Wood stove for the win!

As I sat down to write this week's column, our power went out right around dinner time and who knows how long it will take to come back on. Lucky for us we have a wood stove for just this very purpose! Not only does it provide supplemental heat during the winter, it helps us get through long outages when the furnace won’t work and our oven is down. No house in rural Alaska should be without a wood stove in my opinion.

When we first purchased our home in Willow, we were told that we needed a secondary heat source. We shrugged it off at the time. Fast forward three months and during the coldest part of the winter in 2024, we lost our furnace for upwards of a week. Our house temperature dipped into the low 50s and started into the 40s. We were running on several space heaters and praying our pipes wouldn’t freeze. We got the furnace fixed with minimal issues, but vowed we would purchase and install a stove as soon as we could.

Later that winter we acquired a Blaze King wood stove, known for its efficiency and heating power. As soon as it was installed we no longer had the stress of a frozen house on our shoulders and knew that no matter what, we would have heat and a way to cook our food.

We do have a generator that can be wheeled out of the garage and used for small tasks, but it’s not something I’d rely on long-term. We’ve used our stove throughout the winter to supplement our furnace and keep our downstairs warm. The radiating wood heat permeates the house better, it seems, and keeps everything dry.

Tonight’s dinner consists of bacon, farm-fresh eggs, baked beans and sweet corn, something my wife called a “good-old-fashioned cowboy breakfast.” I’ll never live without a wood stove again.