Wood - energy costs and pros and cons

Smart Preppers Shop Here!

I must admit I was a wood novice before I moved here – in the UK, logs came in a sack and were for Christmas as an illegal supplement to the smokeless coal I normally used in my London Edwardian fireplace.

Here, firewood provides the Autumn interest.

The people of the valley take long walks on the hillside paths, estimating the size and quality of their neighbours’ wood reserves.

In Africa, wealth may be measured in goats; here, it’s the size of your timber stacks.

This week they’ve been thick as flies on the church road as I’ve been working – and having to answer several queries a day about

(a) how much I paid for my bulk logs

(b) who from

(c) wood condition and quality.

The consensus is that this year I’ve paid neither too little nor too much, and most have nodded in quiet satisfaction that their nephew / brother in law / wife’s sister’s mother could have got the same a little cheaper.

All my heating and hot water comes from wood – so how does it figure out?

An invaluable guide for the obsessional is the Wood Fuels Handbook pdf. I’ll cut to the chase. 

I use only air dry red beech – which given the very dry alpine air here, samples out at between 11% and 14% moisture content. It burns hot and clean and with little ash residue. I buy it split but uncut for a cost of about £66 per srm or bulk cubic metre, containing around 400kg of wood. Each m3 is equivalent to around 1,850 kWh, so a cost of about 3.6p per kWh – comparable to gas and oil in the Uk at about 4p per kWh. However, the pros and cons are significant

Cons
====
- You have to feed the stoves. I have a 23kW central heating range cooker and a 7kW oven in the Winter living room. Each day you need to carry fuel indoors, and feed the beasts every 30/40 minutes. And no, you can’t turn it on remotely with your i-phone at the airport so the house is hot when you get home. 

- You need to plan. You can’t burn wood on a low setting – it buggers the flues and creates tar deposits. You need a high temperature burn, so you need to capture the heat in a thermal store which then supplies radiators and underfloor heating. Cooking and living need planning. 

- You need to clean the ash out and dispose of it daily.  

- You need somewhere to store it. 

Pros
====
- The smell of woodsmoke – as Austrian as a dirndl. I love it. 

- You don’t have to pay what I do. Many in the valley scavenge wood for free or buy standing wood from the Austrian equivalent of the forestry commission for very little. Your tree is marked with a number, and it’s up to you to fell it and remove it. The local Council doesn’t bother clearing fallen branches – every home has a chainsaw*, and they disappear rapidly

- In a fuel emergency you can burn any dry wood in the stoves – floorboards, furniture …

- Having all your winter fuel in advance, safe from strikes, Putin, price rises etc is wonderfully reassuring.

Smart Preppers Shop Here!

* and a rifle. Even sweet old ladies will have a Moisin-Nagant and 200 rounds in the hall cupboard. Like the US, Austrians have a right to bear arms – except pistols and semi-auto weapons. Unlike the US, they very rarely shoot eachother.