I live in northern MN. Winters can be brutal. My house uses gas for heat. I am thinking about installing a wood burning stove. Lead times on these are not bad right now - it seems not many are looking toward heating when it's 90+ degrees.
Are any of you moving in this direction as part of your prep? Thoughts?
We have no fireplace so ours are standalone. Inserts are quite a bit cheaper, I think. And of course you don't have to worry about installing a chimney. We have two chimneys but no fireplace - one from when a coal stove was used a long time ago and one installed for the old woodstove.
If you only have an acre, I don't think you'll be able to get all your wood from your lot. Check your local Craig's list and you should be able to find people who will cut and deliver firewood. Make sure you get it soon, both to ensure supply and in case it's not well seasoned.
The national forest permits aren't expensive and I think are good for a ton. Looked it up - $20 for a year and you can collect six cords. Dead wood only but there's plenty. They may vary from forest to forest.
We have a lot of power outages out here. That's why we have two different kinds of stoves. If SHTF, the woodstove doesn't use any electricity. I have a stovetop fan that runs on the heat produced by the stove. That stove kicks out so much heat, we don't really need the fan.
And we can cook on the woodstove in a pinch. I just love our Jotul. Load it up before bed, and it doesn't hold that much wood at a time, and in the morning, the wood has burned down to coals but the cast iron stove is still keeping the house warm as toast. The Englander was cast iron too but didn't hold the heat. The Jotul has a special system that burns more efficiently but cleaner too so less creosote in the chimney.
The pellet stove has to have electricity to run the auger than feeds the pellets and the fan. But we fill the hopper once a day and that's all we need to do other than cleaning. It runs on a thermostat so shuts itself off and on as needed. Our old pellet stove was either on or off, no thermostat, so it used a lot more pellets. You can set up a system where pellets are delivered into a massive bin in, say, your basement and then auto fed into the pellet stove on the floor above.