Paying attention to things like using a clothes line rather than the tumble dryer, and the 'economy' dishwasher setting rather than the one we had been using, turning things off when not using them, etc, etc, and the new more-efficient fridge/freezer.
Keeping to the heating target will require more frugality, keeping to smaller areas of the house on colder days and keeping the rest colder.
But nothing too drastic: in particular nothing that would have astonished my parents or theirs I don't think.
Rgds
Damon[ Parent ]
Haven't worked out exactly where we are on finances at this point:
- Stove we bought was a high-end one and we paid more for a couple sheds to store the pellets than we paid for the pellets. That has to get amortized over more than one year.
- California has this strange socialized gas billing system where, if you cut your gas usage for two of the deep winter months (Jan and Feb?) by 10% from the previous three year average you get a 20% discount the next two months. So we ran the pellet stove for the two cold months and then ran on mains gas for the discounted months. B-) (I had a hernia and wife had vertigo so decided to skip toting pellets for a bit. Good timing, PG&E.)
So we're probably behind at the moment.
But even without the discount and paying hardware store palletload prices for the pellets rather than warehouse rates the stove came out FAR ahead on fuel costs. (Also was a comfier heat than the forced air furnace.)
At this point we've got the capital costs out of the way and about 2/3 ton of pellets left over from last year (burned about a ton and a half then). So we'll probably only need one more ton for this winter. Pellets are industrial waste and we expect them to stay cheap while gas is mined fuel and pricey. Cross fingers.
Meanwhile the Harman stove feeds up from the bottom and can burn a bunch of other stuff (with an insert change): Cherry pits, corn, ... Also daydreaming about getting a mini pellet mill and making my own from the weeds on the Nevada place's 5 acres of high desert. THAT would be fun!
(Of course some cheap thermal solar collectors would do wonders for either place, since they're both very well insulated and have good southern exposure.)[ Parent ]
Have you tried to estimate (a) energy consumption for heating from wood and (b) energy and CO2-emission efficiency compared to your gas heating?
What's wrong with it? Pellet stoves use forced air to burn the particulates and dust away to the point that the exhaust almost doesn't even smell (except the first minute or so as the stove is lighting up, before the temperature of the burning pellets is high enough). Part of the air under-feeds the burning pellets, which put out a bunch of smoke, then the rest of the air causes the smoke to burn super-hot and extremely complete. (The hot gases then go through a heat exchanger to heat the room air and leave the chimney at not all that much over room temperature.)
In the US the environmental agencies put big regulations on wood stoves and small ones on recent-model ultra-efficient wood stoves (which do a similar thing with hunks of wood). But pellet stoves are just waved through. (The particulate emissions are so low they're hard to measure.)
Stove pellets are compressed sawdust. Hardwood pellets burn very clean. Softwood pellets are a tad dirtier but have more energy per ton.
What energy are you concerned about? The electric power for the fans, controls and igniter? The fuel costs? I'll try to answer if you clarify the question.[ Parent ]
"Dirtier" mainly means more ash to dump. But "a lot" is like "dump the ash pan twice in a heating season". It's less than a cubic foot, i.e. a lot smaller than your typical wastebasket.[ Parent ]
Also we have a toddler and another baby due, so there is a fire/burn hazard, and we are in a smokeless zone so without some sort of exemption AFAIK wood burning would be forbidden.
I like wood stoves but in reality one would not be a good fit for us IMHO.
That sentence just leaped out at me, sums up the excesses that we take for granted today. I remember (just) when only certain rooms of the house were heated. When refrigerated or evaporative cooling - a near "necessity" in our climate - was a luxury unavailable to most.
Paul. Off-grid 3 1/2 years.[ Parent ]
