Unbiased Heating Information Source?

[tjm73]

I am trying to learn about the different heating options.  I'm most interested in the following

1.) Wood (interior stove)
2.) Wood (exterior stove)  ie....Central Boiler for example.
3.) Pellet Stove (Wood or Corn)
4.) Natural Gas/Propane Furnace
5.) Ground Source Heat Pump

But the trouble I'm having is finding any information that's unbiased.  Everything I find is manufacturer oriented.  And though they'd all like us to believe it, they can't all be the best.  All have pluses and minuses.  If anyone reading this thread has, or had, any of these, or personally knows friends that have or had these.  Please share your experiences.

[JRR]

I currently use natural gas ... am really looking forward to the expected higher (by 50%) heating costs this winter.

I have been playing "mind games" for several weeks with your second item: "wood (exterior stove) ... ie ... Central Boiler for example."  

What appeals to me about this idea is by having the fire outside, heating water to be held in a storage tank ...  fuel can be used that you would not bring inside to a home furnace or fireplace.   In fact, anything that has fuel value could be burned.  Paper trash, undried pine, hedge clippings,  ... whatever.  Smoke would not be an issue.  Even if soot build-up one day caused a "chimney fire", the main building would not be at risk.

UPDATE: Well I see from reading the articles noted below that smoke is a HUGE issue!

[Daddymem]

There is an outdoor furnace down the street from me, one of the smaller ones.  I have toyed with the idea a little.  They have a pallet model that would be great if you had access to free broken pallets.  I bet you could get a lot of stuff from construction waste into it too.  Now stoking that thing in the middle of a nor'easter or blizzard is an issue.

We have natural gas in the street and forced hot water...cost is the issue here with the prices going up.  

I think you have to look at how the heat is distributed as well as what the fuel source is.  I don't like our floor radiators, I think I'd look into the european style modern radiators if I went that route.

We also will be looking into geothermal since we need a well already anyways so no additional cost for the source but we have been told not a good choice for forced hot water or radiant.

I grew up with oil and forced hot air heat....very dry and the interior tank takes up space and stinks.  We had woodstove as a backup.  Wood is nice, but a pita to take care of, not really good for full time unless you get a slow burning model or have someone around during the day to top it off.

Corn/pellet stoves sound great and I have never heard a negative thing about them by anyone who owns them but we have easy access to the fuel around here.  I understand they are going like hotcakes now and the pellets may be hard to come by soon so that could be an issue.

[tjm73]

I am most drawn to the outdoor wood fired furnace for many of the same reasons Daddymem sited, plus the water it  heated is pumped inside the house through radiant floor heating system AND you can have it pass through a heat exchanger for the hot water heater.  That same furnace can also heat a seperate building (think workshop or garage) and it only needs to be loaded once or so a day and I believe some of them are self stoking.  So throw cut (not even split) wood up to about 32" in length into it and close the door.  Go about your business.  Enjoy warm even steady heat and plenty of hot water.  That all sounds very good to me.

They otehr things I like are I can go out and cut down trees if I have to, but I can't just dig up natural gas or wood pellets.  I don't want to 100% depend on paying someone selling me fuel or delivering me fuel.  After Hurricane Katrina, and the kaos that ensued, that kind of catastrophe lossing power and fuel distribution in Upstate NY in the winter would kill thousands (maybe hundreds of) due to heating issues alone.

[Billy Bob]

Depends
What size space ya wanta heat?  Does it need to be zoned? How much work are you willing to do to stay warm?  How important is cost? Do you have power available to run blowers, circulating pumps, etc.?
Nice thing about a woodstove is you can use it for supplemental heat with any of your alternatives.  Price of propane getting ridiculous? Grab the saw and splitting maul!
I have a predjudice against pellet type stoves, especially corn.  Wood pellet manufacturers say they use waste wood.  Fine, until the market demand excedes the available supply.  Then you can be sure they'll start grinding up whole trees. Corn is food, which people are dying around the world for lack of. 'Nuff said by me .

