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Page added on March 13, 2012
What About Wood Heating
A series of columns on home design and home heating with a view to energy efficiency would not be complete without a discussion of the potential wood has for heating our homes.
Mary and I heat our home with wood. We like it. It helps us maintain our connection with the earth that supports us. This connection with the earth is so much more vivid when I am splitting wood in the morning or watching the flame in the glass window than if I were simply to set the thermostat higher and feel the heat come out of the forced air register of a natural gas furnace. For me that is one up side to heating with wood. The satisfaction I get from heating with wood is similar to that of growing the vegetables I eat.
But heating with wood is also energy efficient. We need to learn to pay attention to a new insight called EROEI (energy return on energy invested). When oil was first discovered in the 1930s, the EROEI for that oil was 100:1. Now all the readily accessible oil is gone. We are now developing the tar sands where the EROEI is only 5:1. If I apply that insight to wood heat, I consider the fuel used by my chain saw and my pickup truck. If I get my wood fuel about 45 km from my home, the EROEI is about 24:1. So for residents of southeastern Manitoba, where there is plenty of bush and forest, wood fuel is one of the most efficient sources of home heating.
Furthermore, as we become increasingly dependant on hard-to-get-at oil supplies, notably tar sands and offshore oil, the price of oil-based fuels is going to become increasingly volatile. There is comfort in being dependent on a local fuel resource, wood, the price of which is likely to be considerably more stable in the years ahead.
Now before we all run out and install wood burning heaters, there are some cautions to consider. Wood heaters produce smoke. Outdoor wood boilers are the biggest culprits in this regard. New, certified, indoor wood heaters produce much less smoke. In the last twenty years much research and development has gone into the development of improved heaters. The results are impressive. Nevertheless, where there is a wood fire, there is at least some smoke. If everyone in Steinbach heated with individual wood heaters, we would likely have an air pollution problem. A comprehensive solution to that problem exists and that is district wood heat. In Scandinavia, district wood heating is common.
Maintaining a wood fuel supply is labour intensive. That human energy is not included in the EROEI. This is because human energy is not fossil energy; it can be replaced. Furthermore, much, if not most of the labour going into the maintaining of a wood supply is wholesome energy, energy that ought to be expended in order to maintain the health of our body. Maintaining a wood fuel supply is good, healthy, outdoor exercise.
4 Comments on "What About Wood Heating"
kervennic on Tue, 13th Mar 2012 5:33 pm
Apparently a lot can be done to improve efficiency of wood heating by using higher combustion temperature in home made rocket stove and a passive mass accumulator (bricks for instance).
There is a lot of material on the net but usually very poor describing of principles (tips ?). However a lot of claims like 90 % efficiency, no smoke, no particles, easy to diy and next to zero investment…
One of the problem often reported by newspaper to slow this progress are the partciles generated by wood burning… but this might not be an intrinsic issue.
Norm on Tue, 13th Mar 2012 6:29 pm
Two thumbs up, for wood heat. Can take all that paper stuff (cereal boxes, junk mail) and heat with that too. Reduces the amount of what goes to landfill. Less consumption of natural gas. Difficult to solve the problem, of what to do with ashes. Ideally would be thinly spread in the forest where they came from. Dont have any good way to do that.
DC on Tue, 13th Mar 2012 9:24 pm
Wood heat is fine but like any resource or technique it has limitations, serious ones even. The idea that hundreds of millions of people that live in dispersed car-dependant northerly cities in say, N.A., will be able to keep warm this way, is a foolish one. Im looking out the window right now at(apparently) large swaths of trees. If the 150k people in this garbage strip mall ‘city’ all had to keep warm that way, those vast forests would be gone in the 1st year probably. Then would come the erosion….the flooding..the over-priced flimsly homes built on them would come sliding down into the valley. And it doubtful we could even utilize most of trees around here. Come this summer, I can almost bike out to see the red-ochred pine beetle killed trees. Between the pine-beetle kill and lyme infestation(if your unlucky to be in an effected area), trees prob wont really save us either.
BillT on Wed, 14th Mar 2012 2:14 am
The Philippines has tried to live with wood fuel. Landslides kill hundreds every year from erosion. Pine is not good fuel for homes as it burns fast and hot and coats chimneys with flammable creosote. Most homes in America are NOT designed or able to be heated with wood. Think apartments or highrise condos. Think of how wood would be transported to cities. Think about the gas needed to cut and haul it to buyer’s homes. Think of the curing and handling…no wood source is going to be cheaper then oil unless you own the land and do all of the work yourself. Maybe 10% of the US population can do that. Maybe less.
Then there is the fact that there is about 2 acres of forested land in the US for each one of us. That would last less than 5 years if we had to rely on it for fuel as most is softwoods. Then the land would be bare from coast to coast and America would become a desert. (The deserts of North Africa were once forests before the trees were cut for human use.)