Wood stoves

[Megan]

Hi, My husband is constantly talking about a fireplace or a wood stove in the basement to heat the house. Our house is 2200 sq. Ft. The garage is under the first floor/ or half of the basement. The rest of the basement are four rooms. The first level is over basement and living room over the garage. He is always praysing how good would be to heat the entire house with anything else but not electric. I don't see the house can be heated from the basement just with a wood stove. Because of the floors and the walls would trap the heat. Yes I understand the heat rises. This year he installed a fireplace we both like the look of them. He likes the wood stove better anyway. We burned a lot of wood and thought would save or help something with the electric bill. But we got an unexpected very high bill. More then the years before and in our lives every where we lived we didn't have that high. Now he is back to the wood stove how great they are and would heat the house. He is mad at the electric company and I don't see the wood stove can do the job. Though I understand the basement will get warmer. I am afraid we will spend a lot of money to save $5. on electric. He wants to have registers through the floors to let the heat rise. And I am thinking in summer those registers will let the cold air fall. The basement is year round cold, summer and winter. Any ideas or suggestions. Thanks

[trader_4]

First, I'd consider all heating choices. You don't say what's available, I'm guessing nat gas probably isn't. If it is, that's usually the lowest cost option. Another option would be oil, though it's more, but still almost always less than electric resistance heat. You don't say where you are, but in moderate climates, an electric heat pump is another option. You could look at mini-split heat pumps where you have a few separate units that heat and cool the place. Those are easy for installs like yours where there is no existing ducting. There is propane too. I'd get some contractors in and go over the options.

I agree with you, a stove in the basement isn't going to heat the whole house unless you have some active means to force the air from the stove around. The fireplace was likely a disaster because most of them are not designed with heating as the primary objective. And unless the fireplace has it's own vent to the outside, it draws cold air into the house for combustion. That air will come in via cracks, gaps, around doors, windows, etc. Then the electric heat is heating that. A stove will put out a lot more heat than a fireplace and it will certainly help heat the whole place, but your still going to need something else. Stove downstaris and heat pump upstairs might be an option.

[Frank]

I have a neighbor with a wood burner incorporated into his oil heater system so air is circulated throughout the house. A tank of oil will last him for years.

[Dean Hoffman]

Where is the wood coming from? It isn't free if one factors in the cost of the saws, splitter, and time. My ancestors used wood and coal. They were farmers with pasture and had trees on their own land. The cook stoves ran off the wood/coal combination, too.

[Terry Coombs]

  Well , at least this isn't a 15 year old post ... OK , first off , fireplaces are NOT usually used for main heat , they suck more heat up the chimney than they produce unless you're using an insert that is closed on the front . That's where your high bill came from . A wood stove in the basement will help , but without a way to circulate the heat up to the living space I don't think you'll save much . I heat with wood , but my house is an open floor plan and all on one level - and there are still a couple of corners that are a bit chilly at times .   You don't say what kind of electric heat you have , but if it's via a forced air unit , you may be able to use that to circulate the air . I did some poking around , at $200/cord and $.15/KwH (IIRC) wood is actually cheaper than electric . But the amount of work involved makes up for that - pellet stoves are less work , but more expensive to run . My wood is "free" because /I/ live out in the woods , but cutting your own is a lot of work and some might not be up for that . As someone else noted , I also have a pretty good chunk of money in the equipment needed to process trees into firewood .

[Ed Pawlowski]

My house is a raised ranch. Where you have a garage, I have a family room with a woodstove. Garage is detached. Size about the same. I've burned many cords of wood the first 20 years here.

The stove will do an excellent job of heating the room it is in, and OK job on the rest of the floor, a poor job of the rest of the house.

Fireplaces can actually have a negative effect sucking out more air than they heat so I'm not surprised at the higher bill. Stove are better in that respect.

You can put registers in the floor. They can be closed in summer. You need two, one at each end of the house to get air flowing, up in the same room as the stove, down at the other end. Keep in mind two thing. It may be a violation of building code. Should the woodstove start the house on fire, those registers will help spread the fire faster.

To move the heated air enough to help, you need a fan or two.

My experience is you will be disappointed. I've not burned my stove for

15 years because it is just not very good at heating or saving money for the amount of work required.

If your house is all electric, consider propane if natural gas is not available. Heat pumps are better than electric baseboard. If you put in propane, down the road ditch the electric dryer and water heater too.

Check out comparisons of fuel cost here

Update the cost for your area.

[rbowman]

Are at least one of you at home all the time? Pellet stoves can be set up with a feed auger but pellets are relatively expensive. Otherwise the stove has to be fed regularly. My experience was the place was quite cold when I got home from work even though the fire hadn't gone out completely. It would take a while to get it back up to a comfortable temperature.

This also precludes a wild weekend in Vegas if you have house plants or tropical fish :) Having a house sitter when I was in the hospital for a few days didn't work out well for me. The kid must have thought he was living in a sauna and burned a good portion of my winter supply.

Coal isn't much better even if you can find a reliable supply of coal.

Then there is the wood supply. The local ranch supply has a humorous itemization of the cost of burning wood. After buying the chain saw, pickup, and other needed tools you also have to factor in the cost of repairs, gas, and oil. Fixing the pickup can be quite expensive. A friend concluded, correctly, that if he cut on the uphill side of the road, he could roll the logs downhill rather than lugging them up to the road. He didn't take into account the trajectory of a rolling log after bounding over a couple of rocks. At least the truck was drivable.

[gfretwell]

My niece has a forced air wood burning furnace in her house. (product of the Carter era) It is a real pain in the ass and she got tired of the whole house smelling like smoke all the time.

[rbowman]

Depending on what you're burning, it smells better than a coal burner. Around here it's all softwood which isn't the best firewood but when that's all you've got... Cottonwood technically is hardwood but it's not worth dragging home.

[gfretwell]

It really doesn't matter. After a while the smoke smell starts to make you sick. This is like the one Frank was talking about with a supplemental oil burner and I think that is all she uses now. When her hubby was alive and in the construction business they had access to lots of wood but it still got to be a pain.

[Terry Coombs]

  Around here it's red and white oak , hickory and other hardwoods . A lot of people won't burn sweet gum or black gum , but it's OK .

[rbowman]

I have a neighbor that I think throws flammable kitchen trash in or else he's burning old CRTs. Nothing like the smell of burning plastic in the morning.

[rbowman]

About the only real hardwoods in Montana are stuff people planted along city streets. They get real pissed if you cut them down. Cottonwood and aspen makes a nice campfire but that's about it. Western larch is as good as it gets.

That's one thing I miss about back east. You can walk for miles here and see nothing but ponderosa pine and douglas fir, maybe some lodgepole, larch, or cedar. Lot of monoculture and when you have a pine beetle outbreak, a lot of dead trees waiting for an excuse to burn.

[gfretwell]

Down here it is slash pine and live/laurel oak. The slash pine heartwood burns like an old tire and it is hard to get the oak to burn at all. Buttonwood is real popular for smoking meat and fish but it is protected most of the places you find it. We have a fire pit but I have trouble finding decent firewood. When my wife was building high end houses we burned red oak flooring scraps and white pine moulding.

[rbowman]

It was a long time ago so I'm vague on details but iirc it was a state or TVA campground in Tennessee. Anyway there was a furniture factory nearby and they dumped their scraps and rejects in bins for free firewood. It was all well seasoned oak. I still have a piece that was probably supposed to be a chair leg that I use to prop up the bunk in my pickup to get to the storage underneath.