Here’s the Math on Whether You Can Save Money by Heating Your Home With a Fireplace
The first apartment my future wife and I moved into was an old railroad-style building that was heated by an old-fashioned gas stove in the kitchen. During the winter months, when the machine was at full throttle, the temperature of the kitchen was about the same as that of the sun, and the living room, two rooms down, was like the surface of Pluto. And when we received our first utility bill, our souls briefly left our bodies.
And compared to today, energy was cheap back then. As the cost (checks notes) of everything has risen, heating our homes has become what scientists call “insanely expensive.” The cost of electricity and gas has skyrocketed in just the last year, leaving many people with insolvent utility bills and ice houses.
If you’re facing high heating bills but your home has a wood-burning fireplace that seemed like a nice accessory when you bought it, it’s natural to wonder if it’s possible to go back a century and save a lot of money by burning wood instead of relying on a boiler. , oven or baseboard heat to keep warm. After all, gas and electricity are expensive, wood is relatively cheap, and several million people in the United States still rely on wood as their primary or secondary heating method, so heating your home with wood is certainly viable. The question is whether it makes economic sense.
Cord cost
Assuming you have a fireplace in good condition that can be fired up immediately, the first question is how much wood will it cost you to heat your house. If you live in a rural area and have access to free wood, your cost will be in time and effort, not money, but consider the fact that the wood must be seasoned and dried. Burning damp, “green” wood is much more difficult and much less energy efficient. Seasoning firewood takes at least a year, and firewood should be stored above ground and in a sheltered area where it doesn’t get wet every time it rains.
If you need to buy wood, your costs will vary depending on local prices and how large a space you need to heat. In general, you need about three bundles of firewood to heat 1,000 square feet of interior space throughout the cold winter. Wood cord is a 128 cubic foot stack of wood – usually a 4x4x8 foot stack. Typically a cord made of wood will cost you around $300 on average , although prices will certainly vary depending on where you live.
So if you have a 2,000-square-foot home, you’ll need six bundles of wood (and a place to store them properly) and that will cost you roughly $2,000. This can be a significant savings over your gas or electricity bill.
Efficiency
While buying wood to heat your home can be cheaper than buying gas or electricity, that’s not all because open wood fireplaces are incredibly inefficient.
There are two dimensions here. The first is the combustion efficiency of the fireplace, which describes the ability of your fireplace to turn wood into heat. But most of the heat your fireplace produces doesn’t get into your home. The overall efficiency of a fireplace measures how much heat actually goes in rather than out the chimney. Combustion efficiency is always much higher – the overall efficiency of a traditional wood-burning fireplace is typically around 10 percent . You can add glass doors to the fireplace to bring that number up to a whopping 20 percent.
This means that most of your heat goes straight up the chimney. When the fire heats the air in the hearth, the air rises, creating drafts that carry the air out of the room along with it. It can actually make your room feel colder , which is one of the reasons why people are often depicted sitting close to a roaring fire, wrapped in blankets. And if you only use your fireplace in one part of the house and rely on other heat sources for the rest, it can actually increase your heating costs if you don’t have a zoned heating system that allows you to isolate the fireplace area from the rest. Houses.
A fireplace insert can help
If you’re only trying to heat one small room with a wood burning fireplace, you might be fine. But if you’re trying to heat a larger space, efficiency issues will ruin your wood budget.
One solution, if you can afford it, is a fireplace insert. This is a self-contained sealed unit that installs inside your existing fireplace, typically with a stainless steel chimney lining. These inserts burn wood, but they do so much more efficiently , reaching an overall efficiency of over 70% and sometimes even over 80%. They can be expensive (from $2,000 to almost $5,000 or more, not including installation), so you’ll have to do some math to get your investment back. But inserting wood or pellets can make using wood as a source of heating fuel a viable option for your home.
Fireplaces are cool, cozy, and even useful, but if you’re looking to overhaul your budget with free chopping and heating your home like a 19th-century pioneer, calculate those numbers very carefully. Heating your home with a wood burning fireplace is not a hassle in terms of budget.