Heating Basics 102

Hearth & Home

Heating your own home is all about comfort. The goal is to efficiently create warmth, with minimum effort and cost, to enable easily living the rest of your life (obtaining food in all forms) while winter rages outside.


Fireplaces satisfy that basic urge to bring the flame into the home, creating the direct warmth on the face and the extended, rubbing hands around a campfire feel. The mantle provides a place for stockings with care, and a visual focus for the artwork of the Home. During a gathering of friends, the ambient flame welcomes guests to feel safe.

While it satisfies a basic psychological urge, unfortunately, in addition to being dangerous when not-maintained properly, the fireplace is not able to offer much heat into the room, spitefully pushing it up the chimney instead. Even worse, it sucks already conditioned air from every nook and cranny throughout the house, causing drafts and discomfort.

Woodstoves are a great compromise to the nearly-hands-on afficianados, providing much of the ambiance of an open flame, but turbo-charged to provide serious heat. No other source can match the saturating blanket of warmth, the embracing feel of entering a room toasty and sizzling.

The word “cozy” is perhaps best defined by an evening heated by a woodstove. As darkness descends and winter cold creeps in, the appliance becomes the center of life. The warmer you want to be, the closer you get. Children play on the floor in front of it. Animals sleep practically under it. Mittens dry on hooks behind it. The sizzle and crackle is as soothing as classical music.

Cheaper to install ($2-3000 plus labor), and one third the cost to run, wood heat is a great alternative for the energy conscious, but requires a year round commitment not suitable for the feint-at-heart. No matter how comfy the sound, heat by woodstove takes constant attention, and armfuls of work.

The adage is absolutely correct that woodstoves heat you twice: once when you burn, and once collecting the wood. As winter ends, the real work begins to secure and cure enough cords (typically 3-5 at $150 each) by late Fall. The stack must remain dry and close enough to be easily hauled inside. The chips of bark and dust fall where they may, littering the pathway, and just when you are really settled down and comfortable, it demands another log.

Efficient designs allow for stoves to burn all night, but like feeding a pet, there is a problem for those who spend the Holidays away. Additionally, the amount of heat enjoyed is directly proportional to the proximity to the stove, so the far reaches of a home tend to remain chilly and comparatively uncomfortable.

While a great solution for someone concerned with economics and a greener lifestyle, in cold climates the drawback of a woodstove is that it requires the support of another system to ensure that pipes are never frozen. Discussion of these will follow in future entries.

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Heating Basics 101

3 Ways to Heat Your Home

The high cost of heat and the number of calls for help with weatherization invites a few basic lessons on the subject of creating efficient comfort in colder climates.


This week, a friend called complaining of cold feet. With rolls of fiberglass insulation laying in the basement since purchasing the house, it was only logical for her to finally take the time to hang it between the hand-hewn (this means really old and imperfect) joists under the floors separating the living spaces from the cold basement.

In actuality, the warmth generated by finally taking this action would have only made her feet colder come winter. Like our bodies, a house is a complicated system, and a chill is not always cured by putting on a sweater.

Comfort in the home is all about the condition of the air and surfaces. In hot climates, the solution is named air-conditioning for a reason. Against the cold, heaters are the appropriate solution.

How best to heat and move the air has been under discussion since people first shivered. The invention of fire has not only led to filet mignon, but created sophisticated ways to ensure comfort in the home.

The fire itself has remained a choice for those who love the psychological warmth of hands close to the heat. From the primitive lodges with a hole at the top to Rumford fireplaces channeling hot air through the chimney, an open flame within the house has provided warmth throughout the ages.

But also danger.


Unfortunately, with the benefits has come the pain of too many lives destroyed from fire burning out of control. A multitude of heaters have been designed to contain the fire safely and distribute the warmth efficiently. In my experience, there are three basic methods: the woodstove containing the raging fire; the furnace heating and distributing the air; and the boiler heating and distributing water which radiates heat outward to condition the air in each room.

How each of these works and how to hold their heat in your home can be the topics for many entries to come as the leaves change and temperatures drop, heading towards a long, cold winter.

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Just Another Season

The New Year really begins in the Fall.

With the start of school is also the approach of winter. Settled back into a home after a summer of outdoor play and travel, the approach of winter looms. Like squirrels gathering nuts, people prepare for the long, cold days ahead.

Conventional wisdom may say that Spring is a carpenter’s busiest season, but my experience has consistently logged the longest hours in the Fall. Projects conceived when the snow melted, were designed, priced and redesigned in June, then put on hold. Now settling back into cramped quarters, jobs are rushed into production to be finished before family arrives at Thanksgiving.

This year, uncertainty about the Election and fears for the economy have changed the landscape. After years of flourishing under the lights of low interest rates and high confidence, the ripe additions are not so abundant for the picking. Instead, people are taking stock and just making the necessary repairs to protect their investment.

In truth, the majority of builders have seen a lot of good years where the biggest problem has been finding the labor needed to construct the wealth of projects contracted. One had the luxury to pick and choose, be too busy to answer new calls, and enjoy profits that only seem appropriate for such hard work.

For some, it is the only season they have known.

Now, it is easy—like breathing the crisp air that turns leaves to brilliant colors before falling off—to smell the panic. Men swaggering in big new pick-ups two years ago are sweating their payment due next week. Others, who have enjoyed the paycheck every Friday working for someone else, are suddenly on their own, with little ability or experience to know how to take off their nail belt to turn over stones. The signs that advertised hiring have been taken down and stored away.

I hate to admit I have been doing this long enough to have survived several such downturns. The good news is that I have learned that it is a cycle and will eventually turn upwards again. Those signs to hire will eventually be brought back out.

In the meantime, we have to tighten our nail belts and work harder to distinguish ourselves from the next guy. Tough choices must be made to retain the best of your crew, laying off the less productive, no matter how many mouths they might have at home to feed. Spend more time in the field and save office work for the evenings, side-by-side with your kids doing schoolwork. Relentless attention to detail will trim wasteful habits and secure a profitable job against competition. Creative financing may ease troublesome debt.

Having been through it before makes it no easier. Ideally, in the good times, one has stashed some money aside, and diversified the kind of work in the portfolio as well as the kind of client for whom it is done. Ultimately, the ones who have maintained marketing strategies, even though the Good Times felt too busy to have the time to spare, are the ones with phones that will continue to ring.

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