My wife and I recently had an electric heat pump installed in half of our house because we want to spend less money keeping warm. Also, our furnace is old and could die at any time, and we didn’t want to be stuck scrambling for a replacement.
This means that our house, like many in New Hampshire, now has heating sources dating from three separate centuries: a 21st-century heat pump, a 20th-century oil-fired furnace, and a 19th-century wood stove in the basement to keep pipes from freezing if we lose power in winter.
That’s kind of weird when you think about it. It’s like having a cell phone in your pocket, a dial landline phone on the wall and a homing pigeon in the attic to send messages if A.I. destroys the communication network.
But it’s also kind of reassuring. No matter what technologies human beings surround ourselves with, we remain connected to the single most important discovery that we ever made: You can keep warm by setting fire to parts of a tree.
A surprising number of people still do. The state Department of Energy says somewhere around 6% of New Hampshire homes use stoves that burn firewood or wood pellets as their primary heating source, while a ton more use it as supplemental heat. With the price of heating oil soaring due to the Iran War, I suspect those supplemental stoves will be used a lot more this winter.
The Northern Forest Center, based in Concord, is aware that firewood remains a real source of heat for lots of people, often people who can’t afford more modern systems. The center is an advocate of wood banks, the firewood equivalent of a food pantry. Volunteers generally run these banks, which collect firewood from donors over the course of the year and provide it to people in need when temperatures fall. The Sean Powers Wood Bank in Hopkinton is our local example.
New Hampshire seems to have fewer firewood banks than Maine or Vermont, although the Forest Center and the Alliance for Green Heat are trying to change that. If you’re interested in starting one or making use of one, you can contact either organization.
Although I’m a fan of wood fires — I like poking them as much as the next guy — I really don’t want them to expand as a heat source because of pollution. Even pellet stoves with catalytic converters produce some particulate matter and lots of CO2, whereas old wood stoves like mine spew out so much crud they’d be right at home in Charles Dickens’ London.
New Hampshire has long tried to get people to junk their old wood stoves for cleaner ones to lessen this damage, without much success. Keene, in particular, suffers due to the way smoke stays in their valley during winter temperature inversions.
For the good of the planet, not to mention your neighbor’s lungs, it would be better if all wood stoves were replaced with electric heat pumps, which are not only vastly more efficient than any other heat source but can also serve as air conditioners.
But that’s not going to happen because there is one huge advantage to a wood stove that nothing else, not even a pellet stove, can match: Free fuel. If you’ve got a chainsaw and a tree, you’ve got a fuel source. Since New Hampshire has more trees than we know what to do with, a wood stove will always give you a fallback.
Even if you only use it once or twice a year, as I do, it’s reassuring to know I have the option to burn a log or two. Just as people have been doing for 10,000 years.
