A Little Regler BTU Math

I apologize in advance. We’re going to do math.

Relax. We aren’t going to be doing that fancy math. The devil got up on his first day of work and went into his infernal office and put letters into equations that only had numbers in them a minute before. We’re upright folks here in Maine and will have none of that. Fancy math just leads to guys with MBAs telling you to come in on Sunday to make their numbers come out right. For what we’re trying to find out, regler arithmetic will do. And I already work on Sunday, thank you very much.

The question at hand is this: what’s the cheapest form of heat we can buy? No fooling, it’s got to be cheap, coming and going. By that, I mean it has to be cheap to buy the equipment to run it, and it has to likewise be cheap to make BTUs with that cheap equipment.

I turned to the unlikely source you could name. I asked the government. Now I understand that the government is what the devil made on his second day at work, and he’s been working at it non-stop ever since. But in Maine, the government is occasionally a time-warp, and it functions like Eisenhower was still in office. Or maybe Coolidge, on a really good day.

The Maine state government has one of those old-skool bulletproof websites that’s filled with nothing but information. They thought about putting an image or two on it, but their Brownie camera was on the fritz, I guess. So I asked the state gov, “What’s the cheapest form of heat I can buy around here?” Here’s the answer, up to date to today:

Aw, man, that requires too much math for me anyway. I know for certain how many unfortunate romantic liaisons there are in a gallon of gin, but how many BTUs are in a gallon of kerosene or propane or bunker fuel will remain a dark and bloody mystery to me forevermore. And they all taste even worse than gin. Besides, even ill-informed me knows that the furnaces I’d need to burn any of that stuff cost too much money to be practical. I need better answers. Hey look, the government came through again:

 

I know a million anything sounds like a lot, but we need many millions of BTUs to live where we do. This chart is getting things done for me. Of course the prices were different back when I really needed this chart. A chicken egg didn’t cost four bucks back then. You could buy a house for twenty-five grand after the great recession did its work, and I did so. But the ratios were about the same.

So feast your eyes on “Electricity – Baseboard,” and compare it to whatever fuel you’re using. I was heating my house, sorta, using that method, and the only decision I had to make was to run electricity through the baseboard heaters and pay the power company in gold bullion, or to pile up ten dollar bills in the middle of the living room and burn them to keep warm. The cost was about the same.

We could rule out natural gas right away. We ain’t got none here. There aren’t enough people to make it worthwhile to run it out into the boonies, and even if you wanted to, the ground is so full of granite that you’d need Oppenheimer to get back to work to blast the way in for the pipe.

But hey, look at that firewood number. On a good day, it’s as cheap as natural gas. It’s about 20-percent of the cost of electricity. And believe you me, we got trees in Maine. And I could use an 80-percent discount. Only shoplifting and highway robbery pays better than that. And highway robbery in January in Maine is a tough gig, man.

Now this is where internet wags are going to weigh in and tell the world, from their apartment in Tallahassee, that a real man don’t buy firewood. Nosirreebob. You go out and chop down trees like Paul Bunyan and kill something on the way home for the pot. Listen to me folks: No you don’t. You buy firewood. Why? Because you need a big woodlot to cut your own firewood, and you don’t have one. Firewood sellers do.

Let’s do the math. How many cords of wood do we need? That’s easy.

Heating Load=House Area×Heat Loss Factor×Temperature Differential

So my equation goes: Heating Load=Ginormous Victorian dustcatcher x heat running out of every seam in the joint x Oh my god I have to make it 90 degrees hotter in here in February and still wear a sweater.

So I need about 8 cords of firewood. There’s something like 22 million BTUs in a cord of hardwood firewood, so we’d end up with 176, 000,000 BTUs languidly making their way out of my house over a heating season. Eight cords is a lot of wood.

A cord of wood is a stack 8′ long by 4′ high by 4′ deep. It’s 128 cubic feet. The firewood “junks” as we call a piece of firewood around here, are usually 16″ long. I’m not going to stack anything 4′ deep, because that’s not how you dry firewood. One junk deep is it. So I’ll need a pile 24′ long by 4′ high. Actually, I’ll need 8 of them. I certainly don’t want a single pile 4′ high, 192′ long, because I’ll start in my back yard and end up in the street our front, and the plow driver hates that.

So maybe you’re starting to see the problem with you can get your firewood for free if you’ll just cut it. Just stacking that pile is plenty of work, believe you me. We’re doing some math again, and not talking about how firewood warms you twice and similar shite from armchair Daniel Boones. It would take about 24 full-size trees to make 8 cords. A woodlot can produce 20 to 40 cords per acre, but that’s only if you treat it like Sherman treated Georgia. If you want wood every year, you can only cut down 1 or 2 cords a year per acre. I don’t own an 8-acre woodlot.

But what if I did? If I cut down 24 trees, and skidded them out of the mire, and cut them up (by the way, you don’t chop firewood. Ever. You cut it or saw it or split it or stack it. You don’t chop, unless you’re nuts), then split them and trucked them back to the house. You only needed about $100,000- worth of trucks and chainsaws and mauls and kevlar pants and earplugs and whiskey for your frostbite. If you were a pro, it would take you about 60 hours to do all that, working all the time. Then again, if you’re a pro, you’re selling firewood for $350 a cord to people like me, and you’ve got oil heat at your house.

[To be continued]