Word: stoves
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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...
...Wood stove manufacturers and importers have not yet been subjected to a windfall-profits tax, but envious oil refiners may begin to lobby for just that any day. At the All Nighter Stove Works, in Glastonbury, Conn., President James Morande says that his three-year-old firm is producing at capacity, 480 woodburners a day, at prices that run from $379 to $689, against a demand that exceeds 1,300 a day. Business is up 122% over last year. Morande talks bemusedly of visiting a retail stove store in Portland, Ore., where ten salesmen, gracing...
...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...
...easy to dismiss such tiny projects as tinkering?as it is easy to dismiss the wood-stove phenomenon. Crab wastes and the body heat of chickens are not going to save postindustrial America (though Ecologist Barry Com- moner believes that methane, generated from a wide variety of wastes and especially grown crops, could stretch declining natural gas supplies and help the U.S. bridge the 50-year period before it can achieve what he thinks possible: a completely solar-powered society). But the Department of Energy does not dismiss such ideas?and there may be wisdom here. What the woodburners...
...roots a resistance to change. And the changes that the society has shown itself willing to make so far are small ones. They do not inconvenience in serious ways. Yes to insulation, no to public transportation. Write to the nice people at Vermont Castings for a Defiant wood stove brochure, set aside, for the moment, the necessity to think through a profound unease about nuclear power and a disbelief in the quick fix of synthetic fuels. Get through the winter, and make the tough decisions later...