My husband Ed is in a league all his own when it comes to saving energy and living frugally. If I had known that Living with Ed was reality show material, I would have called Hollywood years ago. Looks like I missed the boat on that one. So I’ll just give you a little peek into my own little reality show instead:
- Ed turns off our furnace and water heater when we leave town. For two days.
- He unscrews random light bulbs throughout the house to save energy. And yes, they are all CFL so that’s a savings of roughly 60¢ a year. Per bulb.
- Pop cans are important to Ed, and are collected at work or in the ditch. Doesn’t matter. I often have to talk him down from stopping the car, but I have gotten totally used to beer cans rolling around in the minivan. Some of them get turned in to our local bottle return, but most of them are stashed in the garage for a dryer vent heat exchanger he has designed.
- Ed is a hard-core, skilled DIYer and tackles every home improvement project himself. Then he straightens every nail and saves every board for the next project.
- His poor little car gets enlisted to haul home whatever treasure he digs out of the trash trailer at work. Office chairs, box fans, wood pallets, small engines. He has a soft spot for abandoned items, and brings them home to live with us. Currently his car is filled with remnant rolls of insulation from a construction site near work.
- That internal light in our microwave? You know, the one that helps you see if your bowl of oatmeal is overflowing? Disconnected. It drives me crazy, but it saves us an average of 2¢ a year.
The man is nuts. Good thing I adore him so much, which makes living with (my) Ed such a fun adventure. This isn’t to say I agree with all of his cockamamie ideas. No, my friends, but I must pick my battles wisely, for the sake of the planet and my sanity.
However, when we moved into our current house two years ago, and Ed suggested swapping out the natural gas fireplace for a wood burning stove, I was completely on board.
Both of us grew up in homes heated by wood stoves, and two out of our last three homes have all had wood stoves. We love it. There is just something about the constant, penetrating heat from burning wood that you can’t beat with other methods. We also have forced air heat in this home and have had electric heat in others. Those work fine, but don’t provide the same cozy feel and steady heat as good ol’ wood.
So that was a major motivator for us. The other factor, of course, was the huge savings in our energy bills. We’re talking hundreds of dollars a year! Leave my microwave alone, Ed, we have bigger fish to fry.
We wrapped up our wood stove installation two months ago, and we could not be happier with the change. It is seriously one of those relatively small changes that has totally improved the feel (and temperature!) of our home.
In the next two posts, I will be sharing all the details about what we spent to make this swap, as well as what it will save us in the long run. I’ll also share some tips for finding firewood without breaking the bank. Or really spending any money at all. Even better.
Stay tuned! And stay warm this week! Yikes, it’s cold out.
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One tip for using a fan to disperse the heat around the house is to focus on blowing the cold air (close to the floor) back to the stove or out of a room verse trying to blow warm air into the room. On side note this works will in summer too. Just try to blow the hot air out of your house verse trying to blow cold evening air in.
So this topic brings to mind a question that has started rattling around my brain recently, how does one balance the time frugality takes with the savings created? Or put another way, how do I spend the most time on the things that save me the most money? Hats off to Ed, I love the passion, but for me unscrewing light bulbs for a combined savings of less than a dollar per year makes me wonder if I could spend that time doing something with more return?
Insert sarcasm. 🙂 I enjoy giving Ed a hard time about his nutso energy habits, so that was written tongue in cheek.
The 5 seconds it takes my husband to unscrew a light bulb is totally worth it to him. Saving energy is his hobby and his passion; it’s just the way he’s wired so whether he is saving .02 or $200/year, it’s worth it to him.
I, on the other hand, need to see a noticeable, measurable impact in our life/budget to make it worth my time. Hence the reason I was so excited about our wood stove project. Here’s a post on that: http://www.frugallivingnw.com/tips-tricks/making-vs-buying/
Yeah a wood stove is huge boon to the budget for sure, and like you mention in the post the way it makes the room feel is unbeatable! Since my comment was a bit of a tangent I was wondering does your site have something like a forum where people can bounce ideas off this community? I realize that running this site is a big workload and that such a thing might be too much but I thought I’d ask.
