How much for firewood this year??

Ok, so the answer to the question is... 13 Euros per 100kg (quintal) plus 1 euro for staking in a neat pile. As i have a gassification wood boiler and a huge accumulator tank the specialist reckons on between 8-10 tons of wood per year for my house depending on the temperature i want and the severity of the winter. I will let you know what happens. the first delivery is on Tuesday so i can get the boiler fired up after that. For those that have been following my limited posts on here, i have knocked down the old 1950's house and built a new one in Tuscany on three floors (Inc the basement - where the wood boiler and accumulator are), all made of local stone, chestnut windows and doors, cotto floors, solar panels on the roof etc etc etc. So i am a fountain of knowledge on building costs and techniques!!:) The house is nearly finished - we are about three weeks away and this journey has taken 4 years to realise. Loads of people have asked if i would do this again and my answer is very simple. I am glad i have done it and (almost) come through the other side but i would never do it again. Maybe a little time will soften the dramas of the 4 years but it is very unlikely I will be building another house...anywhere! Oh and FLIP....... who wrote this..... Who ever you get it from, I now hope he stiffs you on the price! There is always one tosser in every woodpile.

I think you'll find prices vary depending on the quality of the wood and quantity you will buy. The best thing to do is ask a few of  your local Woodman what are their prices and ask a neighbour what they paid. I've found it's not really a commodity that you can bargain about so you just have to pay up.

When we first bought our villa, I asked the previous owner where did he buy his wood and how much would it cost.  He looked at me in amazement and said "from the land you have just bought".  I then went out and bought a chain saw!

20 years supply .......... will be well seasoned!!!

As Badger rightly points out 1 Quintale = 100kg, so on reflection do you think you need that much 10,000kg, that is a sh!t load of wood. We use with one wood burner approx. 4/5 qunitale a season  which adequately lasts from October through till end of March, so unless you're fueling the Fires of Hell I might revise my estimate, or buy a Forest in preparation.

If i didnt need 10 tons of wood i wouldnt buy it or ask about it. I  have a 500m2 house with a log boiler and 2 esse stoves. This was the estimate from my engineer. Why are you guys so aggressive, this forum is not one that i want to be part of. No wonder people leave. Forums should be a place of support. Well done on your big headed know it all answer Flip. 

Sorry Kensington2 if you took offence It is a lot of wood, but for 500 sq mtrs, the stoves will probably soon get through it. Knew a guy with a 360 sq mtr house who got through 150 quintale a year, plus about 3000 euro of lpg.

Well sorry !!! but I didn't think either of us were aggressive (I can do aggressive if you like) simply that in the first place I think we assumed that you were talking about fueling a wood burner (the example of quantity I replied to you) not a complete heating system for a large house; and as for a 'big headed know it all answer' who's the aggressive one there? Who ever you get it from, I now hope he stiffs you on the price!

... blimey - calm down folks   lets talk turkey for a minute.  The rates here are €12 and some folks get away with €10.  It is REALLY important to know how dry the wood is for a couple of reasons. 1/. If it's wet you will be buying a lot of water  and 2/. ... the heat output can be as much as 50% less. Wood furnaces in particular are very fussy about dryness. For 500mq I'd say 100 quintale is too little and you'll run out - more like 200 would be the mark... if there is some left over then that's your dry start for next year.  Having said that, although I'm a wood heating enthusiast, I tend to design systems which only use about 120 Quintale on the grounds that any more becomes too much of a chore. 2 wheel barrows a day is enough and so is ONE stove too. After that - sorry to bang the drum again - the next best thing down the energy chain is a heat pump. All this wood should have been split and drying from last May so take care with the wetness.

Would be about my calculation as well Sagraiasolar, unless there is gas involved as well. We have a installation quite close to you in a 400 sq mtr, fairly modern house, with 2x 17Kw Gshp, running rads. What would the wood heating equivalent be for the 34Kwh required? This was a retrofit by the way.

Badger and Sagra Do your calculations produce "acceptable" warmth in every room in the house over the year?  What temp would that be by the way?? I ask because presumably most people don't heat up every room in the house in the same way.  If I can get intimate for a moment....I don't heat my bedroom in the UK at all except for a small De Longhi heater for 15 mins before I get into bed.  Can't see the point in having a radiator blasting away in there at all hours.  And I might put the heater on a timer to come on about 15 mins before I'm due to get up if it gets really cold. Ditto in Italy - we have stufa and underfloor in one large room  where we eat, sit and watch telly. Other than that I might turn on a radiator in the bedroom on for an hour before bed. I'm not trying to tell other people how to survive the cold, but am interested if your calcualtions take my situation into account. Ta A

Well I have a tiny house (3 up 2 down) and would think I get through 80 qnt every year. Though I have no gas, I have  a solid fuel cooker that is on al day every day for 7 months, then just used evenings to cook with for 3 months. With a small stufe upstairs that is used Dec-April. 

