Wood stove and coal furnace heating
 

Most people want free home heating until they see what it takes to get free home heating.

Over this summer I installed my coal furnace and a wood stove.
The coal furnace out in the garage and the wood stove in where my fire place is on the opposite end of the house.

The most common types of wood in this part of new Mexico are pallets, scrap lumber and elm.

I figure the wood stove and coal furnace will save up to 2 mega watt hours on my power bill per month.
If it's a real cold winter they could pay for them selves this winter if I don't run out of wood.
If I can find a supply of coal then I will be all set.

You mentioned saving megawatts. What type of electric heat are you using?

I had a ductless heat pump installed in 2017. Last January the heat pump consumed 1008 kWh. That is a 1000 sq ft house with the thermostat set at 69F. The average daily temperature was 33 F.

Heat pump with backup electric resistant heating.
Last year's wasn't a really cold winter but it seemed like it just wouldn't go away.
And my wife would fire up a little space heater in the living room on the opposite end of the house that's not connected to the central heat and air.

A little OT but I get great comfort from small heat lamps under my desks shining directly on me even with the house thermostat set at 66F. My cat enjoys it also. 100 Watts under a desk or table goes a long way. Electric blankets on the couch or bed work well. Battery electric heated clothing is also an option. EV owners will want the plug in clothing I use on my motorcycle in the car if they have a long, cold commute.

I have one of those bed warmer things.
They have been keeping my heat turned down or off since 2006.

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?

It depends on the area.
Europe seems to love to force people be dependent on other people. I saw an article about London banning fire places.
So goes London so goes the entire UK.

I am trying to disconnect from the state controlled utilities.
Already said no to natural gas.
Next will be water. I have a 45ish cm well on my property.
Only problem is its over 100 meters from the house.
If I had my way I would build the house around the well like a midevil keep.
My service charge for water is $47, going up to $53 in Jan of 2019.
Also the water service is becoming unreliable. Always air in the lines and there is a water line break every 1 to 3 weeks which causes the water be be shut off for at least a few hours.
I'm also planting fruit, fuel and nut trees and they are going to need water. The fuel tress, mostly elm are already there I experimented with watering a small group of them as spring started, the trees I watered grew more leaves faster than groups I didn't water. Not really any surprise there. How much the difference between the cultivated and purely wild trees is what surprised me.

Building resilience and self reliance.

I had a small wood stove, but the insurance company didn't like it and was hitting me with $300 a year to keep it. Only used it on the weekends so wasn't worth it.

I have apples, blueberries, strawberries, pecans, apricot, cherry and pawpaw trees plus a small garden. I started a city (250 population) orchard a couple years ago about 2 blocks from my house (I'm on the city council) so will have 11 other fruit trees to get some harvest from in a couple years. Need to replace one that didn't make it.

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.

How old is your heat pump? I saw a huge reduction in consumption when I switched my house in Alabama from the old contractor grade heat pump (10 SEER / 6.8 HSPF) to an Energy Star Trane (17.9 SEER / 9 HSPF). My electricity use for heating dropped 52% and my A/C 25%. It likely would have been even better if the contractor hadn’t oversized the unit.

My Lennox ductless unit in Oregon is 24 SEER / 11 HSPF and provides 100% BTU’s down to 0F and continues to work down to -22F. It doesn’t even have backup electric heating.

However, looking at my power consumption spreadsheets today makes it clear I need to do something about my house. I’m using as much electricity in my 1000 sq ft housing in Oregon as I did in the 1500 sq ft house in Alabama! The Oregon house is older (1976) and doesn’t have any insulation in the crawl space and only 5 inches of insulation in the attic. The Alabama house was on a slab and had 10 inches of blown insulation in the attic to which I added another 10 inches of fiberglass batt.

I have a new modern wood stove and coal furnace.

I actually have what I believe is a stainless catalytic coated oxidizer, I'm going to make it fit in the coal furnace and attempt to catalyze the exhaust. Cutting and welding stainless is kind of my thing.

The heat pump is new enough to be r-410a charged and have a mechanical expansion valve.
But I'm sure it ain't no 24 seer like I put in the rental house before I realized it was going to be a rental house.

If it is R-401A it is at least 13 SEER / 7.7 HSPF. 2 Megawatts per month seems like a huge amount of electricity for a relatively modern unit. Have you checked your ductwork? That can be a huge source of leaks. When I went under my house with the home inspector for a prepurchase inspection we found 2 out of 6 vents completely disconnected. The tape had aged and cracked.

All the vents blow air.
Only some of the ducts are accessible.
Yeah I havery had a vent disconnect on my house in Langley.
It was just blowing heated or cooled air under the house.
I hooked it back up and it definitely helped some.

Oh and the house is 2,700 square feet.
But that's nothing. One of the guys I work with has a newer double wide and spends $360 a month heating during winter.
So he is at 3Mwh minimum.
My highest bill was $270.
It's going to be more like $140 this year.

