Heating the House

          My childhood home, in Sandy Springs, Georgia, was heated with an enormous oil furnace in the basement. A thermostat was mounted on the wall of the sunporch, upstairs. With seven people in the house, usually someone was cold and someone was hot, so the thermostat was now turned up, now turned down. When someone turned it up or when the furnace automatically started, it came into action with a loud "whoosh" that terrified me as a child because I knew it meant a fire had started in the basement. Fire! Wasn't that dangerous, to have a fire in the house? 

         When I lived in Europe in the sixties, first in France, then in England, everyone I met spoke with admiration and envy about central heating in America. In England all the rooms I was ever in were heated with tiny gas stoves set in the old woodburning fireplaces. Many were operated by coin insertion. When I went to the rooms of my professor, Sita Narasimhan, for tutorials in Elizabethan literature at Cambridge University, we would sit close to the tiny gas fire, swathed in thick wool sweaters, sipping sherry and talking about Shakespeare and Spenser. Every so often, Sita would insert another coin into the heater.

          Ironically, given both my childhood fear of having a fire in the house and the envy of Europeans for American central heating, I have for the past fifty years, here in Oregon, chosen to heat with wood. In the tiny house I built here on the mountain, for $300 and poorly insulated, I spent many snowy days huddled close to the stove. I liked seeing the fire through the stove's window. I liked the exercise of chopping wood ("Chop your own wood and it heats you twice," I would say as I swung the axe), and I liked the elemental connection of building a fire.

           Therefore, when I built a new house, ten years ago, I never considered heating with anything besides wood. Because building codes required a second source if I heated with wood, I did install electric wall heaters, which I have never used. Needing a larger and better stove, I bought an old Vermont Castings stove that my son found for $300 on Craig's List. It was quaint and pretty, but because it had been sitting outside for years before I bought it, by the time I had had it for another nine years, it had begun to wear out. It stopped holding a fire for more than a few hours, wasn't heating the house, and was creating volumes of ashes.

The old Vermont Castings stove

I wasn't about to resort to my electric heat source, so, just before Christmas, I bought a new stove, from Home Comfort, by repute the best stove store in the Rogue Valley, a reputation I like to hear because my husband owns it. With Mike's advice, I chose a Jøtul, the right size for my house and Quaker-like in the simplicity of its design.

          When the Home Comfort installers, Brian and Jeptha, dismantled the Vermont Castings stove, they discovered a hole worn through the metal in the interior top of the stove. No wonder it hadn't been working well! Jeptha and Brian wrestled the Vermont Castings stove onto a dolly and wheeled it to their truck, then brought in the Joøtul and the new stovepipe.

Brian, Jeptha, and Mike,
moving the old stove out

While they worked, efficiently and pleasantly, to put it in place, Brian told me that he had worked for Home Comfort for fourteen years. "Mike is a great boss," he said. "You don't stay with a company that long unless you like your boss." 

Jeptha and Brian bring the
new stove in

         I like his boss, too. 

          I also like my new stove. When I get up in the morning, I just throw kindling on coals to restart a fire. The house stays warm. I am using less firewood than I did with my Vermont Castings, and I empty ashes less often. If, when I was a child, I dreaded the thought of fire somewhere in the house, one of my enjoyable relaxations now is to sit on the couch meditating on the fire, watching the orange flames dance on the logs through the exceptionally clear, clean glass window of my new Jøtul stove.