Heating Our Home

It's getting cold, our low a couple nights ago was eight degrees! And we won't even talk about the wind chill! So now we get our first taste of winter in our new wood-stove-less house. This is the first time in many many years I haven't had wood heat and I already dislike it very much. Our house is heated with an oil-fired furnace, which is diesel  (seemed weird to me, but I hear they do this quite a bit in the East. If you live out East, do you know if that's true?). So first up we had to figure out how to check the level in our underground fuel tank.  Which you have to use this big metal stick for. Which we had to go get from the scrap metal pile because we thought it was trash and were throwing it away. Oops. Anyway, we have to dip it into the oil through a pipe coming up from the tank and then measure how many inches are covered in oil when we take it out.

Then we have to look up the number of inches on this little scrap of paper which tells us how many gallons we have in the tank.

Then we write a check for over a  thousand dollars to put enough fuel in to hopefully last the winter with the help of extra electric heat.

Oh, and it's still much cooler in here than I like. But I don't want to turn up the heat because of the cost. (I know, I know, just get another sweater!)

I really miss having a wood stove.

We had Woodstock Soapstone wood stoves in two of the other houses I lived in and they are awesome.   I always kept our house really warm (probably a lot warmer than most people would like). We put in electric heating for back up, but very rarely used it. I loved loading up the stove and getting the house up to about eighty-five degrees, then opening a window a little to have that winter fresh air smell in the house but still be toasty warm! Which sounds kind of weird, opening windows in the winter, but really, it's great! 

For this year, we will just have to make do, (and of course be very thankful that we have heat at all!) but it's definitely a priority in the Spring to get a new stove and get rid of this furnace. Do you heat with wood? What do you love (or not love) about it?