MARC ASHLEY IS BEATING THE HIGH COST OF ENERGY

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Marc, grinning as usual, goes on to point out the ease with which he keeps his woodburner running. "Since my furnace is located outdoors the way it is, I never have to carry fuel down into the cellar and haul ashes back up the basement stairs the way most folks with a wood furnace have to. I just stack my logs out back of the house any which way, and they're always right there where I want 'em when it's time to feed the stove. I like to burn softwood during the day and hardwood?which heats longer?at night. It's only in the very coldest weather that I'll throw in an extra stick or two from time to time in addition to my regular twice-a-day stokings."

Steven, one of Ashley's sons, adds: "Dad's furnace holds between five and eight cubic feet of wood and he really needs to fill it only once a day. But he likes to toss in a little something extra when he puts the cats out at night and whenever he wants to feel useful around the place."

Problems? Marc's had a couple of minor ones with his wood-burner. Once, when he'd been loading the furnace with wet chips and logs for several days, he and his wife woke up one morning to find their house had "hazardously" cooled all the way down to 65° in the night. "That damp wood had coated up the stove's chimney with a creosote-like substance," says Ashley, "and the furnace wasn't drawing properly. You can bet your boots I cleaned it out in a hurry."

The second problem hasn't been any worse than the first one. The Ashleys keep their furnace burning right through the summer (with the space heaters in the house shut down, of course) to supply them with hot water for bathing, washing dishes, etc. And once in a while, when they have a bedroom window open on the second floor, a little smoke from the wood-burner comes into the house. "One of these days," says Marc, "I'm gonna move that furnace further away from the building."

It may be some time, however, before that little job gets taken care of. For, encouraged by the success of his $50 homebuilt wood-burner (it saves him $600 a year in fuel oil bills), Marcus Ashley is now experimenting with solar heaters, windplants, and other "alternative" energy devices. And, knowing this guy the way I now know him, I'm betting that Marc's future experiments turn out just as good as this first one has.

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