As oil prices rise, demand for firewood is hard to satisfy

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As oil prices rise, demand for firewood is hard to satisfy By Ralph Jimenez, Globe Staff, 12/3/2000

HICHESTER - It is already quite warm in the room but Robert Stamp put a few well-seasoned chunks of split maple on the fire anyway. The store is, after all, in the stove business and Abundant Life has wood to burn.

Customers who purchase woodstoves now may not be so lucky. ''The average price of a cord of wood now is $150 to $200, but everybody I know who deals in wood is out of it,'' said Stamp, one of the salespeople who has watched both wood and gas stoves fly out of the store in response to rising oil prices.

Heating oil last month averaged $1.58 per gallon - up from 98 cents per gallon last year - according to the Governor's Office of Energy and Community Services. Officials there expect the price to top $2 per gallon before the heating season is over, and more and more woodpiles are turning up in urban backyards.

Many people purchased woodstoves as a backup source of heat after the ice storm of 1998, or in response to a Y2K crisis that never materialized. Stove sales took off again last winter and then boomed this fall when buyers began to think that high oil prices may be with us for a while. Yet few people in a dot.com economy have stepped in to provide the fuel all those woodburners require.

''I have some friends in the logging business who say demand for firewood is up ten-fold and they just can't keep up with demand,'' Stamp said.

Wood was the nation's No. 1 fuel until 1885, when it was overtaken by coal. Coal was king until 1950, when it was displaced by oil, which remains the fuel of choice for most homes, according to the Department of Energy.

According to a draft report of a residential fuel use survey conducted for the governor's energy office this fall, 55.3 percent of all New Hampshire households burn oil - a drop from 59 percent in the 1996/97 survey. About 10 percent of the 400 households surveyed burn wood as a primary fuel source; 14 percent of the homes heated with natural gas, 10 percent with propane, 5 percent with kerosene and 4.8 percent with electricity.

''Over 40 percent [42.6] of all households indicated [high oil prices] will change the way they heat their home,'' the report said. The most common change: turning down the thermostat.

About one-quarter of all households burn wood for at least supplemental heat, though more homes are equipped to do so. Dealers selling through classified advertisements are often asking $200 and up for a cord of cut, split wood.

An honest cord when stacked should measure 4 feet wide, 4 feet high and 8 feet long, with only small gaps between pieces. The state Department of Agriculture has a full-time investigator devoted to firewood fraud, but if you want to complain, commissioner Steve Taylor has this warning:

''If you don't stack the wood within a reasonable time of delivery, say 48 hours, then we can't help you. It has to be a fresh crime. People can't let the wood sit in the driveway for two months.''

Even if you get full measure, however, burning wood at $200 per cord is not much cheaper than heating with oil priced at $1.58 per gallon.

One energy conversion calculator estimated the cost of heating a 2,000-square-foot home for one winter in a southern New England state with various sources of heat: $1,430 for oil; $1,180 plus sweat equity for wood at $200 per cord; $1,046 for natural gas, and $4,099 for electric heat at current New Hampshire prices.

A homeowner with no wood and money to burn could call John Pinkham of Londonderry. Pinkham, who is also known as the ''firewood guy,'' will deliver a half-cord of guaranteed kiln-dried, clean, bug-free hardwood to your home and stack it for $375. ''Pricey is what it is,'' said Pinkham, who advertises in newspapers and on his Web site, firewoodguy.com.

''Wood is wood. It all depends on how it is processed, the quantity, the quality of service you give people. A lot of dealers will take a log, cut it and split it, dump it in your yard and say it's seasoned,'' said Pinkham, who has been dealing in firewood and fragrant woods for barbecuing since 1988.

''We don't sell five or six cords to people who want to heat their homes,'' he said. ''We refer them to other people. You can still get all the seasoned wood you want but you aren't going to get it at $150 a cord. Firewood has been selling for about $100 per cord for the last 30 years while everything else has gone up. There's not much profit in $100-a-cord wood.''

Felling, hauling, bucking up, splitting, hauling and stacking firewood is hard, dangerous work with few takers.

''Firewood is a high-weight, high-volume, low-value product, so loggers are better off doing other things rather than selling firewood,'' said Charles Levesque, a forester and consultant with Innovative Natural Resource Solutions, an environmental consulting company in Concord.

A handful of big dealers sell much of the state's firewood, and many of those tend to keep prices steady because they serve regular customers, Levesque said.

Treehugger Farms in Westmoreland, a major firewood dealer in southwestern New Hampshire, raised its price this season for the first time in eight years. ''We only went up $5 in our area because this is a year-round business for us and people budget for their firewood. We also do a lot of fuel assistance business,'' said owner Donna Clark.

Treehuggers will deliver one cord of seasoned wood for $135 and three cords for $385. Clark does not expect to run out despite an early rush on woodstoves and wood. ''We usually have mountains of wood in the yard, mountains so high that we don't have to advertise because everybody sees them from the road,'' Clark said. ''We had a radio show out of here last July and I sold 15 stoves in three hours.''

Clark's cheapest stove sells for $799. Stoves at Chichester's Abundant Life store also start at about $800, with bigger, enameled models with glass fronts or soapstone inserts costing twice that or more.

''You can get all set up for $2,500 to $3,000 with a basic block chimney but the chimney will add value to your home,'' Stamp said. Payback for a woodstove could come in just a few years if oil prices continue rising, Stamp said.

Clark has been getting calls from Lebanon, Manchester and other cities well out of delivery range. Some people show up with their own trucks or pulling trailers with their cars.

Clark worries about the many elderly who rely on wood for heat or use it to replace unaffordable oil, and fears it may cut into budgets reserved for food or medicine. ''There is a poor old lady down the street who got her wood from a guy who charged her $100 for maybe half a cord of maple. This 96-year-old lady had to stack this green wood but she can't use it,'' Clark said.

Marie - who asked that her last name not be used - is a retired renter who works part time to pay her heating bill. She lives in a poorly insulated home in a small town near Manchester. When her estimated winter fuel bill came in this fall, she decided she would either have to move or freeze. She could not afford to prepay it any longer.

''Keeping it at 62 was all I could afford to do last year without running out of money, but this time it came to $2,400,'' Marie said. ''I work 20 hours a week now, but if I continued living here I'd have to work 10 hours a day five days a week to pay that bill.''

Nor was switching to wood heat an option. ''My daughter paid $80 a cord for nice seasoned wood last year, but she had to pay $175 this year. At some point it's going to be cheaper to burn furniture,'' said Marie, who is moving to an apartment complex for seniors where heat is included in the rent.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/338/newhampshire/As_oil_prices_rise_demand_for_firewood_is_hard_to_satisfyP.shtml

Ralph Jimenez can be reached via e-mail at Jimenez@Globe.com.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 03, 2000


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