Zero heating cost goal for next winter

Every year, our goal is to get a little more self-sufficient. This year, one of our goals is to be entirely self-sufficient in the heating of our 2400 square foot New England mountain home for the 2011/2012 winter season. that means between four and five cords of dried wood needs to be stocked up, starting right about now.

Unfortunately, we still have snow which makes it difficult to get through the wooded areas of our yard to cut down trees. I won't take down so many trees that it impacts the long-term health of the forested area of our yard. My goals is to pull enough wood every year to heat our house, not just for a year or two.

Wood, properly split, stacked and covered can take about 5-6 months to dry enough for buring in a typcial wood stove. We'll need to start burning in late October Which means we would need some wood already drying by now. Fortunately, we have about three-quarters of a cord of seasoned wood already in the wood shed. While we'll use a little more before this spring kicks into gear, it should be minimal.

The rule of thumb for sustainable wood harvesting is that you can pull about a cord of wood per acre of mature forest. Our property is five acres in total with about 1 acre either cleared or with very young trees. that leaves four acres and should provide us with four cords every year. By using it conservatively, that should get us through a typical winter.

Within the next 3 weeks, before the trees leaf out, I want to have all the trees for next winter's firewood felled. From there, if I get one cord split and stacked each month, we should be all set.

I fell the trees and cut them into 16-20 inch lengths with a chainsaw. Which will use a few gallons of gas over the course of the summer, so technically, the cost of the gas and chain oil should fall under heating costs, which makes us not fully self-sufficient in that area. I'll track those costs this year, just to see how much a year's worth of heating does cost. Likewise, if we have a professional chimney sweep come out and clean the chimney, that is a heating cost as well. I may do that myself this year, we'll see.

Once the logs are cut to length, my son and I split it all by hand with a 16 pound maul, after carrying the lengths over an average distance of about 150 yards up a steep grade (about a 20 degree incline) to the splitting/ stacking area. That is a significant workout for both of us, so four cords this summer should have us in pretty good shape by autumn.

The wood shed holds about three cords and the rest we'll stack and cover close to one of the side doors of the house so we don't have to carry it very far through the winter snows when we need it. That will be the first wood we split this year, and the first we burn starting in late October.

A cord, by the way, is 128 cubic feet of wood as split and stacked. It's defined as a stack of wood measuring four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. In our neck of the woods, the going rate for a cord of split dried firewood is about $285, delivered. You can buy a cord of unseasoned wood for about $200, delivered.