BERNE — Robert Motschmann owns a spacious 4,100-square-foot home in beautiful rolling countryside.

Last winter, one of the most severe in recent years, he spent $100 to heat his home.

That paid for gas and oil for his chainsaw.

He smiles when he overhears neighbors complaining about how they spent in the neighborhood of $800 a month to heat their homes.

With oil selling at $3.60 a gallon or more, Motschmann figures he saves over $4,000 in a heating season.

Of the 133 acres Motschmann owns, 84 of them are forested with hardwood — maple, oak, ironwood, and hickory among others.

“We’re blessed with hardwoods,” he said.

Motschmann had a forester from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation create a management plan for his woods. “Any tree that was twisted or diseased was marked,” he said. “You can get a cord of wood per acre of trees.”

The process, he said, is to remove trees with defects; those that are crooked, have cracks or splits, or obvious signs of decay are cut so that marketable trees can flourish. “Seventy-five percent of the hardwoods used to make furniture in the United States come from private landowner woodlots like ours,” Motschmann reports.

The key to heating with wood is efficiency, and Motschmann has his system down pat. He cures his wood and tests its moisture level before burning. He also has an efficient boiler and chimney so that, at the end of a burning season, he has only a small container of fine particles as waste.

“In January and February,” he said of the coldest months, “it’s impossible to tell I heat with wood; there is no odor of creosote….When you burn wood efficiently, you can’t see anything coming out of the chimney.”

He concedes, though, when he first starts up his furnace, there is, of course, smoke coming from the chimney.

“A better way”

Motschmann was not born a self-sufficient Hilltowner; he became one. He and his high-school sweetheart, Ida Motschmann, grew up on Long Island, in Oceanside.

“It was getting too crowded on the island,” recalled Mrs. Motschmann.

Mr. Motschmann recalled the deciding event: a girl came to their church to pray and was attacked.

That was just over three decades ago. They headed for the hills, where his wife’s family owned land, and never looked back.

The couple raised five children in their meticulously kept house on Ravine Road in Berne, originally built in the 1920s, which they’ve recently expanded.

Motschmann, who had served in the Army Corps of Engineers for three years and graduated from the Academy of Advanced Traffic Management in New York City, worked here as a terminal manager for trucking companies for 20 years and then for the state’s Department of Transportation until retiring.

Now 70, he put his engineering and management background to work on his farm, carefully selecting and overseeing every aspect of his heating system. The house originally had oil heat with a forced hot-air system. The Motschmanns didn’t like the way that blew around dust and dog hair, and so switched to baseboard heat in 1976, still with an oil furnace; a new oil burner was installed on the eve of Christmas Eve in 1998.

Last year, Motschmann took out the oil burner and put in a propane gas boiler to back up his wood-burning furnace. The propane tank is buried in his yard, near the driveway from which the delivery truck fills it; a line runs to the house.

“We go away for two or three weeks to Florida in the winter,” he said. The back-up also kicks in even if the Motschmanns have left the house for just five or six hours and the temperature falls below a set point.

Their unique system was set up by Mirabito Energy Products. “They could do the plumbing work, and the engineer sized the house,” he said.

Motschmann was inspired to leave oil because of the high prices. “We’re a captive market,” he said of oil customers in the Northeast. “We’re at the mercy of the oil companies for the prices we pay…I didn’t like the idea that the oil companies could dictate.”

Motschmann, who favors hydraulic fracturing, said, “Thirty-five years ago, energy companies found gas in this valley; there’s a large pool of gas down 15,000 to 19,000 feet. I thought, eventually, they’ll tap into it.”

Motschmann’s home is “super insulated.” He replaced every window but three for a cost of $24,000 and he had insulation sprayed in for a cost of $7,000.

The house has 19 fans that help circulate air, and it is heated in zones so that, for example, the five bedrooms upstairs can be cooler since he and his wife have their bedroom on the ground floor along with other rooms they most often use like the kitchen, dining room, and living room.

Because Motschmann doesn’t want to be caught without energy in case of an ice storm, he has installed an outdoor generator that runs from his propane tank to power his home in case of emergency.

He used to have a smaller generator that was not powered by the underground propane tank. “It was a pain in the neck,” he recalled. “I said, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”

The new generator now turns on power within six seconds. So far, it has been used when a truck hit a utility pole in February and knocked out power on the road. He runs it for 12 minutes every Wednesday so that it stays lubricated.

