We have one small wood stove that lives in the kitchen pretty close to the center of the dome. We start using the Little Dragon to add heat to the Dome evenings in October and usually quit burning by April 1st. It is pretty much a sun-down to early morning thing for us as once the sun is really up and hitting the bay window of the dome, we warm right up inside just with passive solar energy.

Jonathan chops and splits the wood, so far that is a daily ritual in the winter as we never seem to have time to do the wood cutting in the summer and fall to stack it for winter. Maybe someday! And the stove is so small that we have to get up and tend it two or three times a night. If we had it to do over, we'd get a bigger stove that could be packed with wood to last all night, but at the time this was all the woodstove we could afford and anything much bigger would consume a bunch more of the precious dome floor space.

In the winters we also use the wood stove to cook small pan items on top of it and heat all our coffee and tea water so it serves multiple purposes. Lillith would love to have one of those big spiffy kitchen wood stoves designed for cooking and baking; the kitchen in the permanent house has space for this expensive and marvelous appliance.

We tried burning the juniper/cedar that grows all over our property, collecting fallen wood and cutting and drying bushes that had to go for some reason anyway... the trouble is that it is incredibly gummy sappy stuff. We were having to disassemble and clean out our entire stove pipe many times during the season. We've taken to burning a mix of local aspen and pine. The aspen burns hot and fast for quick heating of the space in the evening, we pack the wood stove with pine for the long slow overnight burn.

We could theoretically get a permit to cut our own wood up in the nearby pine forest, but until we have more strong muscles available than just Jonathan's, the project of cutting and hauling wood is too big for us. So we purchase and get several cords of wood delivered to the property by one of the local Hispanic families that makes their living this way. We feel good contributing to the local economy and it is lovely to bump into our wood guy at the grocery store, he is a very nice and industrious man with a big extended family and he makes sure that we get our wood cut the right length for our little wood stove.