The Woodshed and Heating

This woodshed plan was featured in Mother Earth News years ago and I've yet to see a better one. I'd like to build it because we plan to heat with wood. We used to use a kerosene heater but kero is getting hard to find, it's expensive and bad for the ecology.

Wood, however is a sustainable resource - trees grow fast in the North Country and we have an abundance of them. Cutting and splitting wood is good exercise and proper forestry management involves culling trees, it's just like weeding a giant garden.A good wood stove burns clean if you install and operate it properly. I'm not sure we've done either, but our neighbors can guide us. Wood stoves are are always a popular topic of discussion in the Adirondacks.

I wondered how to estimate the amount of wood we'd need for the heating season. I came up with a couple of ways and ended up with roughly the same estimate - 7 to 8 cords of wood. That's a lot of wood.

My first estimate involved thinking about how many logs we'd burn in a typical cold day, then multiplying that by the number of cold days. I came up with 8 cords that way.

The other estimate was more scientific, involving the number of degree days, the heat loss of the cabin and the energy content of the wood. That yielded about 7 cords. A cord of wood is 4 x 4 x 8 feet.

The wood has to be dry and it takes at least all summer do that. We'll have to cut quite a bit of wood and stack it every day in order to lay in enough to keep us going throughout the winter. I may have to augment that at first by buying some firewood. Seems like a waste with all the trees we have, but we'll do our business locally and I'm sure it'll be appreciated.