Permies Poll: How many cords of wood do you burn a year?

I, unfortunately, do not have a wood burning contraption in my home. There is a desire however to have one!

I burn 1-2 cords a year, in a regular 'ol wood burning fireplace. Super inefficient, I know. But its nice and warm to sit by, and it looks good too. It's not our main heat source, of course. We have a boiler with cast iron radiators for that.

Should that 0 be 0-1?

Or is this referring to how many cords of wood you BUY?

Burra Maluca wrote:Should that 0 be 0-1?

Good point! I updated the poll.

Burning approximately 10 chords per year, this includes 365 days of using the cast iron kitchen range,  a Lopi Endeavor woodstove for the main heat in the cold months. And also a cast iron, what was called a laundry stove in the barn / shop during the days below freezing.
All of the wood is from dead trees on the property, cut with a chainsaw and split with an ax.
Monetary outlay per year, for chainsaw parts and gas less than $100,  considering the saws have paid for themselves since they're from the 1970s and '80s

Not sure what happened at the pool Booth but I gave it an apple plus and a thumbs up, it's showing the exact opposite.

Not really sure. I cut and stack enough wood for 2 winters, so each stack has a full year to dry. We burn most nights from late November through March, depending on the weather. It's in a fireplace that has a blower, so once the walls get hot it puts out pretty good heat. Makes the lower level of the house usable in winter.
Today I split some green wood for next year's fires.

A true cord is 4'x4'x8' = 128 cubic ft.
I think some of the higher consumption values must be 'face cords' or 'bush cords'?
We burn just under 2 cords per year to heat a large (2900 sq ft) 2 level stick built house.
We keep it warm over a ~6.5 month burn season in Nova Scotia, but it is well insulated.

You are correct about the cord of wood being 4'x4'x8', but a very large number of people here burn wood, and when they say a "cord", they mean a face cord.  If you buy wood, it is nearly always sold by the face cord here.  My first thought when I saw this poll was "I wonder which "cord" people will mean when they answer."  This is like the oatmeal thread :)

I do not burn wood, but if I did it would be around 12 full cords per year.

A full cord of firewood is equal to about 100 gallons of heating oil. Since I burn 1100 gallons of oil and a little propane, if I switched to firewood I would consume about 12 cord.

Just adding this in case someone wants to do the conversion.

I'm burning wood in Minnesota, and when I say cord I mean full cord!! ,😄  The folks around here don't even recognize the term face chord. We have had 20° below zero fahrenheit for the last three nights in a row, some days it doesn't get above zero at all. It is not uncommon for wood burners in Minnesota to go through 10 to 15 cords of wood depending upon the size of their house, and that is including those people that use outside boilers and are running hot water into there homes for heat.
On cold nights such as last night you can hear the trees exploding like cannon fire throughout the night.

It's the start of autumn now in the southern hemisphere and we have already ordered our wood for this winter, (9m3) 2.5 cords.

Have already had the fire going.

I cut and split about two cords each year for our house. Georgia winters are not arduous. Often we have extra, i can take that to a neighbor in need.  It's all a good workout. This might not save us much money,  but keeps me grounded and happy.

All trees are eased into retirement...or I should say converted from vertical orientation to a horizontal one.....from our land or nearby.  All wood seasoned for at least a year, a mixture of oak, wild cherry, wild pear, locust, pecan, privet, and a few others.  A standing dead pine is nice to drop once in a while, but I leave most as woodpecker entertainment is important too.  Of course dense wood like pecan, privet and Hackberry need to dry a lot longer.  

My teenager helps with limbing and splitting , it helps to keep his two feet firmly on the ground. No real pushback, as he knows that reading good books , gardening and some sweaty swinging buys him a bit of time online , swimming with his team, etc.  Win-win situation.  

Newest stack of mostly oak....growing too close to our barn for comfort.  With no firewood touching the ground and a minimalist three foot strip of plastic on top, it seasons well in summer sun.  

