Logging on Many Choosing Firewood Over Costly Oil, Gas
Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
December 13, 2000
By Richard Higgins, Globe Staff
Early blasts of cold air and the high cost of home heating oil and natural gas are pushing firewood sales toward record levels and making dry, split logs for the stove or fireplace harder and harder to find.
Sales of cast-iron wood stoves, outfitted with devices to make them burn cleaner, are also up, dealers say, stoking the demand for forest, not fossil, fuels.
anything like this," said Roger Tetreault, owner of Tetreault & Sons Forest Management Products in Brimfield, which is logging 16 hours a day to keep up with demand.
Since August, Tetreault has sold 3,000 cords of firewood - twice what he had sold by this time last year. (A cord is a 4-by-4-by-8-foot stack of wood. "We could sell more but we can't go any faster," he said. Between dusk and 10 p.m., when he stops cutting, he added, "this place looks like Fenway Park during a night game."
Prices for seasoned wood, or logs left to dry three seasons before they are used, are $175 to $200 a delivered cord in Boston, about 10 percent more than last year, state officials said.
Seasoned firewood burns hotter and longer than fresh-cut logs.
In north-central Massachusetts, seasoned firewood costs about $140 a cord, compared to $85 two years ago, according to the Forest and Wood Products Institute, a state program at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner.
"We're seeing new people turning to firewood for the first time, or people who used to use it in the 1970s and early 1980s going back to it once they get their oil bill," said Joseph Smith, associate director of the program.
"I don't think there'll be an absolute shortage, because there's still a lot of wood coming from other New England states, but dry wood is going to be pretty hard to find."
Smith added that it could be especially hard for people who are not already on dealers' customer lists, a fact confirmed in interviews with a half-dozen firewood dealers.
"We're grasping for whatever we can get, and we're saving what we have left for customers who locked in," said Tetreault, who delivers in Worcester County, Eastern Massachusetts, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket.
Christina Coolidge of New Salem, a town near the Quabbin Reservoir, plans to burn much more wood this winter in the cast-iron stove she put in 10 years ago to supplement her family's all-electric central heating.
A librarian, Coolidge has six cords stacked at her house. With electric bills soaring, she estimates her savings could be $200 per month. "Wood can be dirty, and certainly not as easy as flicking a switch. But in terms of cost, it's worth it," she said yesterday.
Wood stove sales dropped in the 1980s after environmental agencies cited them as a source of pollution and called for tighter emission standards.
Today's wood stoves have tubes that help reburn the wood and remove particulates from emitted gases.
Sales of wood stoves are "through the roof," said Stephen Deroche, a salesman at the Chelmsford Fireplace Center. Deroche said that since Thanksgiving, he has sold a dozen iron or steel wood stoves, which cost from $600 to $2,500.
In Woburn, one of the larger Massachusetts firewood dealers, App Tree Inc., is running its "log buster" 24 hours a day. The buster is a $75,000 machine that can split a massive trunk up to 8 feet in diameter.
"It's so busy we're doing deliveries up to midnight," said owner Edward App.
The rush this year began in September, as homeowners stung by the spike in oil and natural gas prices last winter searched for cheaper ways to keep warm.
But economy is not the only factor. Steve Coates, the owner of Greenridge Landscaping in Andover, said sales of premium kiln-dried wood, which goes for $325 a cord, are up sharply. Coates calls his moisture-free, Vermont-grown and cured product "atmosphere firewood," while other dealers call it "designer firewood."
Last winter, Coates sold 180 cords to customers across the state and in southern New Hampshire. He has already sold that much this fall and expects to sell about 250 cords for the season.
"People are just more into the atmosphere of a fireplace," he said. "They like to come home and sit and relax in front of a fire. That's what I'm getting from my customers."
Massachusetts has about 225 companies that cut or distribute firewood, although the number fluctuates with ups and downs in the wood industry. The firewood industry began tapering off after World War II, surged after the oil crises of 1974 and 1979, then died down again by the late 1980s.
"In the 1970s, a lot of people were going back to wood stoves for home heating, and there were even people going out to buy a pickup and a chain saw to get their own wood," said Smith, head of the state wood products program.
The amount of heat produced by firewood depends on the type used. Dense hardwoods, such as white and red oak, sugar maple, hickory, and beech, are the most efficient, producing the same amount of energy per cord as 105 to 115 gallons of typical home heating oil.
Wood becomes more attractive when the price of oil rises over $1 a gallon, Smith said. Home heating oil in New England reached $1.56 per gallon in the first week of December, up from $1.09 in December 1999 and 80 cents in December 1998, according to the US Department of Energy.
The peak year for wood consumption was 1981-82, when 1 million cords of wood were burned in Massachusetts, according to state officials. By the early 1990s, that number had dipped to about 600,000 cords. Smith estimates that about 800,000 cords will be burned in Massachusetts this winter.
Oddly enough, one recent convert to "serious" wood heat is Smith's boss and the wood institute's director, Nick Weidhaas of Russell. Weidhaas, 61, has always burned firewood as a passion. But when he retires shortly, he plans to switch to an all-wood furnace.
"I have a wood lot, and cutting wood is going to be my retirement activity," he said. "It'll help alleviate the high cost of energy and keep me in shape, as long as I stay out of the way of falling trees."