Wood is the fuel of choice when oil prices rise.
Here’s something you already knew: home heating oil and propane prices are up roughly 50 percent from a year ago across the Northeast. More old news: same with firewood.
But what your local news outlet may not have reported is that firewood continues to be one heck of a bargain when it comes to heating your home for the winter.
Here at the Northern Woodlands office, we have a dog-eared, cardboard chart perched atop the thermostat that’s called the “Firewood Worth Calculator.” It was developed by David Delaski of the U.S. Forest Service back in 1981, and it compares the cost of heating your home with electricity, natural gas, propane, and firewood. Various factors are taken into account, such as the relative burning efficiencies of various stoves or furnaces, how dry the wood is, what species of wood are being burned, and, of course, how much each fuel costs.
Curious to see how everything was stacking up given the recent price increases, I looked to the chart and ran into an immediate problem: oil prices were only listed from $1.00 to $2.00 per gallon. Electricity topped out at 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour. You get the idea. Too cheap to meter by today’s standards.
With the aid of a calculator and some vestiges of high school math, however, I extended the chart. Using home heating oil at $2.50 per gallon, which is the pre-buy price around here at this point, a cord of seasoned, high-quality firewood (sugar maple, ash, beech, oak, etc.) burned in an efficient woodstove is worth $348.18.
In other words, if you’re spending less than $348.18 per cord (and I haven’t seen any listings above $225 a cord locally so far), you’re paying less for the BTUs to heat your house with wood than with oil. At $225 or below, you are paying more than a third less.
On top of that are the considerable forestry benefits of using “low-grade” wood such as firewood. When foresters, loggers, and landowners can earn money weeding out the trees that are never going to make it to sawlog or veneer-log status, they have far more economic leeway when making management decisions. There’s less pressure to “cut the best, leave the rest” and far more opportunity to manage for wildlife, species diversity, and long-term timber.
I mentioned earlier that we keep our “Firewood Worth Calculator” perched atop the thermostat in our office, which is tied to a gas-fired furnace in the basement. But that’s the backup heat. We’re most proud of the black, cast-iron woodstove in our main meeting room and the two cords of sugar maple stacked outside the door. And the one-third less that we’re paying for the heat.