Word: heat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Buying a stove is one thing; figuring the economics of woodburning is quite another. The countrified city man who got Linda stuck in the mud has eight cords of wood, harvested from his own property, split and stacked under cover. He will heat his house this year for about $100 ?$55 for chain-saw parts, the rest for saw and truck fuel as well as stovepipe. Electric heating, which is built into his house, would cost far too much to think about; for oil, he would have to pay about $1,100 for the winter...
Stove owners who must buy some, or all, of their wood, on the other hand, clearly are not saving much money. Merle Schotanus, president of the New Hamp- shire Timberland Owners Association, calculates that a cord of dry hardwood stores the heating power of $135.90 worth of 90¢ oil. He lops an arbitrary $25.90 from the cordwood figure to allow for the fuss and muss of wood, and arrives at a break-even point of $110 a cord for wood-burners. Dry firewood sells for $80 to $90 in rural New England, for $90 in the Middle West, hovers between...
...forest, the practice can amount to mining the thin topsoil. "In 50 years," says one observer, "New England could look like Lebanon." President Nick Muller of Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., has another sort of woodburning in mind. He wants to build a $1.75 million central heating plant fueled by sawdust from nearby sawmills. Sawdust is cheap, burns cleanly and has much heating power. Muller, a historian, is thankful that he studied engineering for a time since he has had to transform himself into a heating and weatherizing expert who can now discuss R-values* as succinctly...
...made us very lazy," admits the illustrious Philip Johnson, 73, who with the equally illustrious Mies van der Rohe designed Manhattan's Seagram Building. Conceived by their creators as formal abstractions, such austere structures bore out the "less is more" precept in an unintended way: they used far more heating and cooling energy than the buildings they replaced. Now owners are scrambling to make skyscrapers more energy efficient with such devices as heat pumps, reflective film on windows and costly refinements of lighting systems. (At present, a late-staying worker at Manhattan's World Trade Center who does not have...
Some of the cracks that must be plugged as the nation tries to keep warm are in the structure of the society itself. The poor and the old living on fixed incomes can muster no defense against rising heating bills. Stella Falco, 74, a white-haired widow who lives in a $50-a-month tenement in Providence, is tired and bitter. After five decades of working in textile mills, she receives $3,384 a year from Social Security as well as a small pension. A quarter of her income will go for heat; price increases mean a thinning...