Heating Your Home with a Wood Stove

By Stefan Nadzo
Published on November 1, 1976
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An efficient wood-burning stove provides plenty of heat to your home.
An efficient wood-burning stove provides plenty of heat to your home.
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Diagram and explanations of the set-up used to warm the house.
Diagram and explanations of the set-up used to warm the house.

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.

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 wood-burning 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

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