Going Low Tech with Lopi to Heat the House

Most things in our house are high tech as we can get, except when it comes to heating the house. When we built this house a few years ago we put in a wood burning stove (see Lopi, Lopi, and Lopi). Heating our home with a wood burning stove is great, except... you have to have wood of course. Since Deborah likes the house to be WARM, we certainly save quite a bit on electricity over the winter (bill runs around $65 in the winter), it just takes a lot of labor to get it to the point of burning as you see below.

So, we spend many a Saturday afternoon in what turns out to be pretty tough work of cutting up wood, splitting, and stacking. Theoretically we should be working on seasoning our wood about a year out from when we are burning it, but so far we haven't been able to catch up with the seasons and come summer time we really don't want to be out there doing this type of work, so, we are doing it now.

This isn't much of a technological post, other than the fact that I do have my phone out there with me, but this is what we did today. You will have to excuse the quality of the photos, all the images below were taken with my phone.

We have this sort of disaster area in the adjacent property our here. Early this year the logging trucks came in and clear cut the 40+ acres and left a huge mess of wood scrap bio-mass (mostly hard wood trees they didn't want), and in the process gave us an almost endless supply of wood for our stove. Luckily we can't see the mess next door from our house, and the owner of the property (which use to be a nice deer lease) was thrilled was wanted to clean it up a bit.

It was a totally exhausting day, but the end result is heat for the house.