From forest to boiler

Motschmann has a long neatly stacked row of 13 cords of wood that stretches for 92 feet. Each piece of wood is 22 inches long. He and his wife stack it two rows deep, and five feet high.

All three of his sons live nearby, two of them on Ravine Road. “They cut down the big trees,” said Motschmann who has a bad back. “My wife and I cut them into small pieces. We cut and split and stack.”

They’ve stacked 11 cords from February to July. When they work in the woods, they break after a few hours for a picnic lunch.

“We used to split it right where the trees were felled,” said Motschmann. “This notion that it disturbs the animals is poppycock. We’d watch deer grazing just a few hundred feet away.

“It’s good therapy for me,” he said of the outdoor exercise. A well-known adage is that heating with wood warms thrice — cutting it, stacking, it, and finally burning it.

First, the Motschmanns cut the tree trunks into blocks. They have a large chainsaw that cost $800 and two smaller ones that cost under $300 each.

Then, they split the wood with a 27-ton splitter, which cost $1,300, before stacking it in neat rows.

Motschmann uses a rugged Kubota utility vehicle with a bed to carry wood to a portion of his basement he constructed of cinderblocks specifically for that purpose. The Kubota is driven through a garage door and the wood is unloaded onto pallets. Each of nine pallets holds a cord-and-a-half of wood. Last year, Motschmann burned six-and-a-half cords of wood.

That was more than he had on the pallets at the time, so, this year, he has already marked out neatly on the concrete floor where additional wood will be stacked.

There is a pass-through in the block wall from where Motschmann reaches the 22-inch pieces of wood to fuel his Tarm furnace. He bought the boiler in 1985 for $1,100 after looking for seven years; it was made in Denmark and he learned of Tarm from an article in Mechanix Illustrated.

He starts a fire in the Tarm with pieces of small kindling and rolled up newspapers.

He likes to age the wood for two years, to dry it, before burning it. He tests it with a moisture meter. The small hand-held device sells for about $12 and measures the moisture content of firewood. Motschmann measures at the center and likes to see a reading of between 6 and 22 percent.

When it is 10-below zero, he said, it’s an advantage to have the wood boiler in the basement rather than outside.

“I can don my bathrobe and slippers and walk downstairs if I need to at 3 a.m. as opposed to getting dressed and walking outside in snow and wind to an outside boiler.”

He notes, though, that with a gas boiler coming on as needed, such a trek wouldn’t be necessary anyway.

However, he concludes, “The trick is to plan ahead and have a big enough basement to hold the amount of firewood you plan to use.”

Motschmann’s Tarm boiler is 55 gallons, and he has a 391-gallon hot-water holding tank for a total of 446 gallons.

He got the tank from Switzer’s Custom Woodburning System Inc. in Dundee, New York, for $1,000, and wrapped it in six inches of shiny silver insulation. He had planned to buy a new boiler from Switzer but was told, “I don’t want to take your money. You just need a tank.”

When the temperature in the wood boiler reaches 150 degrees, the circulator turns on and pumps the water either to the house or the hot-water tank. When the boiler gets to 180 or 190 degrees, the hot water in the wood boiler feeds into the giant tank, which eventually gets to 190 degrees.

“You need at least 16 percent additional capacity for hot-water expansion,” he says, so the Motschmanns have a 120-gallon expansion tank to absorb the hot water as it expands. Their hot-water system is an enclosed system, running about 12 to 14 pounds of pressure.

“The way our system is set up,” said Motschmann, “we can burn wood all year round if we wanted to, firing the boiler once a week in summer for hot water, for showers, and for laundry.”

Efficiency

Last winter, Motschmann was burning wood in the basement when his wife smelled smoke upstairs. “I immediately shut down the wood boiler,” he said.

He had just cleaned the chimney two weeks before. When Gary Menia of United Specialists, whom Motschmann describes as an internationally known chimney expert, arrived at the Motschmanns’, Menia said the 1920s chimney was too big.

“I’d always subscribed to the theory bigger was better,” said Motschmann. That turned out not to be true.

Menia, whose company is based in Slingerlands, explained that it took extra wood to heat the air space in the chimney, and that it should be sized to fit the boiler with an eight-inch flue pipe. On New Year’s Eve of 2012, United Specialists installed a stainless-steel Ventinox flue with a lifetime guarantee.

The old system had had three elbows; Menia said that every elbow is equivalent to 10 feet of pipe. “I was amazed,” said Motschmann. The clean-out door at the base of the 1920s chimney was also sealed to close the air space and make the chimney more efficient.

