Keeping Warm 1

A year or two ago, I wrote a series of Facebook posts about how to keep your Bulgarian house warm during the winter months. Now that the nights are getting longer and colder, I thought that it might be help to repeat some of the points I made in my previous posts.

In the Bulgarian countryside, most people heat their homes with wood, while in UK logs fires are banned just about everywhere or else you have to get all kinds of permits and safety inspections. If you can get your hands on some cheap (or free!) firewood, then during the winter months you will be able to keep your house cosy and warm for almost no cost.

In the UK, your central heating may well cost between £200 and £300 per month and probably a lot more if it is oil-fired. Let's assume that you turn on the heating in October and switch it off at the end of March. This means that in the UK, keeping your home warm during the winter might be costing you as much as £1,800! In Bulgaria, the person to talk to is the mayor of your municipality (and no, I am not going to make the old joke about your kermit having a girlfriend called Miss Piggy). Anyway, your mayor might well be able to sell you some cheap firewood, usually at about half the going rate.   

After moving to Bulgaria, one of the best decisions I ever made I was to buy myself a chainsaw. Yes, using a chainsaw for the first time is pretty scary and you will be frightened that you might cut off your own leg or some other part of your body. Well, yes, chainsaws can be dangerous, but you will need one if you are going to keeping your woodshed full of dry and suitable firewood. You have to keep filling up your woodshed whenever possible during the course of the year, so you need to be on the lookout for any freebie firewood that might just be lying around. For example, Energo-Pro came to our village and they cut down lots of branches that were touching the power lines. The next day, my chainsaw was in action and I helped myself to a couple of wheelbarrows of free firewood.

However, a word of caution. There are laws in Bulgaria against trespass and theft. Wandering onto someone else’s land and cutting up some firewood could get you into some trouble and it will not endear you to your Bulgarian neighbours. Ask permission of the local landowner and very often he will be happy to let you have that old tree that has died or blown down in the storm.

What sort of wood do you want for your fire? Hardwoods will burn for much longer, but I find that a mixture of different kinds of wood works pretty well. Don’t burn wood that has been painted or creosoted, as this can produce poisonous fumes. Old bits of fence and fruit trees that have passed their “sell by” date can all be cut up and stacked in the woodshed.

What about storing your wood? You could just chuck it into the woodshed any old how, but really it makes sense to stack it neatly. Old pallets are good for keeping the wood off the ground, so that air can circulate and help with the drying. Wood can be stored outside in the summer, maybe under a tarpaulin, and then stack it away in the woodshed during the winter months. Freshly-cut wood may contain as much as 60% water, so drying out or “seasoning” your wood is really important and that takes a long time. How long? Well, if you buy the wood in spring and dry it out over the summer, then perhaps you could use it the same year, but I would want to be on the safe side and burn it the following year. Chimney fires are very dangerous and they are usually caused by burning unseasoned wood.

How will you know when your firewood is dry enough to burn? That is a bit tricky, so you might want to buy one of those meters that measures the percentage of moisture in your wood. I am guessing, but I would say that about 10% or 15% is fine, but anything over 20% needs a bit more time to dry out properly. If you do not have a meter. Then pick up a log. Does it feel quite light? Any signs of cracking? When you bang it, does it make a dull thump or a higher note? These are all signs that the wood is dry and suitable for burning.        

Our big log fire has a boiler on top, with a thermostat and an electric pump to send the hot water round to all of the radiators. This is quite a common system in Bulgaria, but things can be a bit awkward when there is a power cut, as that means no electricity for the pump. Fortunately, there is a battery inside the control unit, as well as a car battery as a backup, so the system will keep working for about another hour, even if there is a power cut and no electricity.

Well, this is just the start of the huge topic “How to keep your Bulgarian house warm”. In my next post, I will be writing about pellet stoves and whether they are better than log fires.