Here in Atlantic Canada, winter goes on and so do the heating costs. In fact, we’ll likely be heating through the month of May. It’s a constant search for an affordable method of doing that.

In southern Ontario where we spent the first fifty years of our lives, I always lived in houses heated with natural gas. It was just always there and I admit that I didn’t give heating in Nova Scotia the thought it deserved before we moved here.

Our Nova Scotia home is a renovated, but still old and draughty farm house built in 1878. It’s heated by an old wood furnace in the basement, and backed up by an oil-burning unit down there as well. The oil furnace is necessary and kicks in when we’re away for the day–or more–, when I’m too sick to negotiate the cellar stairs to feed the wood fire, sometimes in the wee hours of very cold nights, and for heating in the shoulder season when wood is just too warm.

When we moved here in 2003, firewood was $90 a cord. Since there is no ambient heat from the furnace the way there would be with a wood stove on the main level, we found we needed eight to ten cord to get through the winter. Clear cutting is allowed here so our hillsides are quickly being denuded of their woodlots and this year the price of firewood has crept to $200 a cord. Wood heat seems worth it, though, as it is a toasty warm.

In addition to the cost, wood heat is a lot of work. The basement will hold three or four cord but first the wood has to be thrown through the basement window one junk at a time. Then, of course, it must be stacked in the cellar. The wood that’s left outside has to be stacked & covered until such time as the basement needs to be filled again and the wood restacked once more. More than once, we have been caught short with no wood in the basement and no access to the woodpile because of snow and ice.

When that happens, we fall back on oil. We have a small (half) tank that holds about 300 litres (approximately 80 gallons). At the time of last week’s fill-up, oil was $1.02 litre (about $3.85 U.S. gallon). Translated, that means that a tank of oil that costs $295. will last 7-10 days. That’s anywhere from $900 to $1,100 per month–and it’s not even a comfortable heat.

Are there alternatives? Oh yes – and other parts of the property to heat. I’ll explore that in another post.