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As I’ve been thinking about adding a wood stove in our home, I have also been talking with my wife about fire safety.  She has a very healthy fear of fire and is concerned about the dangerous aspects of a solid fuel burning appliance in our home.  Some of the dangers are of little hands and feet getting near the appliance.  This can be prevented by telling your children of the dangerous heat coming from the unit, and teaching your pets to not go near it.  To step it up another notch, child-proof gates can be used around the hearth to keep unwanted attention away from the stove.  We will probably go that route ourselves, to make sure everyone and everything is safe.

Another concern is the fire hazard itself.  House fires can be caused by several things, but the largest concern is a chimney fire.  Chimney fires occur when one or more of these things happen: you have a poorly installed chimney without proper clearances from combustibles, you have a chimney that is leaking/falling apart, you are burning “dirty” fires and building lots of creosote and/or you are not cleaning your chimney regularly.  Chimneys should be visually inspected for creosote once a month, and cleaned as necessary.  Most people clean once a year even if after 12 months the chimney “looks clean.”  You can’t be too safe.

Even though our chimney is only 15 years old, made of cement block and has proper clearances, we are still going to install an insulated stainless steel chimney liner to make it even safer and much easier to clean.  This will bring down our insurance and also help us both sleep at night.  Our wood stove will also be installed by a professional company, probably Northern Lights in Farmington, ME.

Lastly, statistics have shown that 82% of house fire related deaths could have been prevented if there had been a sprinkler system installed in the home.  People think that sprinklers are for businesses only and that is simply not true.  Also, people are concerned about the price of sprinklers.  It turns out that basic sprinkler heads run for all of $8 a piece!  Designer ones that sink in flush with the ceiling to match the decor are still only in the $30 range each.  Most sprinkler heads cover between 200 and 500 sq ft per head.  A home the size of ours would require only 5 heads and that includes the basement!  Of course there is the cost of the copper pipe and the time to install the plumbing.  Then if you don’t want pipes all over the place you have to account for removing pieces of walls and ceiling to hide them.  For this reason I would probably only install a sprinkler head over the furnace in the basement and one in the kitchen near where we want to have the wood stove.

We currently use about 700 gallons of #2 oil to heat our home and supply our domestic hot water.  We have an oil fired boiler and it runs our baseboard for heat and a coil for our hot water.  Our 1,250 sq ft home is insulated, but the wall insulation has settled over time and could use topping off and our attic insulation is modest at best as well.  If we had a contractor come in and blow insulation in our walls that could bring our oil usage down by a solid 10%.  If I add more insulation in our attic, we could save another 5%.  Replacing our windows would get us another 5% down on oil.  That brings us down to 560 gallons per year.

At some point we need to replace our aging 23 year old boiler with a newer unit.  We are planning on going with a direct-vent boiler so we can free up our chimney for wood stove use later.  Direct vent boilers in our size rate at 86% efficiency, our boiler is 84% efficient as of our last cleaning this fall.  This new boiler alone would save us another 2%, dropping us down to 550 gallons per year.

Add in an outdoor temp reset on the boiler for another 5% savings and that brings us in at 522.5 gallons per year (we’ll round up to 525).  Now add in a small Jotul 602 CB like we’ve been considering for supplemental heat.  Burn 3 cords of softwood per year (this is what we have available), and that will save another 270 gallons of oil.  That brings us down to a measly 255 gallons of oil per year.  A bit over 1/3 of what we currently consume now and we would still be comfortably warm all winter and have all the hot water we would want all year.

**edit**
Good news and bad news.  The good news is that it turns out there are two larger stoves that fit our alcove.  The Jotul 100 QT and the Jotul F 3 CB.  The bad news is that our ceiling height for the Jotul 602 CB isn’t approved (for alcove installation), and the Jotul 100 QT has a kind of poor design that can allow logs to roll out if you open the door while it is burning.  So that leaves the F 3 CB, the largest alcove approved stove by Jotul.

This is sort of the other good news.  The F 3 CB puts out 42,000 btu, enough to heat our entire home even when it is -20F outside!  It has the best alcove ratings for tight installations due to it’s design, it appears to have a well designed firebox as well (can’t allow logs to roll out), and it has lots of cast iron on the glass (makes me feel safer and I like the looks).  The down side is it is more expensive, and is less good for cooking (or so I’ve heard) as compared to the 602.

This would give us the btu power to heat our home almost entirely with wood if we so chose – also a plus.

I woke up this morning to 3″ of water in my basement, lapping at the bottom of my oil fired boiler.  We hadn’t plugged in our sump pump last night and I had to trudge through the water to do it this morning.  I can’t install a “regular” float activated sump pump in our basement due to lack of space.  If I was to dig through our basement floor to allow for a sump pit, we would be fighting our very high water table even worse than now.  So we use a surface pump that “automatically” turns on.  The issue is, it cycles every 1-5 minutes when there is no water, to check if it needs to pump.  If you left it plugged in forever, it would run itself dry and cook itself.  So we only leave it plugged in when we think the basement might get wet.

Time for a new solution.  Automatic bilge pumps for boats use much smaller clearances and would fit in my sump “pit” (only 2″ deep), they run on 12v so we could have a small battery and solar panel – no worries if the power is out, the basement will stay dry!

We could do the whole install for around $200 for the pump, panel and battery.  This would stay “on” all the time since it only runs when the float switch kicks off.  If we noticed it running a lot, we could plug in our AC unit to take most of the load.