Learn how to heat your house with wood with these tips on wood burning for beginners, wood-burning stove safety, and tips on the best wood for burning.
Learning to respect and harness the power of fire is one of humanity’s major evolutionary milestones. Centuries later, firewood remains among the most reliable sources of home heating and cooking. When sourced from a smartly managed woodlot, wood is a renewable resource, and with a good woodstove, you can achieve self-sufficient heating all winter long.
Heating with wood has its risks, however, and before you choose firewood as your primary source of winter warmth, you must take particular safety measures. Here are a few tips to get the most out of heating with wood.
Choose the Right Stove
The first question you may ask yourself is, do I want an open fireplace or a woodstove? For heating and cooking, the answer is fairly straightforward. Woodstoves are more effective at heating a room than a fireplace is, because their cast-iron bodies help radiate heat outward. It’s simpler to cook on top of a woodstove, and while all forms of heating with wood are messy, woodstoves tend to be tidier than fireplaces. (Only when ambiance is your primary – or sole – objective, does nothing beat a roaring fireplace.)
Choosing the right size of stove for your home is critically important. A woodstove that’s too small will leave you frustrated by cold spots, and a stove that’s too big presents a major fire hazard. To make sure you have a properly sized woodstove, calculate how many square feet you wish to heat.
Small stoves are sized to heat about 500 to 1,000 square feet, medium stoves are suitable for up to 2,000 square feet, and large and extra-large stoves are available for even bigger spaces. Heat-propelled fans that sit atop a woodstove will push heat out into a room. By strategically placing additional fans, you can encourage heat to travel around corners and into other rooms. If you have a particularly large space to heat or a lot of separate, closed-off rooms, you may need multiple stoves.
Wood Burning Stove Safety
Woodstoves should be installed at least 36 inches from any unprotected walls or other potentially flammable items. The base, or hearth, must be built from a noncombustible material, such as brick, rock, or tile. Give your chimney plenty of clearance. If the chimney pipe isn’t taller than the peak of your home’s roof, wind will force its way down the chimney, causing backdrafts.
Learn how your stove functions. All woodstoves have a flue that can be opened to allow oxygen in to feed the fire. Shut the flue after the fire is going – leaving it open will waste wood by burning it off too fast or, worse, cause your fire to burn hot enough to ignite a chimney fire.
Keeping your chimney clean is critically important. Hire a chimney cleaner or get up on your roof with a chimney brush to clean out creosote buildup at least once a year.
Wood Burning for Beginners
The kind of wood you burn affects results. Some tree species produce firewood that’s extremely dense and burns for a long time but are difficult to light. Other types will burn very hot but too quickly. Some types produce more creosote than others, risking a chimney fire. So, when you head out to harvest firewood, it’s important to know what you’re looking for.
Trees are classified as hardwoods or softwoods. For the most part, hardwoods are deciduous trees that lose their leaves in fall, while softwoods are conifers and other evergreens. Hardwoods, as the name may imply, have less sap and moisture content, making them solid and dense. These qualities make hardwoods the preferred type for firewood, because they burn slowly and produce more heat. Large pieces of dense hardwood, such as ash, are perfect for stocking your stove in the evening so it’ll burn through the night without tending.
Softwoods, with their high sap content, are more flammable and can be helpful for starting a fire. They tend to burn hot and fast. Avoid burning pine except when starting a fire – it’s very resinous, and causes creosote to build up in your chimney.
Best Wood for Burning
Even within hardwoods and softwoods, different species can produce different qualities of heat. Beech, ash, oak, and maple burn very hot and produce a heat-value-per-cord equivalent to 200 gallons of heating oil. Hemlock, alder, and spruce have a heat-value-per-cord equivalent to only 100 gallons of heating oil.
The beauty of heating with wood – particularly if you live in a woodland setting – is that the fuel for your winter fires is all around you. But to harvest wood efficiently, you’ll need to plan ahead. The process involves felling trees, removing limbs, and “bucking” each log into movable pieces. Most of the work is completed with a chainsaw, so you’ll need to wear appropriate safety equipment and have working knowledge of how to operate a saw.
Move bucked lengths of wood to an area for further processing. Firewood ultimately needs to be cut into a length that’ll fit into your woodstove, and then split. You can split wood by hand with an axe, but it’s much easier to use a hydraulic wood splitter. A tree with an 18-inch diameter will produce approximately half a cord of firewood. A cord is 128 cubic feet, and the number of cords you’ll need for a winter will vary depending on the size and condition of your woodstove, the size of your home, how warm you like your home to be, and the kind of wood you’re burning. A good rule of thumb is to have 2 or 3 cords of wood on hand per 1,000 square feet of house you’re heating.
With a sharp eye, you can spot dead trees that are still suitable for harvesting. Dead trees will allow you to reduce your time drying wood, but be careful to avoid trees that have started to rot. In most cases, you’ll be harvesting living trees, which will require you to account for significant drying time.
If you’ve harvested your firewood green (from living trees), stack split logs for at least one year in order to “season” them, which will allow the wood to burn easily and produce less creosote. Keep rotating woodpiles: one or more for the green wood that’s drying, one for wood that’s sat for some months, and piles of ready-to-burn wood that have sat for more than a year. If you harvested dead wood, you can stack it up quickly and be ready to burn.
By supplying a little bit of your own time and effort in the form of proper maintenance and careful firewood procedures, a woodstove can provide a cozy and sustainable way to heat your home indefinitely.
Originally published as “Get Started with Wood Heat” in the September/October 2024 issue of GRIT magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.
Kirsten Lie-Nielsen is a freelance writer and author of two books on homesteading who recently restored a 200-year-old farm in Maine with her partner. Follow along at Hostile Valley Farm or on Instagram @HostileValleyLiving.
