Wannabe Woodburner!

[northernwoodsman]

Internet forums are a wonderful thing! Living in northern MN in a 100+ year old house with minimal insulation has convinced me that perhaps a woodstove would cut down our heating bill. We will be having our first child this summer and mom will be staying home during the winter - thus I want it to be a somewhat warm house without blowing the budget! I also work for the county forestry department so access to cheap wood is not a problem. The problem lies in putting a wood stove in our house. Perhaps someone with experience can give suggestions to guide me through!

The house is a 1 and 1/2 story 1500 square foot house with the bedrooms on the second floor. The house currently has a chimney in the center of the house. The chimney is only being used by the water heater - 1st problem. I am unsure of the liner type and/or condition. The way I see it, my options are to re-route the water heater vent or buy a powervented water heater and use the chimney with the woodstove. OR, create a new chimney for the woodstove. Any thoughts?

One more question - what is the difference between a wood stove and a wood furnace. I have thought that maybe putting the heat in the basement would heat the whole house by using floor vents. (Plus we get a warm basement).

Getting into wood heat is somewhat expensive for a limited budget family. I want to make sure I do this right to get the most bang for our buck! Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

[DriftWood]

Post this also in the boiler room to get some ideas about state of the art wood burning ,wood gasification .

 

[STOVEGUY11]

First I have have a local chimney sweep, inspect that chimney, alot of the times in older houses those chimneys were built like tanks, but what can happen is if you get cracks in the flue, combustible material could be exposed to the heat from the stove. You would also want to line and insulate that chimney with stainless steel to create a proper draft, and most of the time it is now required to do so. If you choose to put up what they call a Class A chimney you have to realize the initail prize of the chimney system and of the stove is not going to save you in the first season. I dont know around you, but around here a 48" section of 6" class a chimney pipe is $200. You need to clear your roof line by 3' with that pipe as well. So chimney systems alone can range between $1000-$3000. If you place a stove in the basement, you would want a high btu, and also a blower fan for that unit. But dont be surprised if its 100 degrees in that basement to keep the upstairs toasty. If you decide to utilize the fireplace I would put in an insert that would heat your living area. Theres lots of companies out there that make 2000 sq ft heaters.

 

[raybonz]

Internet forums are a wonderful thing! Living in northern MN in a 100+ year old house with minimal insulation has convinced me that perhaps a woodstove would cut down our heating bill. We will be having our first child this summer and mom will be staying home during the winter - thus I want it to be a somewhat warm house without blowing the budget! I also work for the county forestry department so access to cheap wood is not a problem. The problem lies in putting a wood stove in our house. Perhaps someone with experience can give suggestions to guide me through!

The house is a 1 and 1/2 story 1500 square foot house with the bedrooms on the second floor. The house currently has a chimney in the center of the house. The chimney is only being used by the water heater - 1st problem. I am unsure of the liner type and/or condition. The way I see it, my options are to re-route the water heater vent or buy a powervented water heater and use the chimney with the woodstove. OR, create a new chimney for the woodstove. Any thoughts?

One more question - what is the difference between a wood stove and a wood furnace. I have thought that maybe putting the heat in the basement would heat the whole house by using floor vents. (Plus we get a warm basement).

Getting into wood heat is somewhat expensive for a limited budget family. I want to make sure I do this right to get the most bang for our buck! Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Just a thought, if your chimney checks to be safe for wood burning and you have an adequate size you could replace your hot water tank with an electric unit which has no flue.. An electric water heater requires a 2 pole 3 amp breaker...

Ray

 

[raybonz]

Internet forums are a wonderful thing! Living in northern MN in a 100+ year old house with minimal insulation has convinced me that perhaps a woodstove would cut down our heating bill. We will be having our first child this summer and mom will be staying home during the winter - thus I want it to be a somewhat warm house without blowing the budget! I also work for the county forestry department so access to cheap wood is not a problem. The problem lies in putting a wood stove in our house. Perhaps someone with experience can give suggestions to guide me through!

The house is a 1 and 1/2 story 1500 square foot house with the bedrooms on the second floor. The house currently has a chimney in the center of the house. The chimney is only being used by the water heater - 1st problem. I am unsure of the liner type and/or condition. The way I see it, my options are to re-route the water heater vent or buy a powervented water heater and use the chimney with the woodstove. OR, create a new chimney for the woodstove. Any thoughts?

One more question - what is the difference between a wood stove and a wood furnace. I have thought that maybe putting the heat in the basement would heat the whole house by using floor vents. (Plus we get a warm basement).

Getting into wood heat is somewhat expensive for a limited budget family. I want to make sure I do this right to get the most bang for our buck! Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Just a thought, if your chimney checks to be safe for wood burning and you have an adequate size electrical service (100 amps min.) you could replace your hot water tank with an electric unit which has no flue.. An electric water heater requires a 2 pole 3 amp breaker...

