Go to my other WEB site at:
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http://www.angelfire.com/mi/cybereport/
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In 1978 we build a solar-heated house located on ten acres of our former 140 acre farm. It is serving us well and I will write about it in a future article. However,this article deals with the type of heating fuel my parents and our family used prior to building a solar heated house. The ideal wood was dry Wisconsin, oak, hickory, maple with some poplar. During many of my school years it seemed that every Saturday,we went off to the woods to cut fire wood with the axes, crosscut saws and wedges.Chainsaws did not enter my wood cutting experience until about 1950. My parents home and our home were heated by a central hot air "Round Oak" heating furnaces. It was not until we build our solar home that we had an open fire place.
Even with modern day chain saws and log splitters heating with firewood, is still a real task. So it is kind of nice to have your main source of heat (solar and electric).We put a fireplace in our new solar home because, even though we realize that an open fire place on the whole does not add much heat to the residence, it certainly is a delightful place to sit in front of on those cold windy winter days and evening and enjoy the "bone penetrating warmth" that radiates from that open fire.
What a delight to come in out of the cold winter winds, take off those winter coats, and mittens, "put another log on the fire" and sit or lay in front of the fire place, watching those orange and blue flames come forth from the wood in a controlled and orderly manner.. In fact one thing that I marvel at as I sit and watched a wood fire burning is the fact that a few sticks of dry fire wood place on top of each other in a fire place, wood burning stove or a camp fire can burn for hours on the gases emitted from that wood and yet not explode in one big bang as in the case of gas or oil under similar conditions.
Most people through out the world, for thousands of years, have used firewood as their main source of heating their homes and cooking their food. It is not until the last couple hundred years that we have used oil, gas or coal for heating to any large extent.
Many times as I watched the flames in a fire place or camp fire I think about the fact that on a daily basis most of us walk, sit and sleep on this volatile substance of wood that can in a matter of minutes, with only enough heat from an open flame, become a raging inferno. How often do we look upon a stick of wood, a piece of furniture or the very floor we walk on and marvel of its ability to hold and maintain the potential fire energy it contains for decades, centuries and even millenniums without losing its power, in fact some species of wood has the ability to produce even greater heat as it gets older and dryer.
Modern mankind has a number of sources of heating their homes and business, other than the Sun the one most readily available source of heat throughout the world is still wood. Wood has been used for heating and cooking for thousands of years, it is a renewable source, it is almost universally available and it is, to this writer, a most delightful ways to really get warm after coming in from those cold wintry winds.
INTERESTING LINKS:
A stimulating WEB page on using Wood for Heating.
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http://www.wood-heat.com/index.htm
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Nice WEB page on Why to Use Wood
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http://www.wood-heat.com/gdforyou.htm
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Web site dealing with Safety Tips in Using Wood for Fires
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http://www.olywa.net/lrockfd/winter.html
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A long list of WEB sites dealing with all kinds of aspects of using
Firewood.
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http://search.excite.com/search.gw?c=web&qbe=24309694&ctag=36C19E5A&showSummary=true