I enjoy the part about "Heat? Well...I'm sure something will happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans there."
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I live in the northwest, so I can't speak to upstate NY, but downed trees on state and federal land near roads is free to take. Every day there's people posting rounds of wood for free to take.
It's hard work, but it's good exercise and rewarding.
There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
I feel like this is really stretching the definition of "$0".
If you're living on $432 / month and working 30-40 hours at this cashier job then using your off days to grab and process wood is honestly pretty miserable. There are slums in developing countries with higher standards of living because they can heat their "house" (read: tent or hut) with oil.
He also mentions other forms of employment, like raising rare herbs, so maybe he's got a little homegrown operation going that doesn't take much time.
Other than that, again, not sure how different it is from living slums in underdeveloped countries. Me, I'd rather just save up and buy some oil.
.. a cargo bike might be a better choice
We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.
Say you do have a wooded plot, the first year or two it might not be so bad, lots of wood near the edges where you can drive up to to load and move, but what about after that when you have to go deeper into the woods? You need to get in there, it may not be accessible by truck or get swampy where you will get stuck, and now you are considering a tractor or other vehicle, a decent expense to obtain, in order to not have to carry all your wood an armload at a time through the woods longer and longer distances. Chains and gas and oil for cutting it aren't expensive but not free, nor is maintaining a gas chainsaw if you seriously use it for all your heating wood, doubly so if you aren't already mechanically inclined enough to repair engines. And then you still have to split it. There are cheap splitters, but cheap spliters will only split the wood that took little effort to split with an axe, and less than half the wood you cut is going to be that easy to split straight grain wood, so you are either going to need more for a splitter or to be physically fit and capable enough to split a lot of gnarly wood by hand. Some people enjoy it for the exercise, I do, but not everyone is up to it, and it is such a hard physical activity that you need to be in good health to maintain it.
Also splitting mauls are a gimmick, they take far more effort than a long handled axe and are only a good option if you are otherwise incapable of using an axe. Speed applies more kinetic energy than mass, kinetic energy is half of the mass times velocity squared, so doubling the mass you are throwing around is far less effective at applying force into splitting than trying to double your swing speed. And that is the biggest "trick" to a good axe split, swing speed, which is why you want a long handle. Mauls are far slower than an axe, take more energy than an axe to lift and swing, and are far less capable of splitting more gnarly wood as the more aggressive edge angle has a much harder time splitting into and separating the grain as much of the energy merely crushes wood fibers before it bites in and starts wedging. If an axe can't do it, a maul won't do it even more, and then you are getting into a sledge hammer and steel wedges anyways, and a wedge and sledge are easier to set and more maneuverable than a maul with a big ass handle on it.
Burning wood is a decent way to heat a house if someone is always at the house in regular 8 hour intervals or more, but it has a lot of caveats and is not what I would call free. More like subsidizing a portion of the cost of with hard physical labor.
I live in a country where for half of the population wood is the default fuel. There's a reason it's a lot of peoples job.