The price here is between €11 and €14 per quintal we paid €195 for 14.7 quintal which lasts a month for 1 large wood burner and 1 nordica kitchen stufa (range) The range is going 14 hrs per day, the large woodburner for 7 hrs per day. Last yer we used 75 quintal (€950). This was supplemented by a pellet stove on another floor, which used 40 bags of 15kg. It is about the same amount we used to pay in uk for a 3 bed insulated house (3 years ago) but here we have 5 beds and 3ft stone walls, and no insulation.

Most calculations that we consider are based on a whole house heating module, at a temperature of 20C internal. With underfloor heating, this could be reduced down to 19C due to the different heating effect, but that is purely a matter of personal choice. Underfloor, is the most economical system as water temps do not have to be very high at around 35C, whereas a radiator system needs at least 50C. A heat pump is designed to run at 100% of the heating need, but you can reduce it to 70% of the heating requirement. Simple terms... house size 100 sq mtrs close off 30 sq mtrs and only heat 70 sq mtrs. We heat all 120 sq mtrs here and at the moment the temperature is set @ 18.5C which is comfortable. The maximum that we have ever used with the underfloor is 21C. Hope that answers your question.

We have just paid 15e, but that is for smaller cuts of seasoned oak....which is performing very well, you get what you pay for in the end and we are happy with the price when balanced against getting the chain-saw out and spending hrs on electricity when we have so many other jobs to do. Olive picking next and will do a post when that is finished...looks like a good year for us.

Our neighbours have had 75 quintale delivered this year. They showed it to me and it looks like a lot; however, they said that they use that amount every year. They have paid 8.50 euro a quintale and they said that it was first class and that you can get cheaper, but there was a big difference in quality... 

Thank you Gala... this is food for thought. Presumably they got this price because of the quantity. I shall have to negotiate a bit more next time. I only bought 20 quintale this time to check the quality, next time i will buy about 8 tons (80 quintale)! Once again thanks.

They have been regular clients for many years... As you said, this may make a big difference. They had the wood delivered in three lots of 25 quintale each within a few days. Simply delivered and left in a pile outside. They have to carry it inside and store it. Quite a job! But then, they are used to that...

We have just had 4 tons delivered and it was 13 euro's per 100kg and we are still stacking it.

How long does it take to season the wood.  We chopped down three trees last year and stored them in our wood shed. Would they be ok this winter?

Normally is at least a year, but you could check with a moisture meter. Sagraiasolar would probably be able to advise you better on that subject.

Wood only becomes 'seasoned' after it has been cut into logs. I had loads of trees felled on my land two years ago, got them logged end of September and discovered they were no good for this winter so need to store them for next year. 

yes qui gia is right - it doesn't dry out easily until cut and split. If you do this before the summer and leave it unstacked to bake in the sun then you can just get away with a one year cycle. My test log lost 20% in the first 6 weeks of sun baking and then settled down.  Strangely, hard woods don't seem to get wet again so easily... I did some tests with a moisture meter on some Ramin and even total immersion did not make much difference - the point is that a shower of rain doesn't matter much. As soon as it drops below freezing and moisture in the air gets frozen out then the wood continues to dry so, weirdly, winter is good for more drying out.

Thank you. They were cut and split last year and left out in the sun during the summer and then stored in the wood shed, so maybe they will be ok.  Though I will test them to make sure.  I really need to get ahead and fell some more for the future.

Thought to look up a bit on your system Ken2, it was interesting with the figures you quoted to a UK house. Will be very interested to know the winter results. Have linked to one from a UK site from a case study, no house size given, although it is from the suppliers website, so not always reliable! http://www.ecoangus.co.uk/case_study_1.html

8  Euro with stacking it  but then you have clean up after it and that is not in the prize.  Why you pay so much for wood - where do you live guys?

Our seasoned oak is lasting twice as long as previous years wood , and burning at a slow hot heat in the stufa...so if you want to do the maths 7e per qt in comparison, maintain you get what you pay for.

I am in Tuscany - Montepulciano area and no way could i get a price like that here - well done you.

For an absolutely tiny house (about 60 sq metre on one floor, 15 on another) we get through about 40 quintale a winter. (2 stufa). Stufa goes on from about beginning to mid November, and until it gets warmer again - March  / April time. Even then, you couldn't say the house was that warm - temp right now is 20C.  We use seasoned wood - mixture of beech, oak etc, no other heating, and this year I think we paid around 13 euro a quintale (from our neighbour). We stack it haphazardly. Life is too short to be any more precise. Probably worth pointing out that in the six or seven years we've been here, the price has pretty much always been the same, give or take a euro per quintale.

It is good to go around and ask at least in 5 places or ask Italians first how much they pay.  The same with labor here - people who have been here for more then 10 years are still paying 18E per 1 hour - I pay 10 E and I should pay 8 or 9 E like Italians pay.   Sure in the beginning I was paying 18 E.  Lucca area here.

Think I paid about 13Euro per quintale, 7 years ago. We had a dangerous oak tree here, that we had permission to cut down some years ago and said to the couple of locals who came to do it, that they could have it all, instead of paying them, plus it would take us years to use it up. It was 2 tractor/trailer loads, so probably 30 odd quintale.