Planning Heating 

Building a house in the wilderness brings you to lots of questions in your planning. One very important is of course how to heat the house in the winter. As there is enough wood around it was clear it will be an oven fired with wood.

It was very quickly clear we want a masonry heater. It has a long history and is well known in different areas. For myself I remember this kind always as a very homey heating in rustically Bavarian restaurants or on the Alps in Austria in old wooden houses.

Big advantage of such kind of oven is the efficiency of using the energy from the wood.

For explanation the masonry heater is made of lots of special bricks inside with long tunnels where the gases from fire goes round and heat up this stones. Outside the oven is covered with tiles. The oven reaches very high temperatures what results in low emission values.

The bricks give the heat over a long period of time (usually 12-24 hours) in the way of radiant heat to the room. This depends of course how big is the oven (the mass of stones what save the power), the outside temperatures and isolation of house.

Radiant heat is very comfortable and its said to activate immunity system. Compared with the water heated radiator I know from flats there is no air circulating so no dust is flying around from heating.

This oven is also always a unique part of the house. This means it is directly planned and designed to your needs and favors. Unfortunately this results in high cost building such an oven. But taking into account it will last for very long time and with not too big wood consumption by heating only once a day or every two days its an good investment.

Dream was also to cook on fire. The quality of the food is very different in my eyes compared to cooking on electric. And again to stay independent and use what we have here around: wood

We have only very positive experience with our big red oven, build from an expert in a 4 weeks by hand, stone on stone. The temperature of the oven can be influence by using more or less wood and of course by the kind of wood. But after 2-3 hours the oven gives a nice heat. And once it is warm it gives the heat all the time to the room. If you heat too much you can only open a window to regulate temperature. After a while collecting experience it works very well.

Only for the case we would be not here in winter we added also some electrical heater to keep the house warm and pipes save from freezing. This we never used or needed until now.

We had first check after two years of using it and results were very good. The oven was very clean.

Base of using wooden oven and produce low emissions to be gently to environment and for keep oven clean is to use only good dried wood bests from own ecological forest :D

Last but not least I have just little ash left and the fireroom don't need cleaning often. As we use only wood also for starting fire the ash is a good fertilizer for our garden.

If you want to know more or any question is not answered feel free to contact me.