In the past week alone three couples have mentioned to me they’re seriously considering installing a fireplace or an outdoor wood furnace as a hedge against raising oil costs. On the face of it, that’s not too surprising, given where I live. A lot of people in the country want or need an alternate source of heat. What’s interesting is that the people who said it weren’t exactly truck driving country types, but Volvo owning suburbanites, the sort of people I would never imagine in a million years would want to install Satan’s outhouse in their backyard.
I wonder if there’s a trend story here. Do you think the New York Times might assign me a story about it? About how “more and more” people are considering investing in a heating source worthy of Larry the Cable Guy? (You’ll notice many trend stories use the slippery phrase “more and more” when there’s no hard evidence to substantiate a trend. ”More and more” is editorial code for “the reporter and three of her friends.”)
I will say this. I’ve been using the OWF for a couple of weeks now and I can’t believe how dry it makes the house. So dry that my throat all but seals up the moment I climb into bed. I can barely swallow. I wake up with a head ache. My body is actually sore. It was worse for June, who kept waking up and crying, her little throat swollen like a grapefruit. I finally bought her a humidifier, which helps (she hasn’t been waking up all night) but now I need to get one for myself. And I’ve opened all the windows to bring outside moisture in….then cranked the heat even more to compensate.
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we have a wood burner in our basement and it’s “piped” in to the heating ducts so it heats our whole house. we cut/split/stack wood throughout the summer and very, very rarely turn on our furnace. we have saved thousands of dollars in heating oil.
i am not sure what has happened or the exact outcome but i know the EPA was trying to ban outdoor fire places in ohio (my home state) due to “wood smoke pollutants” or as i like to say, “oil companies are losing profits.”
ha ha!
I grew up with a wood-stove in the house and YES it makes everything so frigging dry! Ours wasn’t outdoors though, it was in the basement. I wonder what the big difference is between the outdoor wood-stove and indoor version?
Jessie K.,
I wonder, have you considered a largish aquarium (as a source of humidity)? And maybe a couple of plants.
My ex-roommate stuck toothpicks in an avocado once to try rooting it. I tried it with the heart of a stalk of celery — it worked a treat. I planted the thing; the living room smelled like celery, but it grew and was worth harvesting. Last winter I kept a couple of pepper plants and a tomato in the kitchen window sill. The fruits were small, but they stayed green and growing all year. That is, until I put them in the garden last spring, and the grasshoppers chewed them off.
This year I have a couple more plants in the window, and brought in the Rosemary plant from the deck planter. I am still considering the miniature roses, but I think they get to try to winter over outside.
You might also try some saline nasal mist. It is cheap, non-medicated, and surprisingly effective. My chiropractor suggested it to me for nosebleeds when I lived in Phoenix; my family doctor agreed, told me that “twice in each side, once an hour, and blow” would cure up to a sinus infection without antibiotics, and helped relieve allergy and dust issues — that is, the common, unexpected dry or sore throat, regardless of whether you consider your nose “stuffed up”.
Just remember the old Saturday Night skit, though with the saline nasal mist (ask at your grocery or drug store, it should be with the other nasal sprays and sinus meds). You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t . .
Don’t share the bottle. Really. And when you squeeze the bottle, *big* inhale (if you can). It works a treat for completely stuffed as well as apparently “no sinus problem, just a dry tickle in the throat”.
Luck!
If you should happen to use a clothes dryer (i know – you probably don’t) you can get a kit so it vents through a water thingy to catch the residual dust and then into the house – keeps the heat and humidity in the house.
A few years back, in the “North Country” along the Canadian border in New York state, everybody was buying up pellet stoves. It was very trendy, but it meant that those of us who used wood stove pellets as kitty litter couldn’t get our hand on anything for the cats to go in! We ended up with the pellets used in horse stalls because it was all we could get our hands on (thankfully, the cats adjusted to it easily instead of peeing all over the house).
I’d say alternative fuel in general is a pretty big trend right now, especially in areas like here in New England where we traditionally heat with oil (mostly because municipal gas lines are only found in big cities). At $400-$500 per oil delivery, I just couldn’t take it anymore, so we broke-down this year and installed an inexpensive wood pellet stove. So far, I’m loving it.
We chose the pellet stove because you don’t have to split, stack, and lug wood and because they’re closed systems that don’t leave that “campfire” smell inside the house. I imagine your outdoor stove works almost the same way. I do agree though, that it’s a slightly more drying heat than the hydronic system that the oil burner runs, though only slightly so. Pretty much any heat source aside from steam (which vents into the room a bit) is going to dry out the air.
Nothing a couple of well placed humidifiers can’t fix. In fact, depending on how your OWF works (forced hot-air??), you may even be able to have a whole-house humidifier attached to it. I know they make them for traditional forced-air systems and they look like they’re nice and easy to use and maintain.