Quote:
Originally Posted by seifrob
Now thats interesting. Almost every (older) house here has a coal furnace and wood stove and it is used as a primary heat source. And our goverment is working around the clock to force (well, to convince is official phrase) people go for gas or electric heating.
Is it just you, or is it trend in the US, to disconnect from (almost state controlled) network?
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No, it is not common to heat with wood in the USA. Only 2% of household in the USA use wood as their primary heat source while another 8% use wood as a secondary source of heating. That compares to 39% that heat with electricity and 48% that heat with natural gas. That is still millions of houses but a small percentage of the total population. Most of the homes heating with wood are in rural areas. Wood does seem to have a resurgence in the Northeast with people removing oil boilers and replacing them with pellet stoves.
There are also some regulatory changes that make heating with wood less economical but that is on a state by state and even city by city level. In the state of Oregon where I live you cannot sell a house that has a non-certified wood stove. The stove must be removed and taken to a disposal area in order to sell the house. Without a certificate of destruction the house sale cannot be completed.
However, a current homeowner can continue to use a non-certified wood stove and my county has a $1500 - $3500 rebate to replace an old non-certified wood stove with a new one. There is also a $300 federal credit for installing a certified wood stove. It is an effort to get rid of old polluting stoves not an attempt to ban them.
It can also be hard to find an insurance company that with insure a house with a wood stove. My parents used to have a wood stove in the basement for secondary heating but the insurance company kept raising their rate because of the stove. Finally they couldn’t even find a company that would insure the house with the wood stove so they removed it.