The first apartment I lived in with my future wife was an old railroad-style place that was heated by an ancient “gas on gas” stove in the kitchen. In the winter months, cranking up as far as it would go meant the kitchen was approximately the temperature of the sun, and the living room—two rooms away—was like the surface of Pluto. And when we got our first utility bill, our souls briefly left our bodies.
And compared to today, energy was cheap back in those days. With the cost of (checks notes) everything rising, heating our homes has become what scientists call “insanely expensive.” The costs of electricity and gas have risen dramatically in the last year alone, leaving many folks facing untenable utility bills and ice-cold homes.
If you’re facing steep heating bills but your house has a wood-burning fireplace that seemed like a nice amenity when you bought it, it’s natural to wonder if you could go back a century and save a lot of money by burning wood instead of relying on a boiler, furnace, or baseboard heat to keep warm. After all, gas and electricity are expensive, wood is relatively cheap, and several million people in the United States still rely on wood as their primary or secondary heating method—so heating your home with wood is definitely viable. The question is whether it makes economic sense.
Cord costs
Assuming you have a fireplace that’s in good condition and can be fired up immediately, the first question is how much it will cost you in wood to heat your home. If you live in a rural area and you have access to free wood, your costs will be in time and effort instead of money—but consider the fact that firewood has to be seasoned and dried. Burning damp, “green” wood is a lot harder and a lot less energy-efficient. Seasoning firewood takes at least a year, and the wood has to be stored off the ground and in a protected area where it won’t get wet each time it rains.
If you have to buy your wood, your costs will vary depending on local prices and how large a space you need to heat. In general, you need about three cords of firewood to heat 1,000 square feet of interior space for a whole winter in cold temperatures. A cord of wood is a stack of wood that measures 128 cubic feet—typically a stack that measures 4x4x8 feet. Typically a cord of wood will run you an average of about $300, though prices will definitely vary depending on where you live.
So if you have a 2,000-square-foot home, you’ll need six cords of wood (and the space to store it properly) and it will cost you roughly $2,000. That might be a significant savings over your gas or electric bill.
Efficiency
While buying wood to heat your home might be cheaper than buying gas or electricity, that’s not the whole story, because open wood-burning fireplaces are incredibly inefficient.
There are two measurements here. The first is the combustion efficiency of the fireplace, which describes the ability of your fireplace to turn your wood into heat. But most of the heat produced by your fireplace doesn’t make it into your house. The overall efficiency of the fireplace measures how much heat is actually pushed into the interior, as opposed to escaping up the chimney. The combustion efficiency is always a much higher number—the overall efficiency for a traditional wood-burning fireplace is typically about 10 percent. You can add glass doors to your fireplace to bring that number up to a whopping 20 percent.
That means most of your heat is going straight up the chimney. As the fire heats up the air in the hearth, the air rises, producing drafts that pulls air from the room along with it. This can actually make your room colder, which is one reason people are often depicted sitting right up close to a roaring fire, smothered in blankets. And if you’re using your fireplace in just one area of the house and relying on other heat sources for the rest, this can actually increase your heating costs unless you have a zoned heating system that allows you to isolate the fireplace area from the rest of the house.
A fireplace insert can help
If you’re trying to heat just one small room with a wood-burning fireplace, you might be okay. But if you’re trying to heat a larger space, the efficiency problem will ruin your firewood budget.
One solution, if you can afford it, is to go with a fireplace insert. This is a self-contained, sealed unit that is installed inside your existing fireplace, typically with a stainless steel chimney liner. These inserts burn wood, but do so in a much more efficient manner, achieving overall efficiency ratings over 70% and sometimes even over 80%. These can be pricey (ranging from $2,000 to nearly $5,000 or more, not counting installation), so you’ll have to do some math around recouping your investment. But a wood- or pellet-burning insert can make using wood as a heating fuel source a viable option for your home.
Fireplaces are cool, cozy, and even useful—but if you’re plotting to revamp your budget around chopping wood for free and heating your home like a 19th-century pioneer, crunch those numbers very carefully. Heating your house with a wood-burning fireplace isn’t a slam-dunk, in budgetary terms.