On the Economics of Heating One's House by Firewood...

I've spent several hours over the past few weeks chopping firewood out of the mainly pine trees which we cleared out in spring - cleared out to create a fire safety barrier on the outskirts of the land and just to thin out in the middle, which was badly needed.

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I've got a nice, large, wood burning stove in the Kitchen which is the main engine of heat in the house, but I've also got a gas fire which uses gas bottles (which I used all last winter and is very efficient) and a small electric heater in the bedroom, which is an option but I'm hoping to avoid using that, it's by far the most expensive methods of heating in purely dollar (or Euro) terms.

However, given then amount of time it's taken me to chop down the trees in the first place and then prepare the firewood - I don't have to chop it that small as the stove is so large, but it's just easier to regulate the heat if I avoid max-sized logs...

I also have to get to the land, store the wood to keep it dry and get it back to the house, lug it back to the house.

So the question is - how efficient is Firewood economically if I factor in the amount of time it takes me to prep it?

A time-based economic analysis of prepping Firewood for heating.....

Based on what I've been burning so far this is about enough wood for a late afternoon/ early evening, which is fine at this time of year and probably up until around late November, but I'll probably need double this on cold/ wet days, maybe even treble for whole day heating on very cold days....

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I estimate that this much wood is about three weeks worth:

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That took me about 6 hours of labour all-in to sort out - and that's with a chainsaw, but said chainsaw requires sharpening quite frequently, which takes about 10 minutes a go, so it all adds up, and then there's the lugging and stacking too - some of this wood was about 20 metres up the hill.

I need Firewood for about 6 months of the year (I SHOULD be able to get by without heating from around mid April and I managed without the fire until mid-October, a couple of weeks back), 6 times 4 = 24, so I'll need eight times what I've already got to see me through.

6 hours times 8 = 48 hours of labour to chop my firewood, which is enough for 168 days, so that's 0.28 hours per day, or around 15 minutes a day to chop and stack a day's worth of firewood, which sounds about right TBH, once I add in the chainsaw maintenance and wood lugging time - I mean if you just rocked up to a perfectly circumferenced log with a prepped chainsaw you could probably produce enough pieces for a day in five minutes, but the reality is there's simply more to it than that!

So based on minimum wage of £10 an hour, that's around £2.50 a day I'm paying in labour for Firewood.

Last Winter I got through a gas bottle around every 12 days on average for heating - 9 days was the extreme when it got cold, but longer for most of autumn, winter, spring, and a gas bottle costs around - actually I haven't bought one for several months, so I'm going to say $30 EU or £25 and that divided by 12 days is £2 a day.

So damn actually, the gas is cheaper!

And it actually gets worse too: I really should spend a bit longer splitting some of these logs:

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(Maybe a tad lazy of me, but it burned just fine!)

And I haven't factored in above to the cost of the Firewood...

  • The time getting too and from the land
  • The capital costs of the chainsaw and axe I use
  • The initial time it took to thin the trees.
  • And I guess I should factor in a percentage of the cost of the land too.

If I factored in all of the above I could be looking at nearer £4-£6 a day for heating the house via firewood.

But then again, gas fires don't do this...

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It just never gets tired!

But having said that, I won't be too shy about using the gas fire occasionally for sure, not when it's so much cheaper, at least for now, who knows where the gas prices are going in 2022!

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