Problem:A Natural Gas OPEC - Solution: Pellets

This story provides a nice segue into a post on my activities for the past few weeks which has resulted in a dearth of posting. Soon, $300 a month natural gas bills will be the quaint old days when natural gas was cheap.

Two things prompted me to investigate the world of bio-fuels.

1) My house has been at 62 degrees during the day and 58 degrees at night for the past two years and the number of dollars it takes to do this in a 1600 square foot house just boggles my mind. The U.S. produces a fair amount of the natural gas but a fair chunk of it comes from our annoying neighbours to the south. Geopolitics aside: My family and I are tired of freezing our arses.

2) My attention had been drawn to an individual named John Sharpe who runs Distributist Press. I don't know enough about Distributism to make any definitive statement about it but from what I gather its an anti-corporate, anti-communist and thoroughly Roman Catholic view on economics. From what I can gather the major tenet of Distributism is "keeping it local." Expect more on Distributism in the near future. Distributism is really interesting economic analysis and bonus: it has the effect of driving neo-Catholics in apopolyptic rages.

Put these two things together and you get heating your house with wood pellets, something I did for five years in my old house which saved me thousands of dollars. (see right)

There exists an amazing (but not new) technology consumers can use to heat their home: they're bio-fuels in the form of wood, corn, wheat and, soon, grass packed into the shape of a pellet and burnt in a furnace. This is not throwing logs into the fireplace. Most fireplaces lose the same amount of heat as they produce. At best a fire place is 25% efficient. A free standing wood stove is around 50% efficient. New pellet stoves and newer oil and gas furnaces are around 80% efficient and the super-duper-Al-Gore-save-the-planet oil and gas furnaces are about 92% efficient.

There's nothing like a nice fire and there's something even nicer in spending $450/yr to heat your house to 72 degrees, all the while buying a product produced in Jaffery, NH and sold in family owned stores. This being New England, I'll be burning the local stuff: wood pellets.

As stated previously, the blogmaster takes no position on global warming but, for the record, bio fuels like wood pellets, corn, wheat and switchgrass are carbon neutral. Wood pellets are made from sawdust harvested from mills. For centuries, this dust was considered a waste product. The airborne ash and smoke from pellet stoves are virtually zero (as opposed to fireplaces and wood-log stoves.)

Here's a picture of the little beauty me and the misses picked out. The pellet stove (really a furnace) inserts right into our worthless and dangerous fireplace.

Editorial note: My apologies to readers who may be dismayed by the dollar sums and percentages and monetary concerns gracing the blog but readers should be reminded that your humble blogmaster grew up in a hard scrabble housing project and went on to a degree in economics from a prestigious university. That $110,000 bachelors degree has to be good for something! I've always got money on my mind and my mind on money. A curse, yes, but perhaps with further study of this whole Distributism thingy, it'll be a platform for new insights on the Faith for those who practice it in this corrupt world.