Few images are as cozy as the idea of bundling up in front of a blazing cast-iron stove to read books and tell stories in a cabin in the woods during the dead of winter, especially when you have someone to share the moment with. It’s almost as romantic as the tiny house itself.
The trouble with this dream these days is that some tiny houses are just too tiny for one of those giant old stoves. What’s worse is that many of those old cast-iron stoves are terribly inefficient, making winter heat too expensive.
All is not lost, though!
Can a Tiny House Have a Wood Stove?
Thanks to advances in materials science and appliance design, it’s both possible and desirable to equip almost any tiny house with a wood-burning stove. These modern stoves can provide just the right amount of heat in the wintertime, and with incredibly low energy expenses.
Why Modern Wood Stoves are Excellent for Tiny Houses
Wood stoves are the least expensive and easiest way of providing heat to a home, especially if you have access to a woodland where you can gather or cut your own firewood. It’s as simple as that!
In planning for the needs of your tiny house lifestyle, you may have asked yourself why you would need to take up a bunch of precious wall or floor space for a stove. Why not just buy a simple electric heater that you can plug in whenever you happen to need it?
You’ve probably already realized the obvious answer: that sort of heater is most likely to be useless when you need it most. It requires that you either have a photovoltaic system or a grid connection, both of which have a high chance of doing you no good during a storm on a long winter night.
You could get by with a battery backup, but in addition to the maintenance and reliability issues of those systems, an electric heater is a huge power drain. On top of the actual power that it draws, which at around 1,500 watts is enormous, that power comes at a steep cost. On average, using an electric heater costs $45 per million BTUs. That may not seem like much, but you have to also consider the source of that energy.
In most places for now at least, any appliance that’s tied to the electrical grid is still heavily reliant on power generated by facilities that run on non-renewable energy sources, especially at night. That little electric heater is often indirectly burning fossil fuels at gas- and coal-fired power plants. You might as well save a little money and go ahead and use a propane heater. But even that isn’t as reliable and cost-effective as a wood stove.
The electrical grid may not always be so harmful to the environment in the future, but by simply using a wood stove instead of other fuel sources, you can immediately keep your tiny house warm for a fraction of the energy costs, while using a completely renewable resource that will always work, rain or shine.
At less than $12 per million BTU on average, cord wood cut for a wood stove is the least costly tiny home heating fuel, and that’s not even factoring in the intangible benefits of its abundance and renewability. Many wood stove models also do double duty as a cooking surface, which you won’t find with almost any other type of heating stove for a tiny house.
On top of that, depending on where you’ve parked your tiny home, there’s a good chance that you can gather all the fuel you need from within walking distance, or at least buy it locally.
What are the Best Wood Stove Options Available for Tiny Homes?
By far, one of the most popular and most often-mentioned wood stoves suitable for tiny homes is the Newport Solid Fuel Heater, by Dickinson Marine. As the company’s name implies, these stoves were actually originally perfected for use on boats! That’s exactly why they’re ideal for the small and often mobile spaces of tiny homes. They have a decidedly compact, sturdy, and modern design that will easily fit in a small space, but they don’t necessarily have the charm of the old cast-iron stoves that were once so prevalent.
For a more classic look, though, there are options like the stoves designed by Hi-Flame, or the CUB and GRIZZLY model wood stoves by Cubic. They’re not alone. There are many excellent stove brands available to cater to the specific needs of your family and your tiny home.
The key here is to consider, as always, the exact ways you’ll be using your tiny house, meaning whether it’s meant to remain in place or follow you around the country, and what climates you’ll be living in. Different stoves will be better suited for different purposes and contexts. At least one of them will be right for you.
How do you Properly Install a Tiny House Wood Stove?
The way you install a woodstove in your tiny home can make the difference between delight and disaster. One of the key factors that you must consider is ventilation.
The essential principle to understand here is the fact that the combustion of wood by definition requires oxygen to occur. If your tiny home is very tightly constructed, and doesn’t have any leaks or gaps around the windows and doors, a wood stove without ventilation will literally suck the oxygen out of the house! If anyone were to be inside when that happens, it would definitely be a disaster.
What this means, then, is that your wood stove needs to have both an air intake leading to the outside of the house, and a chimney. Ideally, the two of them would be separate from each other, to avoid recirculating smoke that would extinguish the flames. Depending on where you build your tiny house, regulations may require the chimney to extend as much as two or 3 feet above the peak of your house’s roof. If it’s a tiny house RV on wheels, this means you might need to make sure that the chimney is detachable for travel, to avoid running afoul of vehicle height restrictions.
In almost all tiny houses, the best interior places to install a wood stove are going to be either the living room space, or the kitchen. The latter option only makes sense if the stove also doubles as a cooking surface, which not all stoves do.
In either case, the main consideration is ensuring that there is a sufficiently safe space surrounding the stove to avoid setting other parts of the house on fire. This is even more important when your tiny home will also be a home for small children. You will want to make sure that there is a barrier of some sort that will prevent them from accidentally touching a blazing hot metal stove.
What are the Pros and Cons of Wood Stoves in a Tiny House?
Now, just because a wood-burning stove has multiple advantages in efficiency and sustainability, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Even the best man-made solutions to ancient problems come with some drawbacks. The biggest of these problems, in this case, is the pollution that comes from burning wood.
First, though, the bright side: we’ve already covered how the fuel for a wood-burning stove is the cheapest energy source available for heating a home. In many cases, it’s free as far as money is concerned, though that’s aside from the significant labor and time required to chop and split a sufficient supply of it down to the right sizes. You’ll need enough for the whole winter, and a tiny stove means tiny logs!
With that in mind, what may be even more advantageous than free fuel is the fact that a wood-burning stove does not depend in any way on a power grid that could fail due to bad weather or worse emergencies. It’s the ultimate fail-safe!
As a side note, most wood stoves will also significantly dehumidify the air in your tiny home. Your mileage may vary as to whether this makes it more or less comfortable, but the lack of moisture will most likely reduce your home’s maintenance issues.
The big downside, though, is that burning wood produces smoke. The chemicals in that smoke include carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and soot. Those oxides are toxic, and the soot is both toxic and comes with a tendency to accumulate on the inside of the stove, lowering the device’s efficiency.
The implications of these drawbacks are the reason for which modern wood-burning stoves must meet local air quality standards. They must also be installed alongside adequate ventilation systems, including a chimney and a separate air intake, all of which require regular maintenance, usually by a certified professional chimneysweep.
These waste products also make it essential to have a carbon monoxide detector installed in your tiny home, but you should probably have one of those anyway, especially if you’re driving a tiny home RV that will be on the road frequently.
Perhaps the most important consideration, though, is that you really can’t ever leave a wood-burning stove alone once you’ve lit it. You have to keep an eye on it, and add wood when necessary, or be prepared to douse the flames in case the fire grows too strong.
Conclusion
All things considered, the benefits of opting for a wood stove to heat your tiny home will most likely outweigh the drawbacks. You’ll find that installing a wood-burning stove in your tiny house is one of the best ways to ensure a natural and sustainable source of warmth all winter long, no matter what happens.