Ray

 

[raybonz]

Internet forums are a wonderful thing! Living in northern MN in a 100+ year old house with minimal insulation has convinced me that perhaps a woodstove would cut down our heating bill. We will be having our first child this summer and mom will be staying home during the winter - thus I want it to be a somewhat warm house without blowing the budget! I also work for the county forestry department so access to cheap wood is not a problem. The problem lies in putting a wood stove in our house. Perhaps someone with experience can give suggestions to guide me through!

The house is a 1 and 1/2 story 1500 square foot house with the bedrooms on the second floor. The house currently has a chimney in the center of the house. The chimney is only being used by the water heater - 1st problem. I am unsure of the liner type and/or condition. The way I see it, my options are to re-route the water heater vent or buy a powervented water heater and use the chimney with the woodstove. OR, create a new chimney for the woodstove. Any thoughts?

One more question - what is the difference between a wood stove and a wood furnace. I have thought that maybe putting the heat in the basement would heat the whole house by using floor vents. (Plus we get a warm basement).

Getting into wood heat is somewhat expensive for a limited budget family. I want to make sure I do this right to get the most bang for our buck! Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Just a thought, if your chimney checks to be safe for wood burning and you have an adequate size electrical service (100 amps min.) you could replace your hot water tank with an electric tank which has no flue.. An electric water heater requires a 2 pole 3 amp breaker...

Ray

 

[raybonz]

Sorry about the multiple post not sure why that happened....

Ray

 

[northernwoodsman]

So what I'm gathering by the posted comments is that using the existing chimney is probably the best bet and hiring a chimney pro to look at it would be a good idea. As far as the water heater goes, I'll have to continue exploring options.

Can anyone give me any reason or situation where wood heat is not a great idea? I've convinced myself it's a good idea, but I can usually justify anything if I want to do it.

Thanks!

 

[T Osborn]

If I lived in Northern MN, I would want my wood storage close to the house if not in the basement. Don't like the thought of collecting wood when the wind chill is -30!

 

[northernwoodsman]

Air temp can easily get to -30 with wind chill much below that! Yes wood storage in the basement is an option.

 

[granpajohn]

Can anyone give me any reason or situation where wood heat is not a great idea?

Not on this forum ;-)
A county forester, living in MN, expecting a new baby? (Congratulations, BTW). Wood is a great idea.

 

[savageactor7]

northernwoodsman I have an old house like yours and save tons of coin heating with wood from my back yard.

If your chimney doesn’t have flue brick in the center of it… get a liner. If you make enough inquiries I’m sure you can get the job done for less that 300.

I don’t recommend storing wood in the basement …a musty smell develops.

It may be a pain going out to get it but that’s what I do. I have a stand that holds about 5 wheel barrows full 5’ long 4’high. That lasts us 2 maybe 3 days. If it’s mild out…that’s when we replenish.
You can save a lot time stacking wood if you just make a long high pile on old pallets and then tarp it over in the fall after it has seasoned. I’ve improvised a long tent like enclosure I walk in and grab our wood.

Try and work on your wood at least 45min every day that way work gets done without becoming a pain in the butt project and you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy the family.

***buy the biggest stove you can afford…cause you’ll end up buying one eventually.

If I didn't have all this free wood behind me I'd be burning coal...just say'en. Have fun, take breaks, smell the roses, never cut that one last log at the end of the day, respect and maintain your equipment.

 

[gyrfalcon]

So what I'm gathering by the posted comments is that using the existing chimney is probably the best bet and hiring a chimney pro to look at it would be a good idea. As far as the water heater goes, I'll have to continue exploring options.

Can anyone give me any reason or situation where wood heat is not a great idea? I've convinced myself it's a good idea, but I can usually justify anything if I want to do it.

Thanks!

The main drawback to heating with a woodstove is the huge amount of physical labor involved, not just in splitting and stacking, but day to day. If you're working full-time and your wife is tending a baby/young child, you're going to have to do almost all of that work by yourself before and after work every day and on weekends. Do consider that before you decide to store your wood in the basement. It takes a lot of wood every day to keep a big stove going 24/7 through the kind of weather you have in the winter, and hauling that up the stairs day after day will get very old very fast! My old house has a large attached woodshed, which makes life much, much easier. You'll also need plenty of room near the stove to store a couple days' supply of fuel, and even more room to dry it out and warm it up if you end up storing it outside.

Be sure to get your full winter's supply of wood -- 5 or 6 cords? -- cut, split and stacked in the spring so it's ready for next winter. If you manage that, you may be the first newbie woodburner in the history of the universe to skip right over first-year struggles getting inadequately seasoned wood to burn decently.

Another disadvantage to heating with wood is the learning curve involved in getting the best performance out of your stove or furnace, if you go that way. That's going to fall mostly on your wife if she's home all day, and it sometimes may be difficult for her to juggle the inevitably simultaneous insistent demands for attention of an infant and a woodstove/furnace.

