Burning wood to heat your home is a New Hampshire tradition, so it is slightly startling to hear that we’re no longer one of the top-three states, along with Vermont and Maine, when it comes to heating primarily with wood. In fact, we’re not even in the top 5!
That’s the news from the Alliance for Green Heat, which analyzed Census data through 2019 and found:
Vermont and Maine have long been ranked #1 and #2 for per capita primary wood heating with 9% and 13% of homes as of 2019. New Mexico rose from #6 in 2009 to #3 in 2019, passing Montana, Idaho and Oregon. It experienced a 14% rise in primary heating during that decade whereas Montana, Idaho and Oregon dropped 14%, 10% and 17% respectively. Poor economic conditions in Native American Reservations may account for some of New Mexico’s per capita rise.
New Hampshire was No. 6 in per-capita wood heating.
The article notes: “According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), about 3 times more homes use wood as a secondary fuel than a primary one.”
You can read their whole report here.
Return to the Concord Monitor
We joined the heatpump crowd this year. We heat with cordwood mainly harvested on our own property. However now that we have hit geezerdom summer heat has become more uncomfortable and at some point we will be too decrepit to burn cord wood even if we buy it. Modern heatpumps are very efficient and work down to pretty low winter temperatures so figured it was time to experiment with how well it works in summer and winter. Getting old was not something my wife and I factored in when we built the house 40-ish years ago.