[Bart_Cubbins]

A lot of good info on wood heating can be found here...

http://www.woodheat.org

[Daddymem]

A pellet is a far more efficient use of wood than burning logs.  Pellets burn cleaner, produce less waste, and burn more completly than wood does, so actually, it would be better if they cut that tree down and made pellets out of it than if they cut it into logs to burn.  The issue is there aren't enough places making the pellets..yet, and you have to pay someone to make them.

I don't think they use corn that people eat, but even if they did, this still would be a very green use since crops can be renewed every year (and multiple plantings in some areas)...much faster than a forest can be replaced, and this is probably a better use of resources than to ship that food to the people who need it before it was dried.  Again, supply is suspect, unless you live where corn is bountiful, it may be hard or costly to keep yourself going-and you are still paying someone for the fuel.

Both of these supposedly are only beat out by wood (only if that wood is self cut) as far as cost goes for heat.  Now I am not claiming to be an expert, but I have done a lot research on these stoves and there are so many misconceptions out there.  They are a real viable option in areas like I am in where people don't own acres of land they can cut wood from and cordwood is a little pricey, or for people who cannot cut or carry their own wood.  It is a pretty close race now between the two and that isn't even getting into the safety, insurance and installation issues.

Having said all that, I think if I had access to plenty of trees (or to people who do), I would no doubt go the woodstove route, preferably with a stove that burns the wood efficiently like the outdoor stoves claim (without that crazy price tag!) or like an indoor masonry heater, something you only have to tend to once or twice a day.  We still have to make this decision and it is going to be a tough one, but it will be a backup source for us that we will use as much as we can, but not 100% of the time.  IN the end I think woodstove will win.   I'll be interested in other opinions which will undoubtedly be biased based on where the posters live.

[tjm73]

My feelings on corn burners is if it helps farmers make their crops more profitable, I'm all for it.

Particularly since I saw a news article recently where they are going to reduce subsidies again by a lrage ammount.

If I have to buy a fuel source, I'd rather support my home land's farmers than a crown prince or some other oil rich country.  I prefer to keep my money here at home if possible.

I also have to wonder if other biosources could be made into what I'll call 'vegi-pellets' to burn.  Potato's and beats might be other possible sources of organic pellets.  And what about corn stalks.....they are almost 100% waste I think.  Can they be processed into a fuel?

[John Raabe]

Thanks to Bart for the link to WoodHeat.org.

I learned a lot. There is a great article on providing outside air to the stove or fireplace and how it is a better idea in theory than it is in practice. (This vent is required by many codes.) http://www.woodheat.org/outdoorair/outdoorairmyth.htm

Below is a first person review of when an external wood fired boiler (furnace) will make sense and when it doesn't.
http://www.woodheat.org/technology/outdialogue.htm

[Amanda_931]

My guess is there ain't no unbiased information.

Solar gain/thermal mass can work well, but you do have to design for it.

masonry stoves (another case of thermal mass) including the rocket stove into the cob bench, ditto.

none of those work in rental units.  (I have ended up with plenty of solar heating on sunny summer afternoons when I rented, though!)

Here's a link to some photos of a cob bench, and a promo for the book:

http://www.cobcottage.com/node/113

the thermal mass/solar gain probably works best in long narrow houses or the kind of setup with concrete blocks set sideways that James Kachadorian likes.

I'm not much in favor of corn or pellet fuels (although I'll use those for kitty litter) but then I have the same kind of reservations about biodiesel or ethanol/gasoline mixtures.  The answers to the question "What happens if we try to use them on a large scale?" don't convince me that they are a solution to much of anything.

[alan gray]

We live in Northern loewer Mich in a 1920's 5 br home. I installed a Empyre outside wood stove 2 yrs ago.
I have heated with wood for the last 30 yrs using all manner of stoves, this is by far the best.
Use dry wood and it smokes suprisingly little, the detractors will have you thinking you are killing baby seals by using an outside stove, but if you use common sense about how you burn it, it makes an excellent heat source. Just don;t get caught in the "fire every 4 days" hype.
We live in a fairly cold area and use about 25 face cords a year to heat a big home.
Thanks
Alan

[Daddymem]

Yeah, the tone of that wood site leave me a little less than enthusiastic about taking all they have to say to heart.  A website like Countryplans with the topic of heating methods would be far more useful than
<insert who wants to toot their own horn>.org
If you read them all, you would just wear more clothes because they all claim the other's is no good, "kills baby seals" (alan   ), or prolongs dependence on foreign entities.
Has anyone any experience with the solar claims of Radiantec?  
http://www.radiantsolar.com/
Their claims sound high to me, but perhaps they aren't...

