Burning Down the House

The difficulty with my project to save electricity is that almost everything in the house runs on it - our heating, hot water, cooking, as well as appliances. Our only alternative energy sources are bottled gas for the stove-top, and the open fireplace in the living room. Now I know that an open fireplace is particularly inefficient for heating, but every couple of years when the chimney sweep comes he is impressed anew by the design of our fireplace and chimney, and says it ought to heat up the house better than most. I am glad there is some aspect of our house that is well-designed!

We don't use it every day, maybe a couple of nights a week during Winter. It is nice to know that we won't freeze if the power goes out. We mostly use it because we have a source of free wood to use up - the house. It sounds slightly cannibalistic, but we have saved most of the wood that we had to remove from the house during renovations, and we are burning it up to keep warm. So far it has kept us going for about three Winters. That's a lot of the house we are burning down...