The Costs Of Heating Your Home With Wood vs Propane

when I was a younger man bought my first property in the country it had a little land and some timber it was a ranch about 20 years old with a walkout basement and it had a forced air propane gas furnace and I'd never used propane up until that point well I took possession of the property in October and it was a cold October that fall November was colder and by the time December rolled around it was freezing bitter cold I discovered on New Year's Eve that year that my propane tank was about empty I had gone through five hundred gallons of gas in 90 days shortly after that I installed a wood-burning stove and I started harvesting the timber that was on that land and I never turned that furnace on again for seven more years this is the first of several videos that I'm going to do exploring the different methods of heating a home using wood versus the traditional methods of electric propane gas and heating oil and I'm going I'm going to furnish you with some basic information and I'm going to do some comparables and some side-by-side cost analysis to let you know what the breakdown is how much does it really cost to heat your home the way you're doing it now versus using wood so stay tuned [Music] another advantage to a wood-burning stove is the quality of heat that it produces over a forced air furnace system a wood-burning stove will efficiently and effectively warm a room using radiant heat that means that the heat from your stove is rising it's coming out and it's going to the sides it's going to thoroughly spread out and effectively warm that living area versus abducted furnace which is pushing air through those pipes and it's going to a specific area in each room and it's going to heat that primarily first you can install a wood-burning stove in just about any room in your house as long as you have access to create an outside vent and what that means is that you could effectively zone heat your house using wood heat now you can't cook on your furnace and I don't think you can cook on your propane tank but I'll bet if you had to you can cook on your cast-iron stove so in my neck of the woods and in my lifetime propane is run anywhere from a low of 50 cents per pound all the way up to about 90 cents per pound to to install a propane say a 500 gallon propane tank and get it set up it's gonna be at least 1,500 dollars if you want to install a propane forced air furnace you're looking at least three thousand dollars and that's if you know somebody what you can do when you want to evaluate the cost on your appliances look at your last heating season now for some of us it winter maybe three months for others it could be five months let's take five months let's say your bill last year was seventeen hundred and fifty bucks you can take that five months take five divided into seventeen fifty and that's going to give you an average monthly cost of about three hundred and fifty dollars so you're spending an average three hundred and fifty dollars every month for propane for five months so you're at $1,750 now let's presume that you're using wood as your heat source and let's say that a quart of wood in your area runs about two hundred and fifty dollars a cord and you're going to burn through a quart a month now here I all go through about two and a half cords a winter five is gonna be quite a bit but just for the sake of discussion let's play this out so at the end of five months you have got an investment of twelve hundred and fifty dollars in wood that you burnt to heat your home versus what you would have spent in propane of seventeen hundred and fifty dollars so there's a five hundred dollar difference right off the top unlike the furnace and the propane you paid for the gas you've paid for the furnace and there it is with a wood stove the money that you've saved off your utilities is coming right back to you which you can put in your pocket or you can apply to your original investment that's the savings of one year when you go forward exponentially you're looking to paint off your heating equipment in your home very rapidly and another side note of that is that's if you're paying for a quart of wood if you have firewood that you can cut on your property or that you can you can manage to bring home doing it yourself then the savings are substantially larger now what some people will do is they'll use their furnace as a backup where they may set their thermostat at sixty degrees so that if they're gone to their job or they're gone away from the home for an extended period and the temperature drops below say sixty the furnace will kick on and that can prevent it freeze damaged wood burns hotter than propane will it burns hotter than propane side by side an equal measure of wood will create more BTUs than propane what that means is that you're going to create more heat in your house using less fuel now the cost to install a cast-iron stove system can range as little as just replacing your stove the everyday models these days are an EPA rated stove maybe four or five six hundred dollars to a complete system which could be three thousand dollars or more and in that case you're talking about Hardware chimneys carpentry work to install an exterior chaise or cut through the ceilings in the roof what I'm trying to show you here though is the savings that you will realize using wood heat can be applied back to your original investment and it can pay for itself in a very very short time now as I said earlier I went through 500 gallons of propane in 90 days right after that I installed a wood-burning stove and I filled that tank back up that tank of propane lasted me thirteen months a loose round about average number is that it takes about 20 BTU to heat one square foot of space now if you're in that old farmhouse in Minnesota well it may take 30 or 40 or 50 BTUs if you've got one of those leaky houses where your newspaper is rattling next to the window while you're trying to read it then that's a sign the cost per BTU for wood is cheaper than heating oil then electricity and propane that savings again goes right back in your pocket one other positive about a for uh about a cast-iron stove is it doesn't require electricity if the grid goes down you don't need a solar panel or a solar system for backup you don't need a generator for backup it just runs so what are some of the negatives of burning wood inside your home well number one is the physical work all right you're gonna have to cut wood if you don't and you have it delivered you're still gonna have to load it to haul it into the house two would be cleanup it's messy if you're bringing wood into your house you're gonna have bark or splinters or bugs or dirt or something that you're inevitably going to track in so there's that three would be supervision you know unless you're home all the time you're a homesteader you're an off-grid er I mean you're working from home you're going to have to tend to the fire occasionally number four is insurance you may have to jockey around to try and find an insurance carrier that will cover you knowing that you're going to be burning wood as a primary source of heat now of course the numbers and the examples that I'm giving you are generalizations because they're based on where I live your savings using wood heat your effectiveness of a wood heating system it's going to vary greatly depending on where you live you may find a huge savings in your utility bills you may find minimal what I'm trying to give you now is just some numbers and a little information to help you become more informed so that you can make a decision in the future based on what serves you best all right so I hope this segment helped you understand a little more clearly some of the differences the effectiveness and the cost of burning wood to heat your home versus using propane if you click on the subscribe button right here in the corner you'll be alerted every for every new video that we have coming out thank you for watching and we'll see you soon bye-bye

Channel: American-Outdoors.net

Views: 16,738

Rating: 4.9452057 out of 5

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Id: yCiCD9UoEnw

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020