By this I mean wood used intentional for warmth and cooking, which is largely in a steel stove, very rarely an outside fire, although there are on occasions bonfires which often use old building timbers of dubious quality.

I haven't given a lot of thought to how much I use but on purchasing the new stove for the workshop I note it uses 2Kg of wood per hour. Hmm! 2 x 24 x 365.25 =17,532 some 17.5 Metric tonnes or 17.26 tons UK.

So for 2h/day that would be just under 1.44T Land on average can grow 1T/acre/year for 30 years and that rate of biomass is maximised probably after 15 years. So from next to zero the first year to a net gain of zero in year 32. Given there is only 1acre available for all user consumption it is clear that this is unsustainable in terms of wood consumption alone. A quarter of a ton may be a sustainable wood use in some time frame. That's 2h every 6days.

Heating is often a by-product cooking and heating water, whereas the latter can benefit from the desire to keep warm. However keeping warm can be maintained alternatively and cooking can be both reduced and the heat alternatively obtained.

My hope is that before I light the stove in the workshop I may have scales to weigh the wood, estimating volume and converting will give very rough guides although over the years it may be possible to see a reduction.

Ant apparent reduction will need to take into account the type of wood as each has it's own calorific value and will have varying degrees of moisture. Further the burning qualities of speed of combustion will impact the amount of usable heat.

My first step is to dry wood before use which in the past has been a bit random, largely because I have had an abundance of ash which burns fairly well when green, unlike sycamore. However with the ash die-back the future of ash availability has disappeared for the foreseeable future, hence the desire to dry the sycamore that is now available.

This year, 2020, I've had reason to fell a number of sycamore so will see how that fares.