You never mentioned that you live in a mansion That explains it then. :thumbup:

I need a big roof to put my solar panels on lol.

I found a 1,500VA UPS that runs off 48v.
Looks like where I work they have a few of these and they replace it new every year.
The coal furnace blowers will be plugged into this so when the power goes out the coal furnace doesn't burn all the paint off its self.

Alright used 1.1 Mwh last month.
For October I put right about 1,500 miles on my leaf, which translates to around 375kwh.
So around 1/3 of my power goes to the leaf.
Tota bill divided over usage was $0.096 per kwh.
Base rate is 7 cents per kwh.

Connected to the heat pump and/or central heating , or ventilation to recover hot exhaust gas energy ?

No that would cause a ton of problems.
I will likely put a duct around the stove pipe to recover heat trying to escape and blow that into the house.

The coal furnace is completely seperate from the heat pump so I can easily power it's blowers with my UPS or forklift battery backup.

Those tips seem very useful but I wouldn't do such stuff because of the wood. You always need a wood for your stove, isn't it? I had a situation a couple of years ago when termites started eating an old boat in my basement. After that, they spread out all over the basement and started eating all the wooden constructions. I had to spent over 2400 bucks to get rid of them... Now I'm trying to carry wood as less as possible (read here what you'll have to face after termites' invasion). Different insects are really a problem in our area.

We don't have termites here.
I keep the wood kinda far fromthe house mainly because grass fires that could light up my wood piles.

Plus if the fire wood was properly split and seasoned the termites would be long gone before being burned.

Bugs, all the more reason to find and burn coal.

I have secured up to a ton of high grade coal.

That sounds like it should be enough.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1543933621

Rolling coal

Not freezing to death is good.

Think of it as a glimpse into our near future.
In the picture I was actually burning piney spruce type lumber scraps.
Steam coal or anthracite would burn a lot cleaner than that.
I get 500 lb of anthracite for Christmas.

If I could get out to one of the coal mines on the other end of the state I could buy coal for about $30 a ton from the mine.
A ton of anthracite is around 24 to 25 million BTUs.
I could heat my house with coal for less than $200 for the whole heating season and have some left over.

I think I am going to get a larger wood stove for the living room side of the house.
The one I have now is just about big enough to heat the living room and hall way area when it gets down to about 12F, but the larger stove could heat better and hold more fuel, thus allowing it to keep on burning throughout the night.
Problem is I can only put 1 fat round log in it at at time and those are what burn all night not the nail filled lumber scraps I normally burn.

Have you heard of a rocket mass stove? Sounds like a good way to go

I prefer something that warms up the room fast and burns for hours.
Those things look they they smoke up the house a lot and appear to burn the wood quickly and give off heat slowly for hours.
Condensation and creosote look like it could be a problem.

The whole point of rocket mass stoves, is to burn very hot, for maximum efficiency - and almost no smoke, and no creosote. They take a fraction of the wood (1/5th to 1/10th!) and they have a higher average temperature in the building.

I have already calculated this out.
When it's freezing out side I burn on average 4 to 5 pounds of wood per hour.
That's about 40,000 btu per hour of fuel.
If I replace that wood stove with a 100% efficient propane camping heater I run the camping heater on high at 18,000 btu per hour it doesn't get nearly as warm.
So if I start burning 1/5 the wood even at 100% efficiency that's about 8,000btu per hour. If I turn the propane heater down to low which is about 8,000 to 9,000 btu per hour it doesn't provide nearly enough heat to keep the living room and surrounding areas warm.
A rocket mass heater could probably reduce wood consumption by up to 1/3.

I am using a lot less wood now with a wood stove compared to a fire place. The wood stove provides more heat and uses 1/5 to 1/3 the wood and the heat spread out much further into the house.

My parents burn wood for heat. Many, many days spent cutting, splitting, hauling, stacking..... no way in hell will I go back to that. We avoided pine wood like the plague except one winter that's all we had for a couple weeks.

Had a chimney fire and dad swore if off forever. He was in such a hurry to put it out, he threw the boxes of baking soda down the chimney without even opening them! :eek::D

I have been burning a lot of pine in the coal furnace. The build up thus far is very light soot, but I burn the coal furnace hot.
Things tend to come full circle.
Plus wood is the most prolific home renewable energy source.

When you burn more / most of the volatile compounds, you get more heat out of a given amount of wood.

A good rocket mass stove has a flue temp of about 150F, as I understand it. It is largely carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Yeah it burns hot and fast like a wood pellet burner.

So.... Another one next year?

Do your local zoning laws allow for a granny flat?

Not one per year a dozen or so.

Zoning laws are almost nonexistent for residential.

Cool. Put six or eight backhoe arms on a 20ft shipping container and run it off a Tesla battery pack.