Here in Alaska there are several options for heating homes. If you live in a city, there’s probably natural gas. Out where I live natural gas hasn’t made it to us yet, and probably won’t in my lifetime.

The options out here for most people are oil, propane, or wood. Propane is very expensive so not many people use this as their main source of heat. Oil is the preferred method of heat, utilizing either a forced air system, an in-floor heat system, or a Toyo stove (or 2), all burning oil. The other option is wood.

We use 2 types of materials for heat, wood and coal (most people aren’t set up to burn coal). My husband and I have burned wood for the majority of our lives, starting out with woodstoves in our living quarters first, and then about 10 years ago we upgraded to a boiler system that works with the in-floor heat that we hadn’t hooked up until we got the boiler.

I love this system, and love my warm floors and the consistent temperatures that the in-floor heat provides. I do miss the woodstove once in a while because I like that instant warmth when I come in from the cold that I was able to get with the woodstove. We do still use the woodstoves in the spring and fall to take the chill off when the boiler is shut down.

Each year we pick a material to burn. This past winter we used only coal. This is nice as it’s a trip to Healy, Alaska once every 3-6 weeks depending on how cold it’s been, taking about 7 loads of coal for the winter. Coal takes no work during the summer either, and the trailer we haul the coal in sits near the boiler so it’s easy to just shovel coal directly from the trailer to the boiler. The disadvantage is that it costs money, which we save if we know that’s the directions we want to go.

Wood on the other hand is free, or at least mostly free. There is the expense of fuel and oil for the chainsaws, the 6 wheeler, and the backhoe, all of which we use to get trees out of the woods, cut into length, and hauled back to the woodshed. There is also the cost of time. But we have a lot of firewood around our property.

Not too long ago we had the spruce bark beetle come through our area and we now have a large amount of dead spruce trees that are still standing. These are a huge fire danger so we have spend the last 5-6 years cutting down all these trees and utilizing them for firewood (there are still so many more to cut).

If it’s our plan to exclusively burn wood, we spend many hours in the evenings and on Saturday’s all through the summer gathering wood. If not, we still cut down wood, but more at our leisure for just in case.

We have an area on our property that is across a swamp. The edge of the swamp has many dead spruce, but in the summer we haven’t been able to go get them dragged back to use. It freezes in the winter, but there’s usually so much snow that we can’t get the equipment over there.

This year we didn’t get much snow, but a lot of rain, so we were able to get out and get a large portion of that area thinned out from the dead spruce. We definitely have not cut enough for a whole winter yet, but we are glad we were able to get that part of the property finished off.