By: Logan Ward
Popular Mechanics

Lee Richards lives with his wife in a 1957 brick rancher in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter homes in Charlottesville, Va., where he works as the city’s commissioner of revenue. In the past decade, he decided to become a more self-sufficient consumer of energy. He commutes to work on foot and by bus. He powers his home with 18 solar panels bolted to his roof and sells the excess electricity back to the grid. He heats his water with a solar-thermal system. And he heats his home in winter with biomass—in this case, firewood—using three small but highly efficient Jøtul wood stoves in the living room, sunroom and basement. He spends $1200 a year on wood—five truckloads, split and delivered—and gets up at four o’clock each winter morning to stoke dying embers so his wife will be warm when she wakes. When he returns from work, he throws on a few more logs, and the stoves whoosh to life. His gas-fired central heating system remains installed as backup. Yet he saves over $1000 per year on fuel costs, and his utility bills rarely total more than $100 a month.

A century ago, and for about 400,000 years before that, most people burned wood to stay warm. Then the arrival of oil- and gas-fired central boilers and furnaces liberated them from the toil, mess and smoke. Today, fluctuating prices, a desire for independence and a new generation of clean, efficient stoves have attracted homeowners like Richards to a flourishing back-to-basics…

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