Wood is tremendously cheaper if you have a modern catalytic (or burn tube) stove and buy your wood in the spring (or ideally the previous spring) so you are using dry wood.

If you have an old 70's stove and are burning "seasoned" wood that you bought in September... you probably aren't saving much.

The difference is because the amount of BTUs (heat) that can be extracted from a chunk of wood depends on:

• How much moisture is in the wood. Fresh cut maple or birch could be as much as 45% water by weight. If you burn it when it is wet, you are expending an enormous amount of heat energy to boil off the water before the cellulose can be turned into heat. Dry (less than 20% moisture content) wood produces almost double the amount of heat.

• How efficient your stove is at turning burning wood into heat. This comes down to whether you have a modern stove that is built to combust the smoke or not. A modern stove can get up to twice the amount of heat from the same chunk of wood as an older stove.

Put these two variables together and that's how you get some people who burn 3 cords a winter and some people who burn 9 cords a winter. Obviously 3 cords is cheaper.