The farm came with a big old farmhouse and a lot of wood.
Our farmhouse is the typical product of New England -it was built over time. People used to build the house they could afford, then expand and add on as needed or as they made more money. The original house was about 20’x22′ and contructed in the 1740’s. Both the house and the food heated entirely by wood. In the late 1760’s the house was added onto again with a redesigned fireplace with two bake ovens and a fireplace in the upper bedroom chamber! Again, all wood to heat the house and cook the meals.The earliest sections of the house make up the “ell”. The farm really prospered in the early 1800’s and the family added on again in 1825 with the large house pictured in front (picture above). This new house included a new kitchen fireplace with bake oven, and a fireplace in every room, including bedrooms. By the 1850’s the house added a large cast iron wood/coal cookstove in the kitchen, as well as a coal furnace that vented hot air to the upper rooms. I’m not sure when the coal furnace was replaced with an oil boiler and hot water radiators, but I’ll take an educated stab at the 1920-30’s. Our house had electricity early on for these parts, so it’s possible that’s when the heating transition occurred. 🙂
In 2008 we added new housing built for our amazing employees from Jamaica, who come to us through the H2A Guest-Worker Program. Their house has insulation, new windows and electrical plugs in all the convenient locations 😉 That’s the last portion of house you see in the picture.
The wood shed serves for the kitchen fireplace for cooking and warmth.
When we moved in we used a couple of the fireplaces and burned a lot of oil, very inefficiently, in an super old boiler. When we were able to afford it, we installed a new, efficient oil boiler, including radiators upstairs to take the edge of the freezing temperatures in the bedrooms. One dreadful winter, we spent $10,000 on oil to heat the house! That was with the thermostat set at 60 and only the heaters on in the kid’s bedrooms.
Meanwhile, Glenn had been busy clearing the edges of the fields for years and we had plenty of wood…we had been here long enough that he was re-trimming hedgerows he had cut 10 years before. Lots of people around us had installed wood boilers outside, but Glenn simply would not go for it because the emitted a lot of particulate and often blanketed the whole area with an acrid, smelly smoke. In comes the gasifier wood boiler. These efficient boilers burn the wood and utilizes a secondary combustion chamber and a controlled stream of super-heated air to combust the smoke and air mixture.
We added on with ANOTHER farm building. We designed it to look like an historic carriage shed (pictured above) and it houses the wood boiler, as well as about 16 cords of wood (pictured below).
The inside of the carriage shed today, about 8 cords of wood have been burned.
Now the entire house is heated with an environmentally safe, Econoburn wood boiler with our efficient oil boiler as backup. The wood is cut off the farm (gotta keep clearing those field-sides), heats the house, AND doesn’t emit particulate into the atmosphere. It’s all good!
And look, the history of heating the house has come full circle – WOOD IS GOOD.
To be honest, it’s a lot of work: must cut the wood, split the wood, move the wood to the yard, stack the wood, etc, etc. It’s definitely not he easy way out but IT IS sustainable and eco-friendly.
