Heat Your Home With Wood

Image Gallery The ultramodern Fiorina masonry fireplace by Tulikivi is crafted from soapstone, which retains heat and radiates it throughout the room.

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Warming yourself by a fire is one of life's simple pleasures. Unfortunately, traditional fireplaces are notoriously inefficient. They draw huge amounts of air from rooms they're supposed to be heating to fuel the fire with oxygen and sometimes lose more heat than they produce. At best, an open fireplace is only 10 percent efficient. Far better options are wood stoves, pellet stoves and fireplace inserts. Or if you're building a new home, a simple masonry heater can carry you through the winter months.

Wood heat may seem old-fashioned, but it offers many benefits over conventional home-heating fuels. First, wood is renewable and abundant in many locations-even in cities, where mountains of wood pallets, shipping crates, construction-site scrap lumber (make sure it's chemical free) and tree trimmings are readily available.

Wood is sometimes viewed as the black sheep of the renewable energy family because it produces the most air pollution of the many types of renewable energy. However, improvements in wood-burning technology have made it a much better choice today than in the past. Burning wood in the new generation of clean, efficient stoves can help reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas that leads to global warming. And, when sustainably harvested wood replaces fossil fuels, we can reduce our reliance on foreign oil.

Wood stove wisdom

Wood stoves come in many shapes, sizes, styles and colors. Those designed for serious home heating fall into two categories: radiant and circulating. Radiant woodstoves are made from welded steel or cast iron. These stoves' walls absorb the fire's heat and radiate it into the room.

Circulating stoves consist of a welded-steel or cast-iron shell surrounded by an air space and a second layer of metal. The fire heats the inner shell, warming the air space. Heated air flows from this space either passively (by convection) or actively (by a fan).

Both radiant and circulating stoves achieve rather impressive combustion efficiencies-from 60 to 80 percent. (A stove's combustion efficiency is the percentage of the fuel's potential energy it releases.) Radiant and circulating stoves achieve their high efficiencies, in part, by specially designed openings in the stove that introduce air into the combustion chamber at strategic locations. The more air-and hence oxygen-that's available, the more efficient combustion becomes.

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