However you're heating the house now, do you have heat in your 2nd floor bedrooms? If you're planning to rely completely on a woodstove, those bedrooms are going to be cold, possibly too cold for a baby's bedroom. My 150-year-old house in Vermont has had pretty good insulation put in somewhere along the line, but I would hesitate to have a baby sleep in my unheated 2nd floor bedrooms all winter, even though we don't get to anywhere near -30 but once in a blue moon. I've seen a number of threads on this forum about the difficulties involved in getting woodstove heat vented to distant rooms, and you might want to try to find those to see what some of the considerations are.

I'm using a dual system. I orginally got my small woodstove as a back-up to my oil-fueled boiler, but when I got my first oil bill this fall, I went the other way and now rely mostly on my woodstove. I keep my two heating zone thermostats set at 60, which means the boiler comes on only occasionally for hot water and in the middle of the night when the woodstove cools off, or for the zone controlling my home office on the side of the house away from the stove when we get down into single digit temps outside. Although I've had lots of problems with my wood supply and my learning curve and didn't even get started until around Christmas, I'll still save about $1,000 this winter on heat, and next year should be significantly more. But that's not counting the initial cost of the stove and of having a second chimney put in, or the seemingly endless number of necessary accessories-- stove fan, ash bucket, fire gloves, wood cart, steamer, manual splitting tools, etc., etc., etc. My living room already had a good big hearth, but if you're planning on a freestanding stove and not an insert, that's another expense. So it'll take a few years to catch up.

Last point is to be sure to get enough stove for your needs. If I'd known I was going to be using it this way, I'd have gotten the next size up. With a free-standing stove, once you've gotten your hearth and a new chimney put in, moving up to a larger stove that requires greater distance from walls, etc., can mean a major and expensive overhaul of the whole mess.

And be absolutely sure you've got a really knowledgeable chimney guy on tap who can assess not just the integrity of the chimney but its draft. Especially critical if you put in a new chimney.

 

[gyrfalcon]

as per code each appliance needs its own chimny.

Right. You can, at least in VT, vent the boiler out the side of the house and use the chimney for the stove, which is such a dumb thing to do in a place that gets lots of snow that my heating-plumbing guy flat-out forbade me to do it. I learned why when we had a huge snowstorm and the news was full of people narrowly escaping CO poisoning deaths because the vent got blocked with snow.

 

[RedRanger]

northernwoodsman: seems like if you could post a skecth of your house the people on this forum could guide you more precisely.

Using the chimney even if it requires a ss liner is the way to go and that will mean an electric water heater. No matter, what you save in using wood for fuel will easily make that up. That equation is a no-brainer. What is critical is your floor plan and the placement of the wood stove. eg: unfinished, uninsulated basement, most of the heat will be sucked away if you put it there.

As for the chores regarding wood-heating, not to worry, you will come to enjoy that sense of pride in being just a little bit more self-sufficient. And yes, there will be a learning curve until you and your wife understand just exactly what is the best operating procedure for your new appliance. but once you have that down pat, you will never look back.

 

[cmonSTART]

Hey man, I'm in a similar situation. We bought our 1850 farm house a few years ago and installed a wood stove the first year. We're a younger couple, now with a new baby, and the wood really takes a bite out of the oil bill. I figure we have about $1,700 in our current setup, starting from nothing. That's a stainless external chimney, 30-NC w/ blower, and a hearth. But then, when I figure it would probably cost us $1,500 (or more?) to keep our house at the current temperature this winter, it's an easy decision. Of course, we purchase wood, and a lot we scrounge. We spent $400 on wood this past year and we have more than enough to heat our house this winter, with some left over (we found A LOT).

I did the installation (which I hope to redesign this coming summer), I do most of the physical labor involved, but my wife manages to help often too even with the baby. We do have to make a couple sacrifices. In our house, wood heat means our living room can be 80 and our bedrooms will be 64. We don't mind at all. It takes some effort to stay on top of the mess it creates, but we clean up after ourselves when we load the stove or take out ashes and it's not a big deal. The benefits we get from wood heat vastly outweigh these.

I joined this forum this past December when we bought our current stove. I had zero experience with EPA approved stoves and the expertise brought to this forum by the other members has greatly benefited our family and our budget. Anything you want to know about wood heat you can learn right here (and woodheat.org too).

 

[northernwoodsman]

Wow, mention your having a baby and everyone wants to help Thanks so much. I'll post a sketch of our house for more input. I've been working on a Google Sketchup model of my house so the sketch should be fairly acurate.

 

[colebrookman]

Re. storing wood in your basement. You increase the fire load tremendousely by storing nice dry wood anywhere in you house. I've seen homes with basements loaded, farmers porches loaded and a new log home with an almost full basement a tinder dry wood. Discounting the possible insect problems one of the last fires in our area was in a new home, woodburning stove in the basement and the wood was piled to close to the stove. Residents were at work and they were lucky the fire dept. contained it to just one side of the house. Water is also a concern for rural fire depts. especially in freezing weather. Something that may be an easy save in the summer turns into a fiasco with freezing pumps and lack of water. I know many have been storing wood in their homes for years with no problems. But Murphy is real and playing the odds is not good, even in Vegas. Better to suffer a little inconvenience and be fire safe.