Around 1.5 cords of mixed hardwood and pine for heating 1400 sq ft in zone 7, VC Resolute stove.   Probably another 3-4+ cords of white pine turned into biochar.   Not sure how to quantify bamboo, but we burn a lot of it for biochar as well.

I burn about one cord a year. Wood is my only energy source, and I use it for heat, cooking and sauna (bathing+laundry).
My house is small and I cook and heat with the woodstove so it is quite efficient.
Calculated here
https://boisafeudunord.com/tools/firewood-calculator

I burn 1-2 cords per year in a Waterford 103 wood stove. I live in south east MA. I would say it’s roughly 50/50 supplementary with my oil heat depending on how bad the winter is. It also has this ceramic fan thing in the pipe above it called ‘Magic heat’ that helps trap heat going up with the smoke and blows it into the other rooms.

I burn about 3 cords a year.  I also have never heard the term "face" cord .  It would be really nice to build a rocket mass heater for our house since our sole means of heat is firewood and I pretty much do all of the cutting, splitting, stacking, carrying up to the house every couple days, etc.  However, we have a typical wood frame house set on a concrete foundation and with a crawl space several feet high under the first floor.  I would have to crawl under there and reinforce the floor in order to bear the weight of a RMH.  In my seventh decade now, and although I'm sure I'm still up for that much labor (crawling under the house AND building the stove), it is the sort of project I tend to try to forget. It was an eagerly anticipated project many years ago, but life gets in the way. Looking more and more unlikely .  And surprisingly, even with global warming, I seem to be needing to keep fires burning for more months out of the year than I used to do.  That seems odd.  Maybe I can find and entice some young campers to stay out here in the forest for a month and help me build one.  That would be interesting!

Hey Bob;
Depending on what style of RMH you build, adding the floor support is not that hard.
A single skin bell weighs in at just over 1 ton.
A double skin bell is around three tons.
They have a footprint of apx. 4'  x 5', four cement pier blocks, and some timbers are all you would need for adequate support.

Imagine no more than one fire in the morning and one fire in the evening...
Heating with bricks is a game-changer.
Once you go brick, you will never go back!

We have a woodstove, because I couldn't get hubby on board for a rmh. Last year, we went through about 4.5 cords.

Carla Burke wrote:We have a woodstove, because I couldn't get hubby on board for a rmh. Last year, we went through about 4.5 cords.

Sounds like a lot for your location. How many square feet? What type of wood?  Looks like high ceilings…

Gray Henon wrote:

Carla Burke wrote:We have a woodstove, because I couldn't get hubby on board for a rmh. Last year, we went through about 4.5 cords.

Sounds like a lot for your location. How many square feet? What type of wood?  Looks like high ceilings…

2,100sf, cathedral ceilings (both downstairs & upstairs), solid logs. But, it does get very cold, here, at times; -10°F is not uncommon, for weeks at a time, and sometimes, lower. Wind chills have taken us down to -40°F.

We use around 8m3 per year with a 25KW Orlan wood gasification boiler running 12 radiators and heating the domestic water. We have 2 small 5KW stoves to start and finish the season and run the boiler from mid December to Mid March - Living in the South West of France inland.

The boiler takes all types of dry wood so we harvest as much as we can from our own land.

We haven't finished with heating season yet, but when all is said and done we'll have used about 8 m3, or just a bit over 2 cords. I prefer denser hardwoods like wattle and blackwood, and use pallet pieces to get things going since they tend to be nice dry pine.

I think I burned just under 3 cords last year, but it was sold to me in 2.5 face cord truck loads, and I think the last load was significantly less than the first two loads so I'm not really sure.  I have some wood left over from last year.  

That wood seemed to be a mixed lot as far as being dry, and it seems that when there is too much moisture you end up burning more wood because you need to have a hotter fire to get it burning.  
For this year, I have 3 cords- regular cords, and I think it will be more than I need.  I got two 2 cords in July and they are already stacked and one in August which is still in a pile.  