[Billy Bob]

tjm, you picked a good one for getting discussion going.
I would have to disagree a little with daddymem about the wood pellets. Sure they are easier to handle, but you would have to go some to convince me they are so much more efficient. A well designed wood stove leaves just a lttle ash, which divers vegetables and ground covers enjoy no end.  My biggest problem is I suspect they will take wood suitable for making OSB and engineered lumber and grind it up for pellets because it is more profitable, (in the short term).

No such thing as corn that isn't food, unless it is contaminated, or genetically altered and you don't like that., (think corn meal, ground from dried corn).  It also begs the question of the amount of fuel expended to grow and process the corn, so don't get too comfortable with the idea of reducing dependance on foreign oil.  As Amanda mentions, the same problem applies to ethanol or biodiesel.  The energy input nearly equals, or may exceed, the return. And the subsidy matter?  Most of it goes to giant agricorps anyway.

Sorry, it's a rant, but I did say it was a predjudice!

[Daddymem]

Hey, speaking of cornmeal (and to tie into another thread) I recently read that cornmeal is good for ant control.  They eat the cornmeal, then drink some water and explode as the cornmeal expands.  Anyone else heard of this?
And with this non-stop rain for over a week now, I'd give anything to feel the warmth of a fire right now.

[glenn kangiser]

One of my pet peeves - subsidies- our government takes our tax money, buys up all the milk we think is too expensive, or that is in excess in order to keep the prices artificially high so that mega-dairies can continue to have massive amounts of cattle and gigantic nitrate filled lagoons to pollute our ground water.  The milk we pay for is then converted to powdered milk -which we also cannot afford to buy reasonably, and shipped to foreign countries, while our kids run around being born naked and drinking formula because milk is too expensive.

Besides, I heard milk is for baby cows.

Besides, the dairy farmers wife was worried about pollution from a dump 8 miles away when her well was a thousand feet from her own 5 acre multi-million gallon cow sewage lagoon.

Besides, the dairy farmer yelled at me and cussed me out for charging him too much for repairing his well, as he was doing a $200,000 remodel on his house -while his slaves workers lived in little cookie cutter shacks around the cattle pens.

Now -that was a rant.

Back to the subject at hand-- I think the wood pellets are more efficient since the method of burning converts them efficiently to gas first before burning them.  Solid wood also converts to gas before it burns but not quite as efficiently when burned in large chunks- while parts of the large chunk are burning the higher temp burning parts are sent up the chimney to condense as creosote..  Burning in smaller, very dry pieces, in a regular stove or rocket stove is more efficient as the parts of the wood that only ignite at higher temperature -that would go up the chimney and make creosote are burned also.  A higher temperature fire gets more heat out of the same amount of wood.  Mass storage around the stove- brick wall etc.  can save and give off some of the intense heat later.

All this said, I am still working on getting more efficiency out of my own wood heating methods.  

Here is a site about the efficient use of wood by a man who knows.  http://www.woodgas.com/index.htm

[Daddymem]

Cool rant, Glenn usually has some good ones.
 
Site bookmarked for future reading, thanks Glenn.  We've been eyeing the "all-nighter" woodstove to put in the kitchen so we can do some cooking on it too, but we aren't sure it is modern enough to have the efficiency designed into it that are out there today.  Hope this site helps. That's what is great about this place! You always get to learn something in a non-hostile, non-flame ware environment.  

Now...have you got any good links for suburban homesteading?  

[Amanda_931]

But Glen, the dump 8 miles away might lower her property values, whereas if they sold to another dairy farmer the lagoon already built would be a plus!  It might be grandfathered in despite the fact that it is (might be anyway) a major groundwater pollution source.

