Wood for the Winter

If you remember my posts from last fall, we were busy building our rocket mass heater stove.  Last winter we used a combination of electric baseboard heaters and kerosene most of the time, since the rocket mass stove we built wasn't very reliable.  This year, the plan is to use our new wood stove, once we get all the pipes put together.  Just as a comparison, the rocket mass heater had hours and hours of labor invested in it, but only a few hundred dollars worth of duct work, straw, and perlite, since we scavenged the bricks and dug up the clay from the yard.  The new wood stove only took a few minutes to carry into the house, but the cost of the stove plus the expense of having a professional install a new liner in our chimney puts it closer to two thousand dollars.  If we get what we pay for, then this stove better work!  

We have some firewood already stockpiled, but we don't think it's enough to get through the winter. Fortunately, all of our big pretty ash trees that grow in our fence lines have died over the past few years due to the emerald ash borer.  This is sad, but also nice that we have several years worth of firewood standing and drying out, just waiting for Brandon to chop up.  He felled a few small ones, and then this big tree.  

Because the tree died recently, it still had most of the small branches, and when it crashed to the ground they broke into kindling laid out in a tree shape!  How handy, right?

 Now comes his favorite part - chopping up the logs!  Chop, Brandon, chop!!