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Buying a stove is one thing; figuring the economics of woodburning is quite another. The countrified city man who got Linda stuck in the mud has eight cords of wood, harvested from his own property, split and stacked under cover. He will heat his house this year for about $100 —$55 for chain-saw parts, the rest for saw and truck fuel as well as stovepipe. Electric heating, which is built into his house, would cost far too much to think about; for oil, he would have to pay about $1,100 for the winter (150 gal. of No. 2 oil are about equal in heating power to a cord of dry hardwood). So the amateur woodcutter has about $1,000 to pay himself for two months of intermittent hard labor, and six months of the wood lugging, floor sweeping, ash hauling and stovepipe reaming that are attendant on wood fires.
Stove owners who must buy some, or all, of their wood, on the other hand, clearly are not saving much money. Merle Schotanus, president of the New Hamp- shire Timberland Owners Association, calculates that a cord of dry hardwood stores the heating power of $135.90 worth of 90¢ oil. He lops an arbitrary $25.90 from the cordwood figure to allow for the fuss and muss of wood, and arrives at a break-even point of $110 a cord for wood-burners. Dry firewood sells for $80 to $90 in rural New England, for $90 in the Middle West, hovers between $150 and $200 near the big East Coast cities, and has climbed to $225 in Manhattan. (Artificial logs made of sawdust and paraffin, and sold at most supermarkets, can be dangerous if used in woodburning stoves, and are no great bargain at about $1.40 for a three-hour log.) Still, even half a cord of firewood stacked in a garage is a comforting source of emergency heat for buz zards and supply interruptions. When a 32-mile stretch of Virginia's Skyline Drive was opened up to wood collectors by the National Park Service last October, hundreds flocked in every weekend. In Nevada, U.S. Forest Service wood collection permits that once were free now cost $3.50; in California, they go for as much as $20. As one sturdy New Jersey wood scrounger put it, "Every log burned is a lump of caviar extracted from the mouth of an Arab."
Not enough caviar to hurt, however: even in Vermont, which is expected to burn more than 400,000 cords this winter (up from 300,000 last year), the heating oil saved amounts to only 60 million gal., about a third of the state's annual consumption in recent years. In the meantime, new problems are cropping up. Wood thefts are on the rise: one well-equipped thief got away with a haul of 35 cords from a lumberyard in northern New Hampshire. And there are more and more warnings of pollution from wood smoke. Wood has little sulfur, compared to coal, and burning it adds nothing to the atmosphere's carbon dioxide sum. But participates from inefficient burners can polute in congested areas.
With that in mind, Vail, Colo., a densely settled ski resort, has limited the number of wood fireplaces or wood stoves to one per dwelling.