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Heating Your Home With Wood: What It's Really Like and Why More Men Are Doing It
There's a version of wood heat that sounds romantic from the outside. Crackling fire, warm house, rugged self-reliance. The reality is a little messier than that -- there's a lot of work involved, the learning curve is real, and your first winter doing it will humble you in ways your gas furnace never did. There's also a version of wood heat where you've got it dialed in. You're a year ahead on your wood supply. Your stove is sized right for the space. You know your firewood by species and you know when it's ready to burn. Your chimney gets...
How to Season Firewood the Right Way (And Why Most People Get It Wrong)
There's a guy in every neighborhood who burns wood all winter and complains that he can never get his house warm. His stove smokes. His glass blacks out after an hour. He goes through wood fast and doesn't get much heat out of it. He blames the stove, or the chimney, or the wood species, or the weather. Nine times out of ten the problem is that he's burning wet wood. Properly seasoned firewood is the single biggest variable in whether wood heat actually works. It affects how hot your fire burns, how much creosote builds up in your chimney,...