10 April

More on wood heating. It has its benefits, it’s a renewable resource for example, and can capture emissions when you replace cut wood with new plantings. (How often that happens is a bit questionable.) Here’s another interesting way to compare options - energy use. Firewood produces about 20 MJ/kg. The average Australian household using firewood for its majority heating uses 3-4 tonnes of firewood per year. If you convert that to kWh, the measure we use for electricity consumption, that’s about 17,000 kWh of energy used to heat those homes, per year. Have a look at the average electricty consumption of Australian homes, by State. A house using firewood for heating uses 2-3 times as much energy to do that, as the average household uses in total in electricity, every year. (And that includes households using that electricity for heating.) It’s very inefficient, in terms of energy, and that also doesn’t factor in gathering it, chopping it, stacking and drying it. Not to say it isn’t an option for many Australians, particularly in the regions. But wood is up to $500/tonne, and even if you have your own supply it costs about $20/tonne to have it ready to burn (fuel costs for transporting the wood etc.). That’s about $60-$80 for heating for a year, on the absolute best case scenario (not counting your own time and effort gathering and preparing the wood). For comparison, heating our home this year will cost pretty much nothing, including zero effort in collecting, cutting and stacking/drying firewood. So cost saving from burning wood isn’t maybe the argument some make it out to be. I know growing up we began with open wood fires, moved to combustion stoves, and then dad getting fed up with all the work around gathering and chopping/stacking the firewood, stoking the fire all day and for nights, having to get up in the morning and get it roaring again, cleaning out fireboxes etc. Swapped it all for a one-button push job, instant heat, at whatever temperature we wanted. Everybody was happier. (As a P.S., watch where you stack your firewood. Firewood stacks are one of the greatest sources of termite invasion into homes.)