Oil heat?? At THESE prices??? Are you KIDDING?

We have a 300gal oil tank. We heat with oil/forced air. And the furnace is about 25years old. I wonder how much longer it will last. But to pay for oil? At THESE prices??

As it turns out, this is where our home's design comes in very handy. We have a raised ranch with a narrow spiral staircase connecting the upstairs with the downstairs. At the bottom of the steps we have a woodstove. When we first moved in, we had a little woodstove. It was pretty. It had a screen so you could see the wood burning. Nice atmosphere. Romantic. But, the logs had to be small.

Then my parents decided to sell their house and had an auction. Inside the garage was *their* woodstove. A *big* woodstove. And we got it for a whole $10. Yes thats right, TEN BUCKS. That was many years go, maybe 15 or so.

We've always had the woodstove to heat the downstairs at least because the downstairs doesn't have any heat otherwise. (Our furnace only heats the upstairs). With the new woodstove, we can heat the entire house, well *almost*. The bedrooms are at the ends of the house, with the woodstove downstairs and kitchen/living room upstairs in the center. Nevertheless, the woodstove does do a pretty good job of heating the living areas, and if the bedrooms are open, the heat can get in there too.

Last year, my daughter told us that her room got too cold, so we bought her a ceramic heater. Then one day this past spring, she turned it on and CRACKLE CRACKLE POOF, it went up in flames. Too much lint, dust, dirt, etc. Good thing she was home. many times she's left it plugged in and running intermittently to keep her room warm even when she wasn't there. Fortunatley, because of this experience, she has decided not to have anymore electrical heaters in her room.

Where do we get our wood? Well, my husband is a delivery truck driver for a lumber company. So he is out and around driving a lot. And he runs into a lot of people who have wood they want to get rid of. Or the borough or other townships are cutting trees down for other reasons and they want to get rid of it too. So, he asks, or they offer, but we always have enough wood. This year we have 8 cords of wood cut and stacked. We only ever use less than 3 each winter. (Another advantage to our home is that its not overly large. Smaller is easier to heat).

In addition to the wood heat, we have those windows I mentioned in the "cooling" post. The 7 large south facing windows give us plenty of passive solar heat in the winter. And the shade tree outside sheds all of its leaves too, so we don't have the tree blocking the sunlight.

This past winter, there were many days when we actually opened windows because it was *too* hot in the house! And when our baby grandaughter came over, she could be found running around in her diaper in winter time, because it was almost to hot for her to wear clothing! Of course, that meant less laundry too!