Friday, September 22, 2000

Spooked by fuel prices, Mainers buy up firewood

By ALLAN DRURY, Portland Press Herald Writer

Copyright ) 2000 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. E-mail this story to a friend

So many Mainers are planning to fire up the wood stove to save money heating their homes this winter that good-quality wood is going to be hard to get, dealers say.

While some may find it hard to believe that a state as heavily forested as Maine would face a firewood shortage, some dealers have already stopped taking orders for "seasoned wood"  wood dry enough to burn efficiently.

"We ran out of seasoned wood today," James Dyer, the owner of Southern Maine Firewood in Gorham, said Thursday. Normally he would have wood to sell throughout the winter.

"This year has been an incredible year," he said. "I've never seen it like this. We were cutting wood during the Gulf War and it was busy, but nothing like this."

Oil prices, which are driving the current demand for wood, spiked during the winter of 1990-91 when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait.

Dyer said he is still selling "green wood," which has not been seasoned.

Other dealers reported they're getting crunched with orders too. "We usually never run out," said Paul Reed, who owns Reed's Firewood in Durham. "This year I can see us running out."

The situation has been made worse by weather conditions that had the effect of reducing supplies of wood at a time of sharply rising demand.

Reed said the rainy weather in the spring and early summer made it harder for crews to cut wood. He had about 1,800 cords of seasoned wood stockpiled just a few months ago, but now he's down to about 900 cords. And much of that has already been sold.

A cord is 128 cubic feet of wood. A pile 4 feet high, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long would be a cord, although the pile shrinks when the wood is cut and split.

The increased demand has pushed prices a bit higher. Reed is selling a cord of seasoned wood for $130 and a cord of green wood for $105. Both those prices are about $10 higher than last year.

Dyer said he was selling seasoned wood for $130 per cord if a customer bought two or more cords, a $10 increase from last year.

He said he is selling green wood for $100 per cord with a purchase of at least two cords. One cord goes for $110. Those prices are about the same as last year, he said. The prices aren't keeping folks from buying.

Reed said he's averaging about 30 orders per day, about a 30 percent jump over last year.

"This time of year is busy anyway, but with oil prices going up, I think people are just taking it for granted they need an alternative," he said. "It seems people always go back to wood when oil prices go up."

People who order now are told they will get their wood in November, Reed said. In a normal year, he is usually able to promise the wood within about three weeks.

The rise in oil prices makes it more expensive to get firewood to the market, Reed said. His trucks and processors  machines that cut and split the wood and load it on trucks  run on diesel fuel.

"We're not making a dime more than we were last year," Reed said.

Dave Graiver, the owner of Dave's Sauna Dry Wood in South Paris, said he usually places a newspaper advertisement just after Labor Day. He hasn't done that this year, but he's still getting calls for wood.

"Everybody is panicking a little bit, and they're ordering everything early," he said. "This might be the first time in 25 years we run out. It's going to be close. I'm concerned with it."

He said he sells only wood that is "bone dry."

It's not clear how many Mainers plan to heat with wood this winter, said James Connors, an energy policy development specialist for the State Planning Office.

The state's last survey was during the winter of 1998-99. It showed fewer than 9 percent of Maine households used wood as their only or main source of heat, Connors said. The figure peaked in 1980-81, when an estimated 38 percent of households depended primarily on wood.

Sellers of wood stoves are benefiting from the renewed poularity of wood heat.

James Merkel, national sales manager for Jotul North America, a Portland company that imports stoves, said demand increased last year as some people prepared to burn wood in case the so-called Y2K computer bug shut down utilities New Year's Eve. Sales are even stronger this year, he said.

During the first half of the year, 34 percent of the company's business was in wood-burning products. Since early August, it has been about 42 percent, he said.

Jotul North America is a subsidiary of Jotul of Norway, which bills itself as the oldest and largest producer of cast-iron stoves.

Ed McAlinder, the sales manager at Hearth & Home The Black Stove Shop, which has five stores in the region, said sales are up 15 percent to 20 percent over a year ago.

Some have predicted oil could rise to $1.80 per gallon.

"People understand that pretty quickly," McAlinder said.

Arthur Banister, who owns The Finest Kind stores in Portland and Topsham, said he has noticed an increase in customers interested in wood stoves. He said he believes many will still use oil or gas, but will use wood when it's convenient.

"I think people who are going to do this now are not people who are going to heat exclusively with wood," he said. "They're going to reduce their oil bill, not eliminate their oil bill. But I think they can make a pretty substantial dent in their oil or natural gas bill."

The average cash price for heating oil Thursday in Greater Portland was $1.41 a gallon, according to Maineoil.com, an Internet site that lists prices based on a dealer survey.

Northern Utilities, the top natural gas distributor in the area, has asked the state for permission to raise prices 30 percent beginning Nov. 1. The average monthly bill for residential customers in Maine who use natural gas to heat their homes increased almost 15 percent last winter to $104.94.

http://www.portland.com/news/state/000922wood.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), September 23, 2000

Answers

PEAKS AND VALLEYS Warming up to wood stoves

By B.J. Roche, 9/24/2000

igher heating oil prices are stoking a revival in wood-stove sales not seen since the energy crisis of the 1970s. Some dealers are reporting a 50 percent increase in sales over last year, a busy one because of Y2K worries. ''A lot of people who would never even consider wood burning are putting them in as a hedge,'' says Ron Mazzeo, who runs a stove business in Rockland, Maine. You buy your firewood locally, and it's the same with stoves. Some major stovemakers are based in New England: Jotul (Maine), Vermont Castings, and Hearthstone (Vermont).

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/268/newengland/Warming_up_to_wood_st oves+.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), September 24, 2000.