Wood Use Check-In

This week we are just finishing up burning a total of 1/2 cord of wood so far this season.

(Since our wood is all cut to 12" long, it is easy to quantify the volume of wood we stack between the posts on the porch. I have a mark at the height of a quarter cord and can easily mark the heights for fractions of that quarter cord.)

Last night Nancy and I discussed how much more we should load onto the porch. I suggested another quarter cord, or maybe an eighth. We settled on a sixteenth.

With the strong sunshine at this time of the year along with warming temps it just doesn't seem like we'll burn too much more wood.

Now that we are beginning to understand our heating requirements the information allows us to consider how we might source our wood needs. In the years we lived in the yurt we needed so much wood (about 3.5 cords per season) that cutting it ourselves was not really a consideration. Harvesting a half cord just doesn't seem so hard so its interesting to think about harvesting our own wood supply from the surrounding woods.

Wood Use

Later on January 14, 2012...our second 1/4 cord stacked

January 14, 2012...the last of our first 1/4 cord

January 1, 2012...roughly an 1/8 cord

September 24, 2011...our first 1/4 cord

Its been fascinating to monitor our wood consumption this fall and winter.

By New Years Day we'd used just over an 1/8th of a cord which you can see in the middle photo above. Now, two weeks later we've used most of what was left. This means it's taken about three and half month's to go through a 1/4 of a cord to heat a 17oo sq. ft house.

Of course it has been a mild fall, so this may not be indicative of future use, but it starts to lay out a pattern for us to plan around. January and February are the coldest months of the year and it will be interesting to see how much wood these months require. It seems like a reasonable guess that we won't go through more than a cord total for the year, but we'll see when all's said and done.

(I've spent some time trying to figure out a way to present energy use in comparable terms and I'm not there yet, but I want to work it out so it can be presented in a way that would allow comparisons with other forms of fuel, house size, and energy efficiency.)

In dollar terms we paid $200/cord in July for the wood we have on hand now. Roughly this translates to about $50 to heat our home so far this heating season.

The quarter cord we are just finishing burning is a couple years old, so its delivering more btus/kwhs then the woodstack we are about to start using which has not had time to fully season. The new wood was (presumably) cut and split in the middle of the summer since we had it delivered at the end of July. After this season it will be easy for us to maintain a seasoned wood supply by having one dry cord to burn and stocking up a green cord each summer.