Survival Woodstoves

I recommend you get busy and go buy some wood stoves. You will need to purchase all the necessary pipe and roof parts as well. Do this as quickly as possible, you will need to find a way to provide heat without power. You need to be able to cook as well, so get stoves that can be used for this purpose in an emergency. It's possible to pre-purchase the materials needed to install it and wait until something makes it more urgent but just having it installed even if not a primary heating source will add value to your home and provide you with options.

You can get the "roof kits" that come with the flashing, the box assembly that fits around the entrance to the interior of your house. They usually come with the chimney pipe mounted, and a spark arrestor. You should be able to install this roof kit in a few hours. It's not that hard if you have access to the area just under the roof itself.

The concept of using wood stoves is only useful if you do have wood, and a lot of it. You will also need fuel for your chainsaws, spare parts, extra cutting chains, round files to sharpen the chains, and many other tools and material to provide at least 4 cords of wood for your survival retreat. Obviously if you live in a coal area, then you may want to obtain the dual fuel models that can burn both wood and coal. Stocking coal could be a massive problem unless you live in Appalachia and have a backyard coal mine.

Around my place, we are still able to gather a quantity of dead wood. We try never to cut down a live tree, but through attrition we always seem to have enough.

If you don't have many trees, you can get permits from the National Forest Service to go in and cut any tree tagged by them that needs to be cut. If we have to cut wood, at least we can help our forests by trimming over grown areas prone to fires which wipe out even more of our wonderful national forests. You can easily cut 6-8 cords of wood to burn "for free" and you really are helping to preserve the forest.

Here are two stoves I obtained for about $500 locally. They were used when I bought them, and I paid about 30% of what they would cost new. I'm sure we can all save money this way if we are patient and keep searching for a good deal. Craigslist is your friend.

Obviously if you buy a used stove take the time to inspect it carefully, look for thin spots in the walls or bottom, sometimes folks get lazy and stop using grates or let them fall into disrepair which can often lead to damaging the metal by direct burning (without grates).

Be prepared to replace gaskets if it's an air-tight model, there are numerous places to get them, just use a search engine and you'll see. If you use an air-tight model always get extra gaskets and keep them in a dry, moisture-free storage.

Spare parts can be a problem unless you buy a "popular" brand of stove but often-times parts can be made locally.