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Wood Burning Technology
Going Green
Going Green: Wood Burning Technology
Wood burning technology has advanced to such a point that you can heat your home with roughly six to eight cords of wood over the winter months. Now if you choose to go off the grid like that, how much land would you need to own in order to produce that much wood?
Well, one kind of rough rule of thumb, maybe one face cord per acre so an average house might need 25 to 30 acres of a good woodlot. That's not going to be cheap.
"It didn't used to be very hard to buy some woods, some forestland at fairly reasonable prices, maybe a thousand dollars an acre, maybe a little less. But as I look around more recently I see prices like two or three thousand dollars and very tough to have that be economic," said Mike Kellleher, harvests his own woodlot.
Because you have to pay taxes on that plus there's the investment in a chainsaw, log splitter, and a way to bring the wood from the forest to your house without creating environmental damage.
You can use things like a four-wheeler and a trailer and cut the wood and load it on a trailer so you're not skidding logs through the woods.
Then you need a wood stove or fireplace inserts or like Mike Kelleher, a wood gasification boiler.
It's a technology designed in Europe, now made in New York and a couple of other places in the U.S. It's a very efficient central boiler so it produces hot water just like oil or a natural gas system and ties into an existing gas boiler and produce heat that way. It's probably on the order of eighty percent efficient.
We haven't even touched on how much time this wood harvesting will take. Mike averages two days a week, 20 weeks a year.