So I have an ignorant question. What exactly is the difference between a wood burning fireplace and a wood stove?
Good question! According to the hubs, a wood-burning stove is much more efficient than a fireplace. A fireplace sends most of the heat and unburned smoke up the chimney; the heat entering the room is radiant. An efficient wood stove burns the wood and the smoke, sending less hot air out of the house and more into the room.
I think you’re married to my husband!!
We put in an high efficient wood stove too, he saves wood from construction sites, He wants to build a solar heater for the water heater, he just put the microwave and toaster on a extra switch so every time I open the microwave door I think it’s dead LOL
Ha! It’s nice to know I’m in good company. Ed is dying to do the solar water heater thing, too.
I want one so badly. I use to burn wood with an airtight stove when I lived in Ca. Now I am here and our OLD house has an oil heater. I do have allergies to smoke hence my hesitation but currently we are using electric. So now I don’t know what to do.
You made me laugh! My husband is exactly like Ed. You didn’t mention the refrigerator light though… did Ed let you keep your refrigerator light? Mine is off 🙁
Noooo! Don’t give him any ideas. 🙂
Burning wood may save you money but it highly pollutes the air and makes it impossible for some of us to even be able to breathe. I have asthma and your “savings” come at cost to many of us. I can’t even go outside on stagnant days when the neighbors behind me are pumping smoke into the air. Wood burning for fuel should be banned in urban areas. Period.
I suppose this could be said about any decision; ultimately they all impact others in some way. Our current wood stove is incredibly efficient. When you are outside our home, you can hardly even tell we are burning wood. It burns cleanly and emits very little smoke. We also live in a more rural neighborhood, outside city limits. You bring up a good point about wood stoves in urban areas though! At the very least, an efficient stove should be required.
We’ve had a woodstove since we built it 26yrs ago and love it, but even though our woodstove is certified there are many days a year that the air is stagnant and we get a burn ban—So b/f you swap out a gas stove or insert check your local clean air commission and see what they say—Unfortunately, most burn bans occur when its real cold outside 🙁
Do you live in the Puget Sound area? I think these regulations are regional. We follow outdoor bans, but our area doesn’t have indoor bans.
Our old stove was not efficient, and it definitely smoked up the air on stagnant days. However, when we sold the house, we found out the stove wasn’t on the approved list and had to be removed and destroyed before the sale. We hated to do it, but it’d an easy way for them to slowly get rid of inefficient stoves. RIP, beloved Earth Stove.
I am excited for this series, Emily! I’m sitting here by my gas (guzzling) fireplace wishing we had a cozy wood burning stove instead! Did you put it in yourselves? Did you buy it new, or find a second-hand stove? What kinds of things do you need to do to covert your gas fireplace to wood?
Yes, we did it ourselves with a used stove. I’ll share all those details next week!
Emily, email me and I will tell you where you can pick up all the free firewood you want (from my back yard). I took down a tree this year and couldn’t afford to have it hauled away. It will require a chainsaw.
Thanks, Denise! We are currently stocked on wood (piles everywhere!), but I’ll pass this on to my woodsman (Ed).
My husband turns off our water heater when we leave for short times and unscrews random light bulbs. I’ll think for days that I need to replace a bulb only to find out that I just need to screw it in! I know now to remind him the second we get home from out of town to turn on the water heater so I can have a hot shower.
Yes, I can totally relate…
I am curious, did you buy the insert new or used and did you install it yourselves?
Totally agree, about the woodstove! Put one in our home in 2001, and found we love it so much, we NEVER turn on any other form of heat. We cut, split and stack our own wood, so to save even more. Our woodstove paid for itself several times over. Best investment ever! 🙂