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Anyone else in the northeast without power?

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Kevin Mullins:
A wood burner has saved our tails a few times now. One of them things we thought about removing, but glad we didn't. Our is pretty good sized, big enough to easily cook an entire meal on. And when stoked up nice and hot it will almost run ya out of the house and will last through the night and still have hot coals in the morning. We live out in the country, the grid isn't all that great, so even deer farts have been known to knock out the power.

We generally worry about ice, not snow though.
Our worst ice storm since I've been here we lost power for 12 days. I was a lumberjacking fool during that spell.

ChadTower:

Ice storms historically have caused more outages than we have had even with massive snow.  Over the last year, though, we have had multiple sustained outages.  None of them have been during bad winter weather but that is obviously going to happen. 

I went to a stove/hearth dealer last night.  It looks like in my house I have to have a doublewalled stainless vent pipe run from the basement to the roof.  Can't use the chimney because there are already two things using it and it isn't lined.  Initial swag on install cost is $1500 but that was without an actual site visit.  I can get a good stove rated to 2200sqft with a cooktop for $500.  My house is only 1100sqft plus the basement.  Considering I'm thinking supplemental for the oil furnace and only primary when power is out that is way more than enough.

I figure if I can supplement with the tons of free firewood we get around here via fallen trees and save 25% of our oil consumption that is $700 right now (in today's oil price).  That's three years to pay for itself.  I think 25% is way conservative, too, considering that where I grew up we heated with only a similar stove in a larger and far older house.

Kevin Mullins:
Our stove is a Wonderwood 2941. Rated @ 1700 sqft. Our house is right close to that 1700, single level, not super well built, but I can assure you this thing will run you slam out of the main room it's in when it gets going. Ours sits in front of and is vented through the original fireplace which is useless for heat.
The number one thing I love about it is that you can fit real "logs" in it. No chinsy sized burning compartment. I rarely split wood around hear. Cut em' a little under 2 ft long and chuck them in there. I'd say maybe 8"-10" dia logs or so. Use smaller branches and whatnot for kindling to get it started and then set a log on it an go. Like you, we have enough fallen trees and such to keep us going for a long time.

JMB:
Good pic of what it looked like around here on Sunday. Tonight will be night six without power if it hasn't come up while I was at work.



edit for typo

ChadTower:

Yeah, that's about what it looked like here too.

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