Wood Heating Options
For many people home heating is one of the largest expenses during the winter. Most homes use either electricity, oil or natural gas for heating purposes. But perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at using wood as a fuel source.
People have heated their homes with wood for thousands of years, but I’m not talking about building a fire in the middle of your living room. Wood heating appliances have improved dramatically over the past twenty years, making great improvements in efficiency and the reduction in emissions. A couple decades back, wood burning fireplaces and stoves were huge and not very efficient. They would eat up wood faster than you could cut it and spew out smoke that would polute the air inside and out. Now, clean burning and highly efficient stoves, fireplaces and furnaces are owner-friendly, neighbour-friendly and environmentally-friendly. Wood burning stoves and inserts are now legitimate heating options for homeowners.
A few year ago, “airtight” stoves were the best that could be had, but because wood needs air to burn cleanly the airtight stoves would not burn efficiently and produced a lot of smoke. The new “controlled combustion” stoves not only produce less smoke and pollution, but they are also more efficient, burning as much as thirty percent less wood. That’s thirty percent less wood to haul and thirty percent less wood to pay for.
For homes with a fireplace, a wood insert is a good way to turn an energy drain into an efficient source of heat. Fireplace inserts are available that are EPA certified to have the same efficient performance as new wood stoves. For new homes that are just being constructed a pre-fabricated steel fireplace is a great option. They are as efficient as the inserts and stoves and can be built right into a wall without the need for brickwork.
Pellet stoves are another viable heating option, and because of the convenience they offer they are becoming more popular every day. As the name implies pellet stove burn pellets rather than raw wood. The pellets are made of waste wood and come in various size bags or in bulk. The pellets are poured into a hopper that is part of the stove and from there are fed into the fire slowly by an electric feeder, providing heat that is steady and controlled thermostatically.
Although pellet stoves may be a little bit more expensive, they do have some great advantages. Because they are so efficient they don’t even require an EPA rating. The pellets are clean and easy to handle and typically they are available in many retail stores. And, they can be controlled by a thermostat so it is easy to maintain an even level of heat.
Besides wood inserts and stoves, wood burning furnaces and boilers designed to heat an entire home are also available.
Another advantage of heating with wood is that instead of spending your heating money on imported oil, coal and natural gas you keep the business in your local area.
Another big advantage to using wood heat is that they are more carbon neutral than fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide as it burns that it would have released anyway as it decomposed after having absorbed carbon dioxide as it grew.
