When
to Choose Wood Heat.
For
some households, heating with wood is a smart, sustainable option.
Learn about the benefits and costs of using a wood stove to heat your
home.
The
significance of wood heat as an energy resource can be seen during a
drive through small towns or down country lanes: The long lines of
piled firewood in the yards prove that heating with wood remains a
viable option.
Every
winter, people who choose to heat with wood devote time to cutting up
logs, and every spring they split the logs and stack them in rows to
dry under the summer sun. In fall they move firewood to the house and
stack it again, and in winter they burn it to warm their homes as
they begin cutting again for the next year’s supply.
Why
do so many households in forested areas choose to heat with wood — a
bulky, messy and labor-intensive fuel source? Firewood is a homegrown
energy resource that helps families stretch their household budgets,
strengthen their local economies and continue a generations-long
tradition.
Wood
Heat: Understand the Pros and Cons.
During
tough economic times, more people turn to heating with wood. The U.S.
Energy Information Administration data released in October 2012
projects that more than 2.6 million households will heat their homes
with wood this year, which is a 3 percent increase over last year.
Yet
the topic of fuel wood is all but missing from energy policy
debates — few politicians discuss its merits or plan for its
strategic use. (Industrial wood energy, however, is getting some
attention. A recent report from Duke University points out that
advanced wood-combustion technologies can be used to cleanly burn
wood to generate electricity. The report shows that this renewable
power source could be quickly developed to provide more power in the
United States than we currently get from hydroelectric sources. To
learn more about this report, read Cleaner Energy From Firewood.)
Wood
heating mostly attracts attention when people discuss pollution. Wood
smoke has caused real problems in small towns and large cities
throughout North America, and an increasing number of activists
clamor to have wood burning banned from their communities because of
its associated air pollution. Some environmentalists warn that an
increase in firewood use would damage forests. As a result, wood
burning has become more often identified as a problem to be solved
rather than an opportunity to be harvested. Fuelwood is a renewable
energy resource that most governments — and even some renewable
energy advocates — don’t seem comfortable with.
It
is not my intention to trivialize the environmental impacts of wood
heating or to deflect concerns by emphasizing the pollution from
other energy sources. Wood-burning technology has greatly improved
over the past 25 years, however, and I believe wood heating should
remain a part of our energy discussions. For example, upgrading to an
advanced woodstove can reduce a household’s smoke output from wood
by as much as 90 percent!
Read
more: motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/wood-heat