In today’s world, we are all looking to save money wherever we can. Many of us know that reducing utility bills is a feasible way to save money, but struggle to come up with more creative ways to reduce these bills other than to make sure lights are turned off, and possibly putting plastic over leaky windows to prevent heat loss.
However, there is an effective way to greatly reduce your monthly utility bills. An outdoor wood furnace can be used to heat your home and your water.
While it is true that you will have to invest some money initially, particularly with installation, the savings will soon outweigh the upfront money that was needed. Here are the top five ways an outdoor wood furnace will save you money.
Cheap Energy Source
Without a doubt, wood is a less expensive resource than gas, oil or electric. In addition to the cost savings to purchase them, trees are a renewable resource, so you don’t have to worry about the rising costs of trees due to a tree shortage.
If you live in a rural area or have timber in your backyard, you can heat your home for the cost of a couple of gallons of gas and a bit of manual labor with a chainsaw.
Easy Installation
Outdoor wood furnaces are easily installed or integrated into existing heating systems. As mentioned before, it will cost some money to have the unit installed, but the savings will quickly outweigh the cost.
Since outdoor wood burners are easy to install, the labor to install them is relatively low when compared to other home improvement projects, and definitely lower when compared to the cost of replacing a traditional furnace that uses oil, gas or electricity to function.
Less Fuss, Less Mess
Since outdoor wood burners are not inside your home, you are saving money on the maintenance that has to be done inside your home because of the damage that can be caused by a traditional furnace.
With an outdoor wood burner, your home is not subjected to soot, ashes, smoke, or odors on the walls and ceilings of your home. Instead, all of the wood burning is contained in an outside building.
What does this mean for your home? This means you will spend less time cleaning up dust, ashes, and smoke that have made a mess in your home. You will also not have to repaint walls in your home to get rid of the smoky smell that traditional wood burning stoves can leave in your home.
If you currently use a traditional wood burning stove and store the wood in your home or garage, you will experience even less mess than traditional furnace users because you will no longer need to store wood close to your home.
Instead, you can leave the wood outside, where it belongs, near the outside wood burner. This means you will not have to deal with messy wood and the bugs and issues that can arise from having wood in the house.
Better Home Insurance Rates
Traditional wood burning stoves can have a negative impact on your homeowners insurance policy because of the risk that a wood burning stove brings to your home. Also, using a traditional furnace that burns oil, gas, or electricity can impact your home insurance rates.
However, with an outdoor wood burner there is no risk of fire or explosion. Why is this? This is because the only open flame for the outdoor wood burner is at least 30 feet, potentially up to 200 feet, from the home.
This distance ensures that if the unlikely event of a fire in an outdoor wood burner did occur, it would likely not impact your home.
Insurance companies are aware of the safety benefits of an outdoor wood burning stove, and that equates to lower insurance premiums for people who choose to use an outdoor wood burner to heat their home.
Better Air Quality in your Home
During the winter months, many home owners and their occupants suffer from allergies that are largely brought on by the change in air quality in their home.
Allergy sufferers are forced to spend money on doctor’s appointments, over-the-counter medications, and prescriptions to combat the effects their current heating source has on their allergies.
Unfortunately, the only true cure for them is when the heating source is turned off for the warmer months of the year. With an outdoor wood burner, allergy suffering homeowners and occupants can save their hard-earned money since outdoor wood burners do not affect the quality of air in the home at all.
As you can see, outdoor wood burners offer home owners and business owners a plethora of savings in a financial category — utilities — that some people may accept and continue to pay, even though the rates continue to rise and homeowner’s wallets aren’t getting any bigger.
Don’t let the initial cost of the outdoor wood burner and its installation affect your decision to change the way you heat your home or business because the potential savings will quickly outweigh your initial cost.
