Wood burning stove advantage

Winter will coming. Frosty grass every morning. Freezing fingers during barn chores. It’s time to get cozy and talk about heat.

First of all, wood stoves are not an automatic environmental impact win. You should know that right up front . We always consider environmental impact when we choose but we also take into account other things: comfort, safety, labor commitment and especially resilience. Our wood stove was chosen mainly for resilience.

The crackling and warmth of a fire and the whistling of a teapot often bring up a sense of nostalgia and home.

If you are interested in adding this ambiance to your home, selecting the right wood cookstove is pertinent yet can prove a challenge.

There are many excellent wood-burning stoves on the market. We have found five excellent stoves through our rigorous search and selection process, including our personal favorite, the Vermont Bun Baker.

You can find it for sale here on Fire Pit Surplus, and it should certainly be in the running.

It’s obviously not a large traditional model like Bun Baker or Pioneer Princess, but it could be perfect for someone wanting something a bit smaller and less obtrusive.

on my grandmother's living room wall is my great-grandmother's old, black, and white photograph. In the fuzzy picture, she is standing in front of a massive cast iron wood stove. It appears that she had quickly turned around for the photo, as there are several cast iron skillets on the stovetop where she was cooking a meal for the family. A small flue carries away the smoke from the wood fire roaring below in the top corner of the picture.

We tend to have misconstrued conceptions about the lives of our ancestors. The comforts and conveniences of today's world and modern home building indeed put us in a position of privilege. Anyone who lived before the day and age of central heating, high-performance insulation, and plush carpeting must have unquestioningly suffered from deficiency and scarceness, or so we believe. The world that our great-grandparents grew up in was undoubtedly different from ours. To name just one example, heating their homes in the wintertime required long hours of chopping wood instead of merely setting a smart thermostat through pushing a few buttons on your phone.

The agrarian skills and talents of our ancestors, their hard work ethic, and the durability of tools and devices that were practical and functional for their needs, perhaps, should beckon us to question our assumptions related to the difficulty and discomforts of their lives. During a cold December around 99 years ago, my great grandmother was cooking barefoot on an early morning. Their home probably had limited insulation, and no thermostat was on the wall.

The massive cast iron wood stove burned throughout the day and night. It filled the home with heat while also offering the family home-cooked meals and hot water for bathing. Not every modern-day household will invest in cast iron stoves for cooking, heating, and warm water. However, there's something to be said about this "ancient" technology that offers numerous benefits, which we will explore below.

What Is a Benefit of a Wood Stove?
In most modern-day houses, we have separate systems for heating our homes, cooking our food, and heating our water. These three different mechanical systems all require independent sources of energy. Even the most energy-efficient, all-electric homes will likely have separate connections for their water heater, heat pump, and induction range stovetop.

Today, leading building professionals have been experimenting with ways to integrate these systems better. Drain water heat recovery systems, for example, work to reutilize the energy from hot water that goes down our shower drain to either heat your home or re-heat your hot water tank. Many of the best heat pumps on the market offer hot water as a byproduct, as well.

These technologies certainly might seem to be "cutting edge," though the principle of integrating home technologies has been in place for hundreds of years. The triple benefit stove used by great grandmothers worldwide was one system that covered three of the most basic functions of the home. The high-BTU firewood locally harvested on the farms and forests where our ancestors lived was utilized for cooking, heating water, and heating the home. Far from being a "primit technology, these cast iron wood stoves integrated several durable parts, allowing one fire to serve three functions.

Every triple-benefit wood stove was different. However, they all likely included hot water tanks continuously heated by the steam and smoke moving through the flu. Older homes were notoriously under-insulated, though a practical knowledge of the best firewood burning practices allowed these houses to stay warm by a fire that burned throughout the day. Before microwaves and instant TV meals, people ate homemade food prepared from scratch. Besides being much healthier, this also required a constant reliance on a steady-burning fire.