The rocket stove/cob bench proponents believe that that burns the most completely.  Very hot, no smoke smell if you stand by the chimney and sniff, no creosote buildup--this from at least one person who is not employed by Cob Cottage.

Biodiesel vs food is starting to be a real issue in Europe, where there are mandates for making a certain percentage of diesel fuel biodiesel.

See this story--"rape" might be a two-syllable Italian word when we're talking about oil seeds, but Americans decided to call the oil "canola,"  "sun" is almost certainly sunflower:

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/32976/story.htm

Pouring vegetable oil over your salad or into your car's petrol tank is increasingly becoming a critical choice as Europe's rapidly growing biofuel industry soaks up more and more of available supply.

Soaring crude oil prices have turned "green" fuel producers into fierce competitors for European vegetable oils, much of which until recently would likely have been stockpiled.
"Food manufacturers are getting nervous about the effect on prices," said Pascal Cogels, Director General of the European vegetable oil producers and processors federation Fediol.

A month and a half ago, global crude oil prices exceeded those of soy, palm and rape oil for the first time, making biofuels made of vegetable oils even more attractive in the EU, where tax incentives have already stimulated alternatives.

As a result, rape oil -- the most popular for the EU's biodiesel industry -- gained about 100 euros a tonne to 620, leaving food producers, such as Anglo-Dutch major Unilever, scrambling to find material to cover their needs for the next 4-5 months, traders and industry officials said.

German-based oilseeds newsletter Oil World predicted that an expected boom in EU usage of rape oil for biofuels in 2005/06 would slash consumption in the food sector by 100,000 tonnes.

"This has created great concerns in the food industry," the weekly newsletter said. "Several consumers in the food industry have started switching to sun oil and palm oil."

EU processors have sold all their rape oil until January and most of it for the beginning of next year.

[Amanda_931]

Yep, I thought I'd heard the name Radiantec before here.

A search in this portion of the forum gives you, in addition to my crying about the loss of one of my dogs (and yes, I still miss him), two opinions--both--they do a great job of helping you plan and install it.  But one person said that you might pay a price for that help.

You can look it up for yourself.

[Daddymem]

Yeah, I've got the brochure and everything.  My questions is are their claims on the solar assist portion correct?  

I like the looks of this homemade stove:
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/matthews78.html

Are there rocket stoves or cobb stoves that can be installed inside, here in the land of codes and permits though?

And I think I have heard rape seeds that sound just like our word, who knows what it sounds like in Italian though.

[Amanda_931]

Suburban homesteading?  How about "urban"-- in the middle of industrial Cincinnati?

Someone on another list posted this--complete with nested photographs and stitched panoramas, she must have enjoyed playing with the pages:

http://home.earthlink.net/~cighe/CobRadiantFloor/CobNmore.html

[Daddymem]

No, I'm thinking suburban.  The urban stuff would be good, but I imagine the topics would be with no land or very small lots.  
See, I don't have acres of land, but I do have 20,000 sf.  I was thinking ideas of things you can do on smaller lots in the small town areas, not the city.  We wouldn't be raising sheep, but plenty of room for a good sized garden, we wouldn't be cutting trees every year to stoke our fires, but we would be getting cordwood delivered, we can't build pretty much anything without a permit, but we could build alternative minor structures.
I don't live in the country like many here, but it certainly is not the city, there are still plenty of places to get lost in the woods around here, in fact I lost a classmate in high school out in the woods.  We're country enough to call most of my co-workers "city people" and clearly have differing views of life than them (not that this is always related to location but you know what I mean).  Stuff like this:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/2002_June_July/Happiness_Is_A_Suburban_Homestead

And this really isn't meant to be a thread-jack, the heating options would be a topic in suburban homesteading.  For example, Natural gas is available in the street...go alternative or use the gas?  

That floor would be great in a sunroom, but extra precautions for freeze-thaw issues would have to made around here.

