OUR $100 WOOD-BURNING FURNACE SAVES US $1,200 A YEAR!
November/December 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
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During the summer of 1973 I quit a plumbing job in Minneapolis and my wife, Merle, stopped work as a secretary. Then, together with our four children, we made the big break: to a 310-acre farm (which cost nearly every penny we had) in southeastern Minnesota's Zumbro Valley.
None of us would trade our new country living for anything . . . although we have had ups and downs out here on the farm. Our tight budget, for instance, was almost busted right up its seams when we received our first liquefied petroleum gas bill. Why, it was costing us $200 a month just to heat our seven-room house! At that rate, the expense for gas alone could quickly make the difference between independence on the land or going back to work for a boss somewhere. We had to cut those fuel bills and cut them fast.
Now I didn't have time to mess around with exotic (solar and the like) heating ideas back in the early winter of '73. We needed cheap heat and we needed it then. So with the help of my brother-in-lawHarvey Melcher, a welder in Hammond, Minnesota-I combined two assets we already had on hand (150 acres of woods and that greedy LP-gas forced-air furnace). The result is a wood-burning space heater which:
[1] Keeps my family warm while saving $1,200 a year.
[2] Sits in the basement, thereby adding no dirt or mess to the house.
[3] Has a big, off-center door which takes pieces of wood up to 30" long and 10" in diameter. This eliminates almost all need to split the chunks of fuel and makes stoking the fire a twice-a-day job.
[4] Burns—right in the firebox—most of the smoke it creates, for maximum usable heat and minimum Btu loss up the chimney. .
[5] Has cast-iron grates.
[6] Features very easy ash removal.
[7] Needs no damper adjustments during operation.
[8] Is tied directly into the old LP furnace so that it uses all the original heater's controls and ducts. This cut the cost of conversion and allows us to leave home for any length of time, always confident that the gas burner will automatically kick in whenever the wood fire gets low and the house cools to 60° F.
Essentially, our new heater is nothing but a jacketed woodburner set into the cold-air-return ducting for the old LP furnace's forced-air system. The added unit preheats the air going into the gas burner and, if that preheated air is hot enough, the LP furnace doesn't kick on at all. Whenever the wood fire dies down, however (or on the extremely cold days when that blaze simply isn't enough to warm the house), the gas furnace automatically ignites.
Our simple add-on unit can be constructed at minimum cost by anyone who can weld. With the addition of only a little ductwork, the wood-burning furnace could be used as the sole source of warmth for a house that doesn't already have central heat. For installation in a remote cabin that has no electricity (thereby making it impossible to use a powered blower), the warmth the heater produces can be circulated by the old gravity-flow forced-air system. Variations on our basic design are endless.
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