More American households, faced with increasing home heating prices over the past year, are turning to an alternative as old as the Stone Age: wood.
While the typical wood stove emits as much as 350 times more pollution than an oil furnace, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, some homeowners find the economics compelling.
Firewood costs less than half as much as heating oil in terms of energy produced, based on prices from the Energy Department and .
“I got nearly a $2,500-a-year saving by putting in a wood boiler,” says Wendy Wells, a 39-year-old New Hampshire bookkeeper who replaced her oil furnace two years ago with a $3,700 wood-oil combination.
Sales of wood-pellet stoves, the least environmentally harmful wood-heating devices, more than tripled since 1999 to 133,105 last year, according to the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association in Arlington, Va. At Thayer Nursery in Milton, Mass., owner Josh Oldfield says firewood sales are 15 to 18 percent higher than a year ago.
“As oil creeps up toward $100 a barrel, firewood sales have increased dramatically,” Oldfield says. “There is definitely a correlation.”
Business also has picked up for sellers of wood stoves, boilers and ovens used to dry wood, or kilns, says Sherri Latulip, co-owner of Mountain Firewood Kilns in Littleton, N.H.
The company’s sales have tripled, says her husband, Bill. Mountain Firewood’s kilns retail for $21,800, and combination wood-oil boilers go for as much as $6,490.
