Keeping (Financially) Warm with a Wood Stove Insert

Hello from the cold, crisp first January in our house. It’s been almost exactly 5 months since we moved in…and the weather is quite different from move-in day in August. I haven’t posted in a while, but I promise I haven’t been idle. More posts coming soon… for now, onto the Wood Stove Insert.

This winter has been particularly cold, especially for a couple weeks after Christmas into January. We have a heat pump as our first source of heat. HP’s are efficient(ish) but don’t work well in extreme cold. Ours works until it’s under 35°F outside, in which our oil heat furnace kicks in. Oil heat is great, it’s a deep warmth that comes out of the vents, much better than the Heat Pump.

In fact it’s so very dandy, until you have to pay to re-fill your tanks. Can you believe that? Oh yeah, and as we found out, oil is also extremely EXPENSIVE. $$$

When we moved in we made a huge list of things we want to update all over the house; a list that will take years to complete. A list that we’re constantly adding to and reprioritizing every time we walk around the house and notice something new we dislike or something else breaks. A wood-burning stove insert in the downstairs fireplace was on that list. It’s more cost-effective over time, we reasoned. We shuffled it under “someday” in our warm, September minds. Well, “someday” turned out to be January 30th, 2018. It even snowed all day as they installed it, which somehow seemed to really justify the purchase.

Because after all, you have to spend money to save money, right………

….right? 🤔

I mentioned earlier in the post about things breaking and priorities changing…Here’s a great example. As the stove was being installed Mike heard a loud crash… and came upstairs to find this in the screened in porch. It appears the glass of the outside table shattered into a bazillion little pieces, likely due to cold temps. Guess that’s on my list of things to fix by spring.

2020 Wood Stove Insert Update:

I originally posted this two and a half years ago. Since we have had a few winters to see what difference the wood stove actual makes I thought I would write an update. We start the wood stove up on any day that dips below 32 degrees F. Since renovating our downstairs area and insulating it, the difference is incredibly noticeable. Our heat runs less and the warmth stays inside. The heat generally doesn’t reach the other side of the house, but it is extremely helpful in off-setting some of the cost of heating. All of our wood is from trees fallen on our property, so the only cost is the labor of cutting and splitting that wood. Would recommend