Our First Farmhouse

When I got married over 20 years ago, I finally got my wood stove...sort of.  The old farmhouse we moved into had a wood/oil combination furnace.  It wasn't hard to run, even for a newbie like myself but it must have been a lot older than it looked.  It only held it's heat for just over an hour, after 1.5 hours, there were only hot embers left and after 2 hours, nothing.  I've read online that 6-12 hours is more the norm.  Even replacing the bricks inside didn't help but this furnace always threw out good heat.  It warmed the entire 2 full storied old house really well, even before we insulated, just as long as you  went down to the basement every hour. 

This became a huge problem for me when we had 5 kids over the next 7 years.  It became impossible to get to the furnace every hour with 5 very small children upstairs.  I had no problem going down when they were all asleep but when they were all awake, it took less than a minute for one of them to topple an infant out of a sitter, fall off a chair, table or countertop (which they'd never be on if I was there), hit each other with any number of items, fight like the dickens and hurt each other ... it just wasn't worth it to try to keep the fire going.  I just turned on the oil instead.

Hubby would come in from the barn for lunch after 3-4 hours of milking the cows in an old tie-stall barn and have to start the fire over again.  After 3-4 more hours of barn work in the afternoon, he'd have to it again at supper-time and guess what...!  After 3-4 more hours of doing the evening milking, he'd have to again start the fire.  Needless to say, he got tired real quick of this, really annoyed and tired of paying for oil he didn't really want.  And neither of us wanted to get up repeatedly throughout the night.

For my part, I didn't really like the oil heat.  Sure, I was happy and grateful to be warm, especially with small children but the off and on, off and on, off and on of oil can't begin to compare with the nice, even heat of wood.  You warm up, cool down, over and over and we would shiver while waiting for the furnace to 'kick in'.  The biggest downside to the furnace, whether you used wood or oil, was that it required hydro.  In a power outage, you had no heat.  Thank goodness we had a generator!

http://www.air-tech.ca/

A very similar furnace to our old one but probably not as big.