How We Heat With ONLY a Wood Stove for FREE | Harvesting a Year's Worth of Fire Wood

[Music] so when you are completely dependent upon your wood stove as your heat source your work starts a lot sooner and actually in some instance you're planning a full year or more in advance so where we live we do have electricity and we do have an electric forced air system in our home but we haven't used that system in the 14 plus years that we've had our house so we rely solely on wood heat and we don't ever purchase any of our wood it comes completely from our land so we have to be really strategic and make sure that we're getting the wood down in time so this section up here actually you can see we just started following these logs and it's in october we're almost to november and we're bringing them down and this will be wood that will be heating our home in the coming years but it won't be this year and what a lot of people fail to understand when you've got wooded area that your woods are meant to be a crop they are definitely a lot more of a long-term crop than the vegetable garden and the fruit trees but it's still something that you need to be managing if you have got trees on your property so this stand that we had right up here which is in the middle of our cow pasture had some alder and a lot of maple in it predominantly and we took the alders down they weren't really large yet and then a lot of these maples were older trees but unfortunately a lot of them were beginning to get rot in in the center of the heartwood and that's just going to kill the tree they were also near neighboring fence lines and where the cattle were and as you start to come into those winter months when you get a lot of wind and rain and snow that's when a lot of them tend to come down and if they blow down on our neighbor's fence line or our fence line and the cows get out then that's on us so we wanted to go through and we decided to take all of them out because there were so many of them that were diseased or were leaning and so we've taken those out and you can see here we've got these piled but of course to burn efficiently they need to go through a curing period so you never want to buy green wood if you plan on keeping your house warm and using it and you want to have it down so it's got plenty of time to dry so that's what we're doing here and then part of this pasture area now that's been cleared we will re-seed but some of it will also plant back because we're always thinking about the future and what we'll want on this piece of land and so we will be putting some trees back up we like to do some of the silvopasture type method where you've got trees with your grass it provides shade for the cattle it provides shade for the grass and it's a really good management system but the great thing is is we have this wood down so this is going to provide heat for our family but we've got excess wood more than we would be able to burn we usually go through about five or six cord in an entire year here for us to keep the house and so we'll have too much of the wood and even though it'll be we'll get it cured and dried and stacked it's only going to last so long it it breaks down so we'll be able to sell some of the excess and that is actually going to be something my son is doing so we're teaching him some business and entrepreneurial skills as well as some good hard work and so he will be able to sell some of this fire wood himself to earn money he's almost old enough to drive so this will be a way for him to earn money for insurance and gas money and all those fun things because mama and daddy we are not paying for that if he's going to be old enough to drive then he has to figure out ways to support himself this pile here obviously we just took down and this will begin drying out it's not going to get very dry throughout the winter but it's going to be fine it'll be sit here over winter and then in the spring we'll really start uh working this some more but we've got lots of other word as i said this is like a year process and you're always thinking really far out and so last year you can see just the remnants of what we did of our wood over here so we definitely are doing it in stages so here is where we have gotten some of the the trees that we fell down and this is the round pile so we do have a wood splitter which if you're doing a large amount of wood i highly recommend getting a wood splitter yes you can do it with an axe the old-fashioned way but when you're trying to be efficient and go through a lot having that wood splitter is very very helpful so we get them bucked down mostly limbed off you can see of course there's a little bit of a limb here but we kind of get them bucked down into about this size of rounds and then we split them so this is still pretty pretty green and pretty wet so we've got this sitting here and then after we get them split we actually like to put them alongside the fence here we also try not to fall over our rounds of wood so be careful as we stack them here and we just have sheets of tin and we've got some boards so they're up off of the ground and then we cover them with the sheets of tin because pretty much year round here living in the pacific northwest the only months we don't really get rain is about mid-august through the first part of september we get about four to six weeks if we're lucky without a lot of rain we're pretty much getting rain and so we cover it from the top but the reason that we like to pick this section right here and we end up drying and curing the majority wood over the summer months is because we get a lot of wind that comes through here and so you get that wind and of course the sun when it's out but we get that wind and we get a lot of air movement and so that's going to dry and cure it a lot faster and it's in full sunlight when the sun is out rather than a shady area or a area that doesn't have a lot of airflow so we had this whole fence line you can see all the way from the end there which we don't actually have a piece of tin on at the moment but we have this entire fence line was all lined with wood and was curing over the summer and we've gotten all of it in the woodshed except for this very last section right here and so you can see you definitely want to make sure you have it weighed down because we will get some really big gusts of wind that come through so we just kind of use whatever we've got on hand to keep this way down but you can look at this like we've been having rain now for weeks and this is really cured it's nice and dry and you can still see that this part is all really dry a few of these are just along the bottom they're a little bit wet just because we it actually just quit raining it was fingers crossed that it would stop braiding in order to come out here and film and so this will get transferred to the wood shed because it's just finished drying so we like to do them with just kind of those single rows like that as we're getting them cured so this is our wood shed where everything comes in and we've got several layers back of this and then right up front here we also have a bin now this wood does not come from us my husband works at a guitar mill actually it's a tone it's a sawmill and so this is some of their their reject but it's really nice and dry so this is what we use for our kindling to get the fire started in the morning so we just keep this bin right here of that wood and then we transition obviously over to the firewood so this is relatively close to the house keeps it nice and dry and we will fill this up and we actually just moved this that you hear see here which i don't really recommend having to stack and then move and restack your wood twice but this was at the very back and it had been in here for about oh my goodness i think three or four years and we