Here's a way to heat your home for free using a sustainable process that may, as a side benefit, add years to your life. Up here on Sweet Gum Hill, we have experimented with this and are now ready to endorse the process of heating with seasoned hard wood, taken from dead trees on your own property.
First, you will have to do some figuring to see if this process can be sustainable for you or not. Do you have enough property? We think a house like ours can sustain its heating needs with just three acres of mature hardwood forest. A little less than half of our five acres is now in lawns and gardens. Most of the lawn is being directed back to something useful, meadow and woodlands.
The rule of thumb that seems to work for the mountains of Pennsylvania goes as follows: you will need two cords of split, seasoned hardwood for your house, plus one cord for each additional bedroom after the first bedroom. For example, we live in a three bedroom house. We will usually burn four cords of wood per Winter. A cord of wood is a tightly stacked pile of split wood, cut to length, and measuring four feet wide by eight feet long by four feet high. We will use a stack that is sixteen feet long by eight feet wide, by four feet tall. That is a lot of wood for a year. So the main question to answer:
Can my property generate enough hardwood to assure an indefinite supply while avoiding depletion of forest?
We do not purchase firewood. Although we have purchased it in the past, we have discovered that this often encourages others to relax their own sustainability discipline. Since we want to be sure that the wood comes only from dead trees and that the trees have been harvested without damage to the surrounding forest, we have decided that a sustainable heat supply, for us, will include a the self imposed requirement that we source the wood ourselves. To be sure, there are firewood suppliers who only sell dead wood sourced in sustainable ways. Many of these responsible cutters purchase their timber from state forests and game lands, under the supervision of forestry experts. But sadly, many other people purchase a piece of property with an eye to denuding it and selling it later as cleared development lots. We want to be certain that our heat supply is sustainable so we no longer purchase firewood.
This one measures 215 inches near the base.
That's almost 18 feet around!
An old black cherry with oaks and a sugar maple in the background.
Hardwood species like oak, maple, locust, fruit trees, nut trees, and elm, reach their seed bearing maturity at different times. Here on Sweet Gum Hill we have several white oak trees that are probably older than the United States. These older trees, and the relative elders of the other species, too, produce most of the acorns and tree seeds that are responsible for successive generations. Up here we have several varieties of oak, elm, maple, locust, black cherry, and walnut. First of all, we never cut a tree down unless it is dead or unless it is threatening to fall on our house. Fortunately, there are no large trees close enough to our house to cause a problem yet. Following our rules for sustainability we use only dead wood.
Figuring a tree will take between fifteen and fifty years to reach its maturity and then most trees will die or blow over sometime before its first century of life, we hope to lose less than three percent of the trees on our property in any year. We are heartbroken when we lose the old ones. But sometimes it happens. But how do we know when we are harvesting only about 3% per year? We count the mature trees.
Sweet Gum Hill has three hundred ninety trees which are over eight inches in diameter. So roughly we can afford to lose a dozen big trees per year and stay within our hoped for harvesting limit because each year about a dozen saplings grow into their own maturity. Lucky for us, we have only lost five trees in the past year; still they were massive enough to yield the four cords we will need for this winter.
This winter's fuel is already split, stacked, and seasoned by our side door. I am already at work on sawing newly fallen trees into smaller logs and pulling them into a staging area for next year. You may imagine that this is an all year project.
We're In For The Winter! Time for a good book or two.
Because we are shrinking the space we mow, the acreage that will one day be forest again is now meadow. As saplings grow in that meadow, we may achieve, over the long term, a reliable, sustainable source of wood to heat our home for free. If we can continue to lose less than three percent of mature trees per year, we should have a sustainable and diverse population of hardwood, adequate to reasonably heat our small, well insulated home.
Next up: Operation Sisyphus (Surrounding a smaller and smaller yard with stones, brought up from the bottom of the hill. Returning more land to the forest from which it came when we pushed all of those rocks down the hill, last year. )
Handy Dandy Worksheet
(Calculate your profit. Assuming you have at least three acres of woods and a small house.)
Savings:
Turning off electric or petroleum based heat (One Winter Savings) $________________
Cancelling your gym membership (Won't need it) ________________
Fuel Savings from mowing a smaller yard ________________
Cost of your Fall Vacation (You will be splitting wood instead.) ________________
Cost of your weekend hobbies (golf, travel, entertainment,etc.) ________________
Total Savings: ===============
New Costs:
Wood Stove or Furnace for your basement $_______/ 7 year life $_______________
Cost of a wall or ceiling mounted chimney $_______/ 7 year life ________________
Cost of a good chain saw $_______/ 4 year life ________________
Cost of a new maul, sledge, and wedge $_______/ 2 year life ________________
Cost of two saw chains and a sprocket $_______/ 1 year life ________________
Cost of sharpening two chains per season ________________
Cost of Chiropractic Physician ________________
Cost of poison ivy medication, bee sting salve ________________
Total New Costs: ===============
Subtract Total New Costs from Total Savings: $______________________
If this number is positive, you'll be saving money!
21st C. Sweet Gum Gothic
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