Benefits of using an outdoor wood boiler.

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving weekend as I spent most of it with family and had a lot of fun.  I did not partake in the Black Friday shopping extravaganza as I am not a shopper to begin with and the idea of shopping with a crazy amount of people does not appeal to me at all.  I did buy a few things today via Cyber Monday but were things I wanted/needed and at over 80% off, who could pass them up.  To continue last weeks topic, I am going to write about the benefits of using an outdoor wood boiler as your primary heat source.  There are numerous benefits to owning one and I will write about why I chose to go with a Central Boiler E-Classic.

I have an old home that is completely remodeled but still not very efficient for heat.  When we were using natural gas and also electric cove heat, the average cost of a month to heat our home in the winter months from late October to the middle of March was around $500 which was tough to manage.  Including the cooler months prior to and after this, I figured we spent around $2500 a year to heat my home.  I purchased an outdoor wood boiler with everything installed for around $9000 doing some of the labor myself.  I purchase around 12 cords of wood each year for around $90 per cord.  Doing some simple Algebra, it took me a little over 6 years for the system to pay itself off.  This does not include the fact that I now heat my garage so my vehicles are not starting cold each morning.  It also does not take into consideration that I heat my hot water with my boiler which I also figure to save around a $40 a month.  Knowing that my boiler has the potential to last a long time(7 years and counting), I feel this was a very economical decision.

We had really thought a lot about putting an indoor wood stove into our home.  One benefit is that you can utilize the radiant heat off of the stove to help heat the home.  We chose not to in the end because of the risk of a fire.  I know several people who have had either a chimney fire or had their home burn down because of an incident involving their indoor wood stove.  There are so many factors to deal with when you have your stove inside.  Making sure I properly maintained the stove, cleaned the chimney or pipes, and also checking the integrity of the chimney or pipes are a few things that worried me about having it indoors.  Also, having the mess of wood and ashes inside my home was another reason I chose against this option.  I do sometimes wish I had the warmth of a fire in the winter as it tough to beat the feeling, but maybe someday I will add a fireplace on an exterior wall to add that element.

There is a labor of love that goes into having an outdoor wood stove.  Cutting, splitting, and stacking wood into my wood shed is quite a bit of work but I have enjoyed doing it.  For the first many years, I had 12-14 cords of oak and birch hauled in on a semi in 8-foot lengths that I had to cut up into firewood length.  I would then split each log into 2-4 pieces and stack them in 7-foot-high rows in my wood shed.  This took a considerable amount of time but I had heard an old saying that talked about being warmed twice over when making and using firewood and I fully agreed with that.  I used it more as a fall workout regime which helped get me into shape for boot hockey in the winter.  Last few years, I have a cousin who has offered to bring me firewood length pieces that I only need to split and stack.  With just starting out owning our business, I took him up on this offer to cut down on some of the time for a little more expense.   Being my system has more than paid for itself, I feel like I can maybe take a few years off to spend that time on our business.  Lessens the workout aspect, but I try to add something else to compensate. 

Till next time, the end of November is flying away and here comes December.  Christmas will be here before we know it.