, and 6 month old. The prospect of her loading wood from the woodshed was slim. I work 50-60 hours per week, and while I would love love love to buck, chop and stack, it just didn't seem reasonable that I would have properly seasoned wood even by winter 2012.
So we came down to the long-term use of press logs. That took a lot of the fun out of it.
We came down to the other reason we want to burn: Money.
Oil is pricey, wood is not. Oil prices are volatile, wood prices are not. Oil is foreign, wood is local. This is the Pacific NW. We've got all kinds of wood and all kinds of pellets.
We decided that it would be far better to have a machine that keeps the house warm all on its own. It requires some maintenance , of course, but in the long run, less maintenance than a woodshed and wood. If I were to buy the wood (hoping it were seasoned) I would pay almost as much for as I will for pellets.
The wood you burn beats the wood you don't; my wife wasn't sure just how committed she would be to tending a fire all day. So we'll let the pellet stove tend it for us.
So we got an Enviro Empress. I'm sure that there are good and bad things about the brand, but we got it from Wallace's in Tacoma; a very knowledgeable, family run business that was low on the sales pressure and high on service. I don't know enough about every brand out there (our other reasonable option was a quadrafire Santa Fe, which was also very nice, but very ugly IMHO) but I know a lot about people, and so we went with the dealer we liked.
It will be installed on Tuesday, and I'll be trying out different pellet brands. I'm not really sure what to expect. If anyone has good pellet advice for the Tacoma area, I'm all ears. Or eyes, in this case.
Thanks for all the advice.
So I started doing the math. Someone mentioned press logs, and that seemed like a viable option with the woodstove. I finally found a local distributer. We could have run that for a couple of years while some wood set to try.
Then we started considering why we want to burn wood in the first place. We love the look, the feel of the heat, and (a little bit) of the smell. But by next winter my wife will be at home with a 4 year old, 3 year old, and 6 month old. The prospect of her loading wood from the woodshed was slim. I work 50-60 hours per week, and while I would love love love to buck, chop and stack, it just didn't seem reasonable that I would have properly seasoned wood even by winter 2012.
So we came down to the long-term use of press logs. That took a lot of the fun out of it.
We came down to the other reason we want to burn: Money.
Oil is pricey, wood is not. Oil prices are volatile, wood prices are not. Oil is foreign, wood is local. This is the Pacific NW. We've got all kinds of wood and all kinds of pellets.
We decided that it would be far better to have a machine that keeps the house warm all on its own. It requires some maintenance , of course, but in the long run, less maintenance than a woodshed and wood. If I were to buy the wood (hoping it were seasoned) I would pay almost as much for as I will for pellets.
The wood you burn beats the wood you don't; my wife wasn't sure just how committed she would be to tending a fire all day. So we'll let the pellet stove tend it for us.
So we got an Enviro Empress. I'm sure that there are good and bad things about the brand, but we got it from Wallace's in Tacoma; a very knowledgeable, family run business that was low on the sales pressure and high on service. I don't know enough about every brand out there (our other reasonable option was a quadrafire Santa Fe, which was also very nice, but very ugly IMHO) but I know a lot about people, and so we went with the dealer we liked.
It will be installed on Tuesday, and I'll be trying out different pellet brands. I'm not really sure what to expect. If anyone has good pellet advice for the Tacoma area, I'm all ears. Or eyes, in this case.
Thanks for all the advice.
