Wood Heating

To me, there is no better heating system than one fired by wood. The smell of wood smoke is definitely better than that of coal - even though coal makes a hotter fire. I've never tried burning cow chips or charcoal to heat a house, but I'll bet that wood smells better.

Wood warms you two times. You get warm when you're cutting, splitting and hauling; and you get warm when you burn the wood. I remember wood gathering parties that started early on a saturday morning when the temperature was in the low 20's that made you want to get a tree on the ground fast so that you could start working on it and stop freezing! On those mornings the chain saw would balk and sputter and finally crank. Sometimes we had to mix kerosene with the chain oil to make it flow down the blade.

When I was between 6 and 12 we only cut wood with manual saws and axes. Two people on a cross cut saw can fell a tree fairly quickly - perhaps in 10 or 15 minutes. But then you have to cut it into useable lengths. We had a cutoff saw near the house that would run off the PTO of the Cub tractor, but you had to get the wood to the saw and that was work.

Later, after Daddy died, Mac bought a Homelite chainsaw, and then a Poulan and then another Poulan. With one of those we could cut and split a truckload in an hour or so. We still had to split the wood with axes and mauls, but it was good wood and a lot easier to get. Then Ben bought a Husqvarna and a motorized splitter and we could really cut and split woodl. We have burned a lot of firewood in this family in the past half-century.