Archeologists tell us that man has been burning wood for heat for nearly two million years. What the wheel didn’t change, fire did. Fire, more than any other discovery, makes everything else on Earth possible.
Over millenia, we humans naturally have found better ways to burn. We developed methods and appliances that are both more effective and more efficient, usually born of necessity or opportunity.
In this country, the first foundry making woodstoves began production in 1646. Less than a century later, in 1744, Ben Franklin gave us his classic cast-iron design, which did more with less. Market-driven progress continued through the first half of the 20th Century.
During the 1940s, nearly a quarter of US homes heated primarily with wood. That would decline to less than 1% by the time of the 1972 oil embargo, which renewed interest in wood heat. Sales of woodstoves skrocketed.
According to a study by the US Forest Service, in 1981 over 8% of homes named wood as their primary heat source. Fully 25% burned wood to some extent, and half of rural Americans burned wood.
Woodstove sales surpassed 1.5 million annually. To meet demand, there were an estimated 450 woodstove manufacturers in the US.
It was during this boom that I heated my small Connecticut home with wood. I brought in four to six cords a year to feed my old-school cast-iron stove.
Right about the time that I moved into a house with oil heat (and no woodstove), governments began to meddle. Oregon was first, in 1986 banning stoves like the one I’d used. That same year, New York threatened to sue the feds for not meddling nearly enough, and by 1988 the EPA had enacted a set of stringent certification standards.
The effects were disastrous. Wood-burning citizens’ choices suddenly were slashed to just 316 stoves. It’d get worse — even tighter standards issued in 1990 cut that number to 134 stoves.
A thriving industry was devastated, the regulatory burden forcing most companies out of business. Of 500 stove manufacturers in the mid-’80s, by 1992 only 50 were still around.
The popularity of wood heat, along with sales of stoves, waxed and waned with world events over the next two decades — Desert Storm, Y2K, etc. Regulations reared their head again during the POTUS FO-FO regime, which noticed that wood was the fastest-growing heating fuel in the US and couldn’t resist trying to kill it.
The EPA proposed new standards in 2009 and started enforcing them in 2015, then upped the onerous ante in 2017 and yet again in 2020. The selection of certified woodstoves, which had clawed back to about 550, was gutted to 230.
It’s beyond credible dispute that the feds, along with allies in states run by anti-Liberty progressives, mean to outlaw wood heat. That’s their goal. Recent history confirms it.
They all but killed an industry. They reduced and dictated consumers’ choices. State-certified woodstoves on the market today are complicated, maintenance-heavy and priced far beyond the reach of most Americans who, for financial reasons, choose to heat their homes with wood.
Deb and I made that choice in 2021. Facing a retail marketplace we couldn’t afford to enter, we looked for other options. Almost two years of shopping the secondary market landed us what we have now — a Hearthstone Shelburne, specifically a model #8371.
I included that model number for a reason. It fixes our woodstove’s date of manufacture as 2011 – 2012, which makes it a first-generation Shelburne. Succeeding versions were fitted with a catalyst to meet the EPA’s damnable 2015 regs. Ours lacks that feature, along with the mechanism that engages and disengages it and an absurd (and expensive) maintenance regimen.
We found our stove on Facebook Marketplace. We paid the seller $1,000 and spent about $100 more on repairs (touch-up paint and replacing a missing fire brick) and routine maintenance (installing new gaskets on the door and ash pan). So we have $1,100 invested in the woodstove itself.
To the best of my knowledge, it retailed originally for around $2,500. Street price for a new, current-generation Hearthstone Shelburne, identical to ours but with the government-mandated catalytic combustor, is a staggering $4,250.
Though our secondhand Hearthstone doesn’t meet current EPA standards (and we’re good with that), it is an “EPA woodstove.” It bears the scars of previous regulations claiming to reduce particulate emissions — a ceramic baffle and steel tubes in the ceiling of the firebox, for example, that enable a secondary burn. And it does make the stove more efficient.
But that feature already was in the marketplace as an option before the feds required it. Like electric vehicles and labor unions, I don’t object to the thing itself — I oppose State mandates that limit choices and assault individual Liberty.
Compared to the conventional box-and-pipe stove I tended in the 1980s, this Shelburne is more complicated. It also makes more heat with somewhat less fuel. That’s an improvement I welcome, but I give no credit to The Nanny State for it.
As for emissions, I couldn’t care less. I burn wood. That produces smoke. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the size of my “carbon footprint.”
I lit a Christmas fire in our woodstove this afternoon. As I gathered the first load of cordwood from the rack outside the cabin, I silently congratulated myself for having built something that keeps it out of the weather.
And the weather we’re getting for Christmas is wet. Between two and five inches of rain is expected by Saturday, with days in the 50s and 60s, nights in the 40s.
I started this fire the usual way, top-down. The draft set up quickly with the door ajar.
Satisfied, I latched the door but left the fresh-air control wide-open.
I added fuel a little at a time. Within 45 minutes of putting flame to tinder, flue temp was 475°F.
And it kept going up.
When the gauge topped 500°F, I throttled-back the fresh air and watched the needle return slowly to 450°F. I left it there and let the fire burn down some.
Deb came Home from a short day at work (the bank closed at 2pm), and she brought Breadeaux Pizza. I realize that’s not conventional Christmas Eve fare, but we’re not living a conventional American Life, so it’s a good match.
We’ll probably have leftover pizza for Christmas dinner. This year, that’s how we’re rollin’.
It’s good to be here. We love The Mountain and we love this Life, a more rustic existence than either of us has ever known. We feel the full breadth — and bear the full weight — of Liberty.
We presume no authority over others. We bow to no authority but our own.
We’re born-free citizens, not subjects of overbearing State that means to control how we travel, what we eat and drink, the way we defend Life, Liberty and Property, even how we heat our Home.
And you?
Merry Christmas.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB