Lou wrote:
"Glenn Ashmore" wrote in message
news:L1_Ue.23473$hp.14976@lakeread08...

I have been using a fireplace insert for almost 25 years.. I am in

Georgia

so it doesn't get as bad as many places but the house is an old hunting
lodge with little insulation. We have about 14 acres so when we loose an
oak or pecan during the year I cut and split it and can get through the
winter on about a face cord and a half. My neighbor, in a new well
insulated house that is about the same size averages $180/month for gas.

In the evening I load it up with 3 or 4 logs and bank it down. Keeps the
house warm all night and only takes a quick stoking in the morning to get

it

going again.

Besides, chopping wood is a heck of a lot more satisfying than jogging to
keep the ol' ticker tuned up.


I was with you until that last sentence. I haven't heated with wood for
some 15 years or so, but my recollection is that cutting wood isn't
"aerobic" in the ticker-tuning sense. But then, I was using power tools -
maybe cutting down and slicing a tree into usable lengths with a hand
powered saw instead of a gas or electric chainsaw would qualify.


We have a "Tile Fire" in the lounge and it heats the whole house. Shut
down the damper when we go to bed, open it again in the morning, stir
the coals with a poker and chuck on some logs and away she goes.
We'd go through about 2 - 3 ton of wood in a winter.
Bugger splitting logs, I cut trunks about 6" to 8" diameter between 12
and 18" long with the chain saw. Just chuck them in. Mind you it's not
easy to find larger stuff where we live. The timber is rock hard, burns
slow and with a fierce heat.

"Sheldon Harper" wrote in message
...
wrote in news:dg3vs1
:

George George@least wrote:

"Edwin Pawlowski" wrote in message

I don't know about the present models, but 20 years ago a good stove
was
only about 65% efficient...

"Efficiency" is a matter of how long you can keep the warmed air in the
space to be heated.

You are talking about something different. We might say that a heater's
efficiency is the ratio of the amount of heat released to the house to
the total amount of heat released when the fuel is completely burned and
the combustion products are cooled to room temperature.

Nick



"Combustion efficiency: (actual heat produced by combustion) divided by
(total heat potential of the fuel consumed)"

http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/faqs/glossary.html

This is a very good resource about bioenergy.

I still read Ed as talking about stove efficiency, which is how much of
what's produced by burning is recovered to heat the space rather than the
chimney. Nick's definition.

Combustion efficiency suffers on oil burners as well, do to incomplete
atomization and combustion.