The Advantages Of Wood Burning Cook Stoves
The next time you are at a Flea Market or an antiques store and you see an old fashioned cook stove, take another look at it. While it may look antique, something you would have seen in your great grandma's kitchen a hundred years ago, it is actually a piece of equipment that is on the forefront of energy and cost efficiency for the home. Don't believe me? Stop and think about it for a minute. Wood burning cook stoves perform two main functions with one inexpensive energy source: home heating and cooking. Cook stoves operate on wood, and if you can cut it yourself, the only real cost is for the wood cutting permits, which run about $10 a cord. Running wood burning cook stoves round the clock takes approximately five cords per month. If winter is five months long, then you would need 25 cords, which would cost you $250 in wood permits. Now compare that number to how much it costs to heat a small home during the winter months, added to how much it costs to operate a gas or electric stove. The amount of money that can be saved is substantial. Now, consider what operating a cook stove does for the environment. Wood is a renewable resource, and when taken straight from the forest, has no negative environmental impacts. Burning wood doesn't cause any type of pollution, and by taking wood straight from the forest, also doesn't require massive amounts of byproducts to get it ready for use in the home. You can't say both of these things about many other energy sources out there. The benefits of these stoves are pretty straight-cut, which is proven by their continued production. Many companies still manufacture wood burning cook stoves, which are often replicas of antique models with modern conveniences added. Despite this, wood burning stoves take some getting used to, as the art of cooking with wood heat is lost to most of the current generation. Fortunately there are many websites out there devoted to sharing knowledge about operating a wood burning stove. The best knowledge is probably going to be the knowledge you get from your own experience. But don't knock what others have to offer either. An example piece of advice from one website states that the old advice of burning dried potato peels to prevent creosote from building up in the chimneys of wood burning cook stoves is actually true. At around $1,500 for a new or antique wood burning cook stove, your start up costs for switching to this alternative source of energy is fairly small. Whether you decide to purchase a stove from a craigslist posting, or a brand new model from a European manufacturer, be sure to have it properly installed. From there, take the advice of others who are already taking advantage of this cost effective energy source, and enjoy learning new skills and helping out the environment at the same time. |