The U.S. Energy Information Agency releases an annual estimate of what fuels households will use to heat over the coming winter. The latest estimate guesses that the number of people heating primarily with wood in the Northeast will fall 6% this year from last year, due to expected weather.
The weird thing: They expect more homes to heat with wood in the South than the Northeast: 382,000 vs. 347,000. They define Northeast as Pennsylvania and up; the South from Maryland over the Oklahoma and Texas. So there’s a lot more people in the South, but still that’s a surprise. The data is here.
The dominant heating fuel in the South is electricity; in the Northeast it’s heating oil.
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Reporting the number of people who have and use a wood stove (did they think to include pellets?) has no useful value. In order get any idea of any fuel usage you must report on quantity used or the numbers are meaningless.
Not meaningless – just not the metric you want (“fuel use”).
We have heated with cordwood since we built our house in 1982. A couple of years ago we had a minisplit heatpump system installed. As I get older putting up the annual wood pile is taking longer and longer. Last year we did not use the heatpump for heating due to the very high electric rate. We did use it the year before in conjunction with our wood stove. That winter it cut our wood consumption in half.
Dave wrote an article here years ago about is heating with wood environmentally friendly? I just finished reading: The power of trees: how ancient forests can save us if we let them by Peter Wohlleben in Germany. He pretty much came to the conclusion harvesting forest biomass has a net negative effect environmentally. Basically old trees sequester more CO2 then young ones per acre and the harvesting techniques tend to compact forest soil. I assume the latter is less of a problem here in NH with our sandy soils. Managed forests are monocrop so have the same problems as farm land being less tolerant to stressors then unmanaged forests. Worse as far as wood heat us concerned it turns out wood smoke particulates are extremely small so while it makes the neighborhood smell great it is actually pretty harmful.
All in all disconcerting finding out heating with wood is not the panacea I originally thought it was.
managed forests in the northeast are rarely monocrop. one book is not the definitive word on forests and trees; nor is one person’s opinion the be-all end-all for the benefits of harvesting or not harvesting wood.
i’ll gladly continue to heat my house with the wood i harvest. it is time consuming, yet it is also great exercise to produce cordwood.