My home is just over 1100 square feet, and it has cathedral ceilings in the kitchen and living area.  It's on a concrete slab, and it's  just subfloors in the kitchen living area, and the master bedroom is just the concrete slab, no sub floor and it's not well insulated.  I have an old wood stove, it was my neighbor's mother's and the neighbor isn't young.  

The house gets too hot, and it's hard to keep the fire small enough to avoid this.  I have a thermometer on the stove pipe and my fires are generally in the "too low, creosote" zone.  Chimney cleaning is scheduled and I'm not having any fires this year till it's done because seeing that all last winter has me worried.  If I get the fire to where it's in the good zone, the house would be way too warm except for on the coldest days which are just a few degrees below 0 Fahrenheit.  So, I trickle the logs in one at a time during the day, and try to fill it with the largest logs at night before bed.

I have electric baseboard heat, but using that is expensive and they get so hot that I worry about fire when leaving the house and relying on them to keep the pipes from freezing.  I hope to buy a new wood stove in the next few years and would love a rocket mass heater, but am under the impression it is challenging to get these to comply with code in New York State.  

Using the wood stove seems like a huge pain in the ass, and I'm not even splitting my own wood.  Stacking it, and then constantly bringing it inside, and the wood is dirty and the fire makes everything dusty.  This year, I am using a little brush to brush off the dirt as I stack the wood which makes stacking take even longer.  
Keeping the fire going all night wasn't a big deal last year when I wasn't working, but I'm dreading it this year.  I got a lot better at making the fires last longer and learned to ask for larger pieces of wood which seem to burn slower/cooler and last longer.  The person I bought wood from last year once brought me smaller pieces she cut for someone else that cancelled their order instead of the length I requested and I think the last load was less than the previous loads, so feel she might have taken advantage of my ignorance.  If I fill the stove up with smaller pieces of wood it burns so hot the house is way too warm.  I'm looking forward to upgrading the heating system to something different someday.  

Just one suggestion for your old woodstove dilemma. Before buying a new one, try lining the back and sides with quality fire brick. Yes, it can reduce your interior space for logs but will help ameliorate the overheated house problem and perhaps save fuel overall

I think we burn on the upper end of 2-5 cords - a tipper load of soft wood and maybe just over a cord of our own coppice wood (hope to increase our wood in future). This runs our (c. 20yo) range cooker for cooking and hot water all year, and a (modified) wood burner with back boiler at the other end of the house and (barely) heats our poorly insulated, draughty stone house through a mild winter. I'd love to build one of the Walker cook stoves, but have a lot of husband persuading before that happens!
I've found we get less creosote with smaller hotter fires, and I try not to let the fire smoulder overnight - not so easy in a colder climate though. Thermal mass might be your friend there Jolene - consider stacking stones around your stove - they will soak up some of the excess heat and then reradiate when the stove hoes out. Like a rocket mass heater without the rocket.

What does one do to bring in outside air for the rocket stove? Our house is so tight that opening a door or window definitely affects the fire in our airtight Quadrafire. Fortunately it was easy to fashion the duct to bring in the air from outside directly to the air intake on the stove. The rocket stove is interesting but, for me, space is tight.

As for the house, its 1800 of log, new in 2010 with 5" of spray foam above T&G ceilings. In heating season we light a fire around suppertime each day and it goes out before morning. PNW in the rain shadow so it does get cold here but below 0 (f) only a few times per year. So about 2.5 cords of mixed fir and oak.

I use 1-2 cords per year - I only use my wood stove (a fairly small pedestaled Country brand set diagonally in the corner of the living room. The ceilings are cathedral) in the winter and I do have days where, for one reason or another, I don't light the stove.  I'm in a 1600 ft² double wide mobile home on 6 acres next to the North Cascades National Park which is in NW Washington state.

I'm searching for ways to make my wood stove heating more efficient so: 1) I don't have to wake up every 2-3 hrs to add wood, 2) it doesn't take 3-4 hrs for the fire to be hot enough to make any difference, 3) it doesn't take until early evening for the house to be warm!