never actually got to the very back row and then we just kept refilling it then each summer so that we would have all of our wood in by the time fall and winter hit and so we finally decided that we needed to bring this wood forward and burn it before it started to break down too much and you can see some of the pieces are a little bit more soft and broken down than others but it's super dry so we're going to go through and burn this first and then we'll hit the wood that we actually cured and dried this summer that's behind it and i have to say one of the great things about doing firewood is you always get a little bit of an arm workout so you can have those nice toned arms packing all the firewood into the house [Music] so when you're first building your fire you always want to make sure that all of your drafts are open and we live in a manufactured home so we actually have two drafts because we have to take an air source from underneath the house because the manufactured homes are so airtight but it actually works really well and helps me to be able to control the temperature of the fire by having those two troughs better than stoves we've had in the past in other houses that just had the top draft so you want to make sure both those are open and then every fall before we start burning fires again we make sure that you clean the chimney nobody wants to deal with a chimney fire and then we shovel out the ashes we've been building fires for about a week and a half now so there's a little bit of ash in the stove but not bad and then all of those bills and different type of mail we never like to get that's what i use to start fires [Applause] [Applause] brown paper grocery bags work really well too but most of mine because i use reusable bags a lot of the time are in use with the seed harvest that i've got in here drying out from the bean seed so your smallest and driest pieces of wood which this is some kindling again for my husband's mill so we're really fortunate in that way i don't actually have to take a little mall and try and get shavings off and i always like to put mine in like a crisscross pattern so that you've got plenty of airflow in there to help it take off i like to use some of this really dry like a lot of this is maple it burns nice and hot and then we'll put on some of the other chunks later and other things to avoid that maybe don't burn quite as hot a little bit more soft woods and when you're first starting the fire especially with these two i found that if you don't close the door quite all the way of course stay here the whole time but you can see like it immediately really starts to push the air and the oxygen through there and up to the chimney and it'll get going super fast so after it's going pretty well then i start to put the wood in and i don't do that tepee fashion any longer but i just actually just go like that now typically the type of wood that we burn is obviously what's going to grow in your area so for us we've got maple we don't really have much oak here let me get that a little bit better but we have quite a bit of fur we've got cedar and like i said and we've got maple so that's predominantly we do that there's um don't really have some spruce we pretty much typically are doing the majority of us a cedar for we have some hemlocks that we fall hemlock's not ideal but it's a decent enough wood and that's what we usually typically burn and you can really start to control the heat of your fire so obviously this is what controls the heat in our house but also when the power goes out and even sometimes when the power doesn't go out i will do quite a bit of cooking on the wood stove so we made sure when we bought this wood stove and we put it in which is a lopi is the brand name of it we wanted to make sure that had some flat surfaces on the top that were large enough for the cast iron skillets and the dutch ovens and to do cooking on and so what's great is this one is a two tier so this section right here of course is going to get the hottest because it's closest to the flame and then this one up here is nice because it doesn't get quite as hot and so i have a little bit of like temperature control between like really hot when the fire is fully going and then if i need things to not cook quite as hot i can put them back here the other thing that we really like is i've got as i said both of these where i can adjust the draft and so what we usually do when we're first getting it going is we kind of have both of them open just to get everything going in the air flowing but once it's starting to take off like it is now then we go ahead and anytime you open the door you want to make sure this upper one is open because if you don't and you open the door then all the smoke is going to come into your house which nobody wants so after the fire is going and the door is closed then we shut this top one down so that the heat is not going up the chimney but the heat is staying in here and then we just leave this bottom one open when i'm first starting it i leave this bottom one all the way open because that's going to let the most amount of oxygen in and really keep things going until i've got a good cool base and it's really established and the stove has heated up and then after that to control you can control it by how much wood you put in so obviously if i put in you know three or four piece big pieces of wood that's going to be a lot of fuel and it's going to burn really hot whereas if i just put a couple in like that it's not super cold in the house this morning we still have quite a bit of heat left over from yesterday's fire at this time of year um i don't need it to get super hot so you can control your heat by how much wood and then also by your your dampers and your drafts here and so if i don't want it to burn as hot i just shut that all the way in which right now i probably just take it out because it it's just getting started so i leave it fully open when it's first burning for about usually the first 30 to 40 minutes of the fire being started and then i'll push it in if it's burning too hot or if i'm not cooking anything i don't need to be that hot then you can just push it in like halfway and you can just kind of play with it but with your wood stove controlling the temperature both for cooking and for heating the house really that's how you can control it is by how much oxygen and how hot you're allowing it to burn so we'll let this get heated up and then once it's warm enough this little fan will start to go and that helps to circulate the air all the way throughout the house or i should say the warmth which is the warm air all the way throughout the house [Music] even though it is hard work being a homesteader and being very self-sufficient and providing for yourself there's something really beautiful about living in the seasons and having the fire going now it's getting warm enough you can see it's pushing that air and getting to change not only the coziness of the fire but also with our eating and having all of the fall crops coming in is really beautiful i feel like it really allows you to experience each of the seasons and even though we're planning ahead as you saw in this video sometimes years ahead it also helps you to really live in the moment

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 549,263

Rating: 4.8495269 out of 5

Keywords: wood stove, wood heat, off grid, wood stove heating, modern homesteading, heating with firewood, wood stoves, home heating, off grid living, wood heating, wood burning fireplace, self sufficient, wood stove tips, wood stove tips and tricks, modern homesteading ideas, modern homesteading melissa norris, modern homesteading melissa k norris, emergency heating, emergency preparedness

Id: ercU5i6zVfk

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020