How We Heat a Large House With a Single Wood Stove
November/December 1976
By the Mother Earth News editors
His neighbors told him it couldn't be done when Stefan Nadzo of Franklin, Maine decided to heat his family's 1,360-squarefoot home with just one wood-burning stove. He did it anyway,though,and did it with style. And his system works! Here, Stefan shares some of his secrets for getting the most out of wood heat.
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When my wife and I recently settled in southeastern Maine, we were determined to do two things: [1] build and live in a large, comfortable house and [2] heat it with just a single wood-burning stove.
Our new neighbors—hardened Mainers from way back, all of whom had made it through many a difficult down—East winter—admired our idealism . . . but they minced no words when it came to telling us that our two objectives were mutually exclusive.
"You can't survive in a large house with only a woodburning stove for heat," they insisted. "Not through the kind of winters we have here, where temperatures sink to twenty below zero and the heavy winds rack up chill factors of minus seventy!" We might be able to do it with a one- or two-room cabin, we were told, but not with a 40' X 34' house.
Well, we went ahead and built our 1,360-square-foot home—complete with solitary wood-burner—just as we'd planned. And along about the middle of January, we invited some of our once-skeptical neighbors over to dinner. Toward the end of the evening (when the temperature inside the house had stayed a cozy 68° F, even though the mercury had fallen to a marrow-chilling -15° outside), everyone admitted—with due amazement—that, yes, we'd done what we'd set out to do: namely, marry the utility and convenience of a large house with the simplicity and economy of wood stove heating!
HERE'S HOW WE DID IT
We attacked the problem of designing and building an energy-efficient (yet spacious) domicile from many different angles. Among the factors that we considered most carefully were: [1] How to shelter our structure from the wind.
[2] What building materials to use.
[3] The number of windows the house should have.
[4] How to achieve adequate air circulation inside the dwelling.
[5] What kind of stove to buy, and where to install it. I'll discuss each of these considerations—and their effect upon our home's cold-weather livability—one by one.
WIND PROTECTION
Because we'd been warned repeatedly about Maine's stiff winter gales, we wanted to build our home where it'd have as much protection from the wind as possible, yet we didn't want to put the building near a windbreak that might block out either our view or the sun's warming rays. Ultimately, we cleared a small site in the midst of an evergreen-and-hardwood forest and built our dwelling so that it would be surrounded on three sides-east, west, and north-by timber. (The only unprotected side, in other words, faces Ole Sol as he hangs low in the southern winter sky.)
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