Now, to clean his chimney, Motschmann temporarily removes the flexible pipe connecting the boiler to the chimney, and, using a brush with an arm that is extended in sections, he brushes out his chimney.

Motschmann used to clean his chimney two or three times during a heating season, each time filling a five-gallon pail with chunks of creosote.

Now he cleans once a year. He holds up a container far smaller than a quart and says his annual cleaning didn’t even fill the container, and what came out was as fine as talcum powder.

“Now it takes less than five minutes to clean,” he said, shaking his head. “Unbelievable.”

Renewable Heat NY offers breaks for homes and businesses

Heating with wood increased nationwide and in New York State in the decade from 2000 to 2010, according to the United States Census. At the start of the century, just 1.6 percent of American households heated mainly with wood but, between 2000 and 2010, the greatest growth of any fuel was wood; the number of households heating primarily with wood increased an average of 4.5 percent annually.

In that same decade, the price of home heating oil doubled and has continued to increase by 30 percent over 2010 prices; it is now almost triple the price in 2000.

Outside of the natural gas distribution system, oil is the major heating fuel in rural New York State.

Outside of New York City, just 3 percent of homes in the state primarily heat with wood; however, in some counties, as many as 12 percent of homes heat with wood, according to the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau.

In order to promote quicker development of the industry, two months ago, New York State launched a $27 million initiative to help build a sustainable, high-efficiency, low-emissions wood heating sector in New York. Renewable Heat NY, as the program is called, is meant to encourage more clean technology manufacturing, a skilled installer base, and sustainably harvested wood fuels from forests in the state.

Funding for Renewable Heat NY comes through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first market-based mechanism in the United States to cap and reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change. The initiative was the world’s first program to auction the emission credits, rather than give them away for free, and invest the auction proceeds in projects that conserve energy, save consumers money, and support the transition to cleaner energy.

The plan with Renewable Heat NY is to encourage the use of highly efficient, low-emission wood boiler systems fueled with locally grown wood.

“This initiative will lower costs for high-efficiency, low-emissions wood heating systems, and create greater acceptance in the market,” said John B. Rhodes, president and chief executive officer of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, in a statement when the program was launched. “NYSERDA will jump-start the initiative with large anchor projects, which will help increase demand for wood pellets and decrease the costs for smaller residential and commercial customers as the market grows.”

Renewable Heat NY aims to reduce wood smoke, fine particle, and carbon monoxide emissions by offering incentives to retire and recycle highly polluting outdoor and indoor wood boilers and wood stove technologies and replace them with cleaner systems.

The state program offers incentives for advanced cordwood boilers and high-efficiency pellet boilers as well as pellet stoves, but not for wood stoves.

An incentive of $1,000, and up to $1,500 for low-income homeowners, is offered for wood pellet stoves. For homes with advanced cordwood boilers with thermal storage, up to $8,000 is available, based on 20 percent of installed cost up to $4,000 with an additional $4,000 for the recycling of old wood boilers. Breaks are also offered for wood boilers used commercially.

To qualify for the incentive, the system must be installed by an approved contractor; at least one person from the company must have completed NYSERDA-approved training.

A wood boiler, or hydronic heater, according to NYSERDA, has a firebox surrounded by a water jacket. Wood is burned inside the firebox and heats the water, which is then circulated by pipes to the radiators in the home. All of the qualified boiler technologies in the Renewable Heat NY program are advanced, high-efficiency and low-emissions designs. The installed cost for such a wood boiler, integrated into the home’s existing heating system, is about $19,000.

Sustainable Forestry
of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation works with wood-lot owners to evaluate, develop, and adopt recommended “best management practices” specific to forest biomass harvesting for power or heating. The guidelines complement the current New York State Forestry Best Management Practice for Water Quality, developed jointly by the DEC, the New York City Watershed Agricultural Council, and the Empire State Forest Products Association.

Pellet stoves burn wood pellets, which are much smaller than firewood, so, once a room is warm, a thermostat can tell the system to stop feeding pellets into the stove, thereby conserving fuel. New wood stoves are assigned an estimated efficiency, typically 63 to 72 percent, while pellet stoves are estimated to be 78 percent efficient. Wood stoves manufactured before 1990 burn fuel less efficiently and have higher emissions.

The DEC has regulations to establish emission limits for particulate matter and operational requirements primarily for outdoor wood boilers installed after April 14, 2011, both for cordwood and pellets. Neither the DEC nor the federal Environmental Protection Agency regulates indoor wood boilers.