I don’t know that I’ve ever stated it outright here in the blog, but I live in the great Pacific Northwest. That is, in that wild country north of San Francisco California and south of Portland Oregon that covers more than 10,000 square miles of mostly alpine wilderness.
Needless to say, up here wood heat is ubiquitous. And yes, I’m one of those that heats my home with wood heat — and only wood heat! But up until this heating season, I had used a rather advanced fuel called “Prest logs”, made by Home Fire Ltd. (I was going to include a link, but it seems there URL is up for sale, so . . . ) Not that I’m against “real” fire wood, i was just being lazy, and felt that burning wood waste was as least as green as burning trees that Mother Nature had knocked down.
(For those of you who think that wood heat creates green house gases, let me recommend this excellent and rather provocative article: Is Wood Heat Green?.)
Unfortunately, the company from which we had been buying our Prest Logs has decided to go out of business. So they’re not really paying as close attention to demand as they have in the past. At the same time, the Chinese, who own our local paper plant, have decided that they want to buy all pulpable wood — including the “waste” hardwoods that we locals have for generations burned for heat. So the price of cord wood has gone from $285 per cord to over $400 per cord for seasoned hardwood.
The math made solutions relatively obvious. The cost of going into the woods and collecting our own firewood (on national Forest Service land), including the homage to the image of Uncle Sam required to gain access to land we (the American People) already own, gas for collection and splitting using a gas splitter that I opted to buy (I’m not that young anymore), the price of a cord of wood came out to $75. A butt load less than $400+ to buy the wood already collected and split. And I’ve always enjoyed the great out-doors. So this season we started collecting our own wood.
Today, however, the bears got us. We only managed to cut a quarter of a cord before the chain break on the chain saw gave out. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it broken in the unlocked position. But noooo. . . It had to break in the locked position, making it impossible to cut more wood today. We came home with less than a quarter of a cord. This time of year we’ll burn through that in just over a week.
The joys of the Wild, Wild, West!
Technorati Tags: fuel wood, wood heat, Pacific North West
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