High heating fuel prices make wood attractive option

MARY LOCHNER

October 09, 2008 at 12:25PM AKST

With stove oil prices at staggering highs, Bristol Bay residents are casting about for the wave of the heating energy future.

The stakes: survival.

Winter is long and temperatures dip to the tens below zero, making heating energy a necessity that is increasingly unaffordable on the old paradigm of using stove oil to stay warm.

Residents are looking back to the future. They’re increasingly turning to wood.

“I’ve seen a lot more wood-gathering activity going on than I’ve seen in past years,” said Rick Tennyson, land manager for local Native Corp. Chuggiung, Ltd. The corporation owns much of the local land in Dillingham that isn’t privately owned by other individuals. Residents who don’t own forested land can apply for a permit to fell dry, beetle-kill spruce trees on Chuggiung lands, at no cost and with no limit to how many of the dead trees they can take.

Tennyson said he thinks most people have started relying more on wood stoves they already own, while others have turned to the new, high-efficiency wood boiler for salvation from high heating fuel prices.

The current price for the most commonly burned heating fuel is $6.14 a gallon. Representatives from local fuel distributors Bristol Alliance and Delta Western don’t have predictions on what the price of fuel will be during winter, but even at today’s price, residents will easily be facing heating costs of thousands of dollars.

If someone has the money upfront to invest in a wood boiler, weaning from stove oil could be an attractive option financially. Tennyson said he bought a wood boiler to heat the home for his family of six before last year’s winter, and it’s likely to pay itself off within three and a half years. He said that previously, when he used both an oil and a wood stove to heat his home, Tynneson’s family used about a thousand gallons of fuel and three or four cords of wood to heat the home per year. A cord of wood is a bundle four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long.

With the boiler, he doesn’t use heating oil at all, and uses ten cords of wood per year.

Dillingham resident Russell Nelson estimates he paid $1,200 a month in heating fuel last winter. He now has a wood boiler that, with all costs taken into account, he estimates he paid $9,000 for.

“The idea is to save money, not get something fancy,” he said.

But the economics of wood aren’t necessarily as simple as calculating the cost of a new wood boiler against the cost of continuing on with an oil stove.

Tennyson said he’s noticed that residents now have to go farther from the side of the road and into the forest on Chuggiung land to find areas that haven’t already been picked clean of free dry wood. He said he’s noticed the trend increasing over the last few years. Outside of Dillingham lies forested land colored gray from all the beetle-kill spruce, he said. But the trick is in getting to it.

“It’s hard to get to,” Tennyson said. “If you go out with a snow machine, you could only haul a partial tree in one trip. It’s costly to go out five miles to get that each trip.”

The increasing scarcity of easily-accessed free wood could put a slow to the wood trend for Dillingham in general, but it’s not dampening the enthusiasm of some for switching to wood.

“I think most people are sticking with traditional wood stoves to try to knock their heating bill down,” Nelson said. “But there are more people putting in wood boilers. You can see them coming in on the barge. At least a half dozen came into Dillingham this summer that I know of.”

Mary Lochner can be reached at 907-348-2438, or 800-770-9830, ext. 438.