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?
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.
I believe it's a Rangeley and I don't think they still make this exact model. It has a cookplate on the top and a little door opens on the top and there's a little grill inside. Ask the dealer about them. I think they do still make stoves with the cooking plate but not this one. We have never used the top load feature for loading firewood and can't use the side door because it's against the wall of the brick hearth wall. We use the front load. You might be able to find one that has just never been sold or is a trade in. Just make sure the steel vents inside the stove (inside ceiling of stove, you'll see what I mean) are in good shape. That's what does the efficient burning.
https://www.acmestoveco.com/product/jotul-rangely/ you can see the cookplate in this photo and if you look closely, you can see the little handle on the front of the cookplate to lift up for the grill inside. The cookplate is steel colored.
I believe all of their stoves have the technology that gives them great efficiency. It's amazingly better than the standard woodstove we had.