[Amanda_931]

That doctor in Portland (OR) who is famous for rainwater harvesting did a lot of really urban homesteading--grew most if not all of his food on a tiny old urban lot (not as bad as semi-detached condos but not big at all).

He had pictures of his roof, which not only collected rainwater, but put his plants up into the sunshine.  

Unfortunately, his old site moved and then apparently went bye-bye.

He'd moved to the country by then, and there was kind of interesting stuff on the newer site about his house--might have been Eastern Oregon.

bagelhole (AFAIK the thief of information without attribution and maybe even or permission) has the rainwater portion, without pictures or diagrams or links here:

http://www.bagelhole.org/article.php/Water/95/

That Cincinnati community is apparently right in the middle of an industrial wasteland.  Biodynamic farming and so on.

With suburban lots, people have gotten into a lot of trouble with the subdivision rules and county planning maps--no house trailers, no clothes on the line, no vegetable gardens at least in the front yard, no fencing in the front yard, etc.

[Daddymem]

HOAs aren't very common here, but they are becoming more common with the higher end subdivisions.  Here in yankee land the power still lies within the Towns, Counties don't mean much except for courts, because of this I think the suburbs are a bit more free than elsewhere in the country.  I can and do do everything in your list.

[Billy Bob]

On the subject of heating methodologies, I'll have my crow broiled.

Pellet stoves are more efficient than the newer, EPA certified woodstoves, (my "well designed wood stove" ) by 6%.  The best of the pellet stoves beats all of the catalytic models, but some of the catalytic models beat out most of the pellet models in terms of particulate emissions.  On average they all do better than a modern diesel bus, except they won't get you to Times Square.
 Current cost of pellets vs cordwood is about on par, IF you are buying your cordwood.
The other caveat in that part of the equation is whether you are buying premium cord wood; evidently the catalytic wood stoves are happy with softwood and a little moisture, (actually work better with smoky wood), so you might even the cost/efficiency ratio by purchasing lower grade wood.
Future cost and availability of pellets would still concern me, plus consideration of initial unit cost. Plus for the pellets: smaller flue size.  Plus for the catalyst: some don't need electricity.  If I had a woodlot, no contest.
This link will take you to the list of EPA certified wood appliances, with performance data.  Be warned, it's like 96 pages in pdf.
http://www.epa.gov/Compliance/resources/publications/monitoring/caa/woodstoves/certifiedwood.pdf
Outside wood boilers take a beating in both efficiency and emissions.  New York State for one took a look at them, and issued a scathing report.  Apparently they are only 1/3 to 1/2 as efficient, and since they are not covered by EPA regulations, (Who let the dogs out on that one?), they stink.
I don't like the idea of 'em anyway.  Reminds me of my grandfather who had the new fangled flush toilet installed in the outhouse. Trust me, that ain't a "convenience"!

[Shelley]

Our first pellet stove was installed Monday.  It was pricey, but mainly because of some features that we wanted to allow us to be gone.  Extra bin, totally automatic.  Goes off totally and reignites itself.  Harman and Quadra-Fire are considered the best round here.  We got the Harman.

Not a woodlot in sight, tho cutting permits are easy to get what with the fires and the beetle kill of the last few years.  Just didn't want to fool with it.  If I had wood right on my land, choice would have been harder.

Ton of pellets cost $179.  Should last the whole season.  Maybe longer.  Our friend heats his drafty business building in town with a ton.

We've been experimenting this week.  First night turned it totally off.  Took a while the next morning to get the building warm.

Second night, set on 65.  Almost no time to recover to 72.  Stove was totally cold in the a.m. and almost no pellets used.

Last night left it on 70.  More pellets used, but stove was cold at 08:00.

Here's what I find interesting.  The combustion blower will run some in the morning, but never the blower motor.  Then in late morning, it goes off completely and never refires.  We usually leave about 5 pm.

And, this is inside a metal building.  R30/R13 at this point.  Haven't begun to build the inside structure yet.  I've been busy closing off the air leaks in the metal skin.  Finished today.

With John's Sunkit, plugging the leaks, and no mass except for the concrete floor it appears that the sun will provide all the heat we need.