Heating Your Homestead

Heat is about as basic as shelter. Many different options exist for providing heat for your home. Here are few ideas.

Wood Facts

An estimated 75% of the earth's wood is used for heating. Wow! Given how much is wasted in out-dated building codes it is hard to believe that burning it for heat uses even more.

Wood is a "low grade" energy resource, meaning that it takes quite a stack of wood to deliver very much energy.

Wood heating is a popular alternative because it is dead-simple to do and very cheap.

Hydronic Heating

This is a system where hot water is circulated through pipes buried in the foundation. This warms the entire floor and creates the most comfortable heat of any system on the face of the planet! Commercial systems use fuel fired furneses, but an owner built system can be easily adapted to use a passive solar hot water heater with a fuel fired furance as an optional backup.

Passive Solar Systems

Your living space can be heated a number of ways. The simplest in many respects is to design your home with south facing windows. The sun does the rest. Regulation of indoor temperature can be tedious depending on the amount of window space and the overall design of the house.

Or a sun room can be used to create hot air which is circulated via a blower into the rest of the house. The blower can be turned off to keep the majority of solar energy from entering the dwelling. Naturally, this is does require some electrical power to drive the circulating fan.

Hot water can also be used. A passive solar hot water system can be sized to provide not just domestic hot water but enough hot water for interior heating as well. The hot water can be circulated through baseboard registers, through a central heat exchanger when air is warmed as in a standard furnace, or through in-floor piping that heats the entire floor.