Seven years ago we retired to Vermont, in a 2,000 sf, 100 year old wooden house with a small Jotul wood stove and good air circulation on the first floor, and a converted carriage barn as an office with an electric heater. The house had been recently renovated with new windows and is generally pretty tight.
So this is what we did and learned over those seven years of wood heat. We had heated a house with one wood stove when we lived in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but it had been many years ago. And then, when I was young, I cut and split the wood myself, but those days are behind me.
The first year in Vermont we tried to heat the house with the little wood stove averaging something like 55 degrees living temperature. It was pretty miserable. The next year we got a bigger Jotul (a used F-3) for the house and put the little stove in the barn. We foamed the stone basement walls and got rid of a radon system in the basement which was sucking in cold air from the outside directly into the house.
As people from away, we were initially overcharged for wood and and stacking, but when it was understood in the village that we were full-time tax payers, staying year round, that practice ceased. It is actually a very friendly place.
We found a more reliable wood source, with better wood, since these stoves wouldn’t accept splits longer than 16 inches so we needed consistently sized splits. We rebuilt the back porch with concrete pillars for support to convert it into a wood porch capable of holding about 3 cords. Firewood here is majority maple with some birch. We stacked about half the wood ourselves and hired a neighborhood kid to stack the rest (he did a better job).
During the heating season (6 months or so) we burn the wood stove in the house all day, filling it at night and letting it burn out by morning and then starting a new fire to warm the house up, which it does in about an hour. Oil heat supplements when needed. We burn the small wood stove in the barn during the day, with an electric space heater supplementing it when needed.
We have the chimneys cleaned and inspected every year. The chimney guy says the hot fire in the Jotul every morning really helps to keep the chimney clean. We generate enough ash over the winter to fill one 25 gallon metal trash can. In the spring we haul the ash can down to the edge of the property to an ash pile. We burn 4 to 6 cords of wood a year, buying it green in the early spring for burning in the fall, though some people here season the wood for a year before burning. I don’t think we have room to store that much wood for that long.
I have to say, all other considerations aside, it is hard to overstate the psychological importance of the presence of a live wood stove in the living room during these long Vermont winters. Starting with a cold house of 55 or 60 degrees in the morning, the living room warms up quickly and the rest of the first floor warms up in about an hour. The second floor is for sleeping cold…
Finally, it is really kind of astonishing how much general dirt wood heat generates in the house between bark fragments, dirt and wood sprinters brought in with the wood, and ash and dust from the fire itself. Cleaning is continuous. We live in a small village in the Green Mountains, so most people here have either wood or pellet stoves in the house and there are a number of local folks cutting and selling firewood.
We are helped by the design of the old house, which has air circulating from living room to dining room to kitchen to hall to living room, with a ceiling fan to help push the heat down from the ceiling. Overall it's a great system, but it requires a fair amount of work stacking, hauling and cleaning.
So this is what we did and learned over those seven years of wood heat. We had heated a house with one wood stove when we lived in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but it had been many years ago. And then, when I was young, I cut and split the wood myself, but those days are behind me.
The first year in Vermont we tried to heat the house with the little wood stove averaging something like 55 degrees living temperature. It was pretty miserable. The next year we got a bigger Jotul (a used F-3) for the house and put the little stove in the barn. We foamed the stone basement walls and got rid of a radon system in the basement which was sucking in cold air from the outside directly into the house.
As people from away, we were initially overcharged for wood and and stacking, but when it was understood in the village that we were full-time tax payers, staying year round, that practice ceased. It is actually a very friendly place.
We found a more reliable wood source, with better wood, since these stoves wouldn’t accept splits longer than 16 inches so we needed consistently sized splits. We rebuilt the back porch with concrete pillars for support to convert it into a wood porch capable of holding about 3 cords. Firewood here is majority maple with some birch. We stacked about half the wood ourselves and hired a neighborhood kid to stack the rest (he did a better job).
During the heating season (6 months or so) we burn the wood stove in the house all day, filling it at night and letting it burn out by morning and then starting a new fire to warm the house up, which it does in about an hour. Oil heat supplements when needed. We burn the small wood stove in the barn during the day, with an electric space heater supplementing it when needed.
We have the chimneys cleaned and inspected every year. The chimney guy says the hot fire in the Jotul every morning really helps to keep the chimney clean. We generate enough ash over the winter to fill one 25 gallon metal trash can. In the spring we haul the ash can down to the edge of the property to an ash pile. We burn 4 to 6 cords of wood a year, buying it green in the early spring for burning in the fall, though some people here season the wood for a year before burning. I don’t think we have room to store that much wood for that long.
I have to say, all other considerations aside, it is hard to overstate the psychological importance of the presence of a live wood stove in the living room during these long Vermont winters. Starting with a cold house of 55 or 60 degrees in the morning, the living room warms up quickly and the rest of the first floor warms up in about an hour. The second floor is for sleeping cold…
Finally, it is really kind of astonishing how much general dirt wood heat generates in the house between bark fragments, dirt and wood sprinters brought in with the wood, and ash and dust from the fire itself. Cleaning is continuous. We live in a small village in the Green Mountains, so most people here have either wood or pellet stoves in the house and there are a number of local folks cutting and selling firewood.
We are helped by the design of the old house, which has air circulating from living room to dining room to kitchen to hall to living room, with a ceiling fan to help push the heat down from the ceiling. Overall it's a great system, but it requires a fair amount of work stacking, hauling and cleaning.
