Everyday I'm stunned by how many people heat with wood
I recently became one of them by circumstance, for one winter only
I never thought I'd learn how to chop wood and light a fire at 31, but here I am
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Like, you're joking but this is an actual thing. It's called biofuel.
Basically they turn maize and other crops into fuel that you can fill into your car where it will be burned. This obviously means that the more biofuel we produce, the less food we produce, because both take up the same area, and the area availability is what's limiting food production.
And it’s orders of magnitude less efficient than just using that land for solar panels.
but can I light the solar panels on fire?
do you want to?
IIRC solar panels produce about 100x as much energy for the same area than biodiesel.
I think we all saw the same video from the Christmas lights activist
what video?
oh that yeah of course i saw it :D
but that's not why i said it. I did my own calculations here:
Biodiesel takes much more area because the efficiency is much lower because plants metabolism isn't so efficient, like iirc sth like 0.3% of sunlight energy end up in the fruits of the plants, compared to 20% efficiency for solar panels.
Is it me or does it look genuinely possible when most rooftop space is not being actively used?
i'm personally also against rooftop solar, partially for aesthetic reasons but more importantly for financial reasons:
flat-area solar parks are significantly cheaper than rooftop solar (source 1, source 2), and they also don't require a lot of land area (see comments above).
"utility scale" and "PV frei" means flat-area ground-based solar parks, while "PV klein" and "PV groß" mean rooftop solar (small/big). "Stromgestehungskosten" means levelized cost of energy.
Someone best me to it lol
Which in turn still damages the environment more, because you need more surface and you spray it with chemicals. Bio fuel is not green.
That curtain placement would get you arrested in Germany.
Pellets are a scam, man. Wood fuel for a standard wood stove is all around us. In the states, I can pull a forest permit for like $40 and go harvest enough firewood for the winter. It requires effort and sweat equity, but all good things require that.
Somehow, they created pellets (made from sawdust -- the byproduct/waste of the mill industry) and sold this generation on the convenience, but now a necessity for life is a commodity and they can fuck with the cost as much as they want. Eg temps drop to single digits so price of pellets go up equals maximum profits. It's the bottled water equivalent of wood heating.
Ditch the pellet stove for wood stoves.
Pellets helped my grand parents survive a winter when the power went out for an extended period of time. They were too old to just start hacking at the forest but they still had access to an offline source that was easy for them at an old age.
Everyone keeps pointing out exceptions to the rule. Obviously enfeebled elderly folks benefit from pellets if their children/grand children arent hacking down trees for them.
It's like me saying "prepackaged single serving items are a scourge on the planet" and then someone clapping back about how they're disabled and need single serving pre cut apples or pre-peeled bananas or some shit. Like, yeah, of course in that situation it makes sense.
No it’s like you are saying apparently everyone has children and grand children ready to start a logging op on the fly…
As if everyone has equal access to trees and equal physical ability to log them at the necessary scale.
Meanwhile in reality… your poor understanding of prepared foods doesn’t scale to folks actually heating themselves in real life…
Manufactured wood bits aren’t the way but they have a place in a world where your bs doesn’t create a silver bullet either.
You have no idea how expensive firewood is in Europe.
You're right. I have no idea about that. How would I?
Last time I bought a cord of wood, split, ready for the fire, and delivered, i think it was in the ballpark of $300 USD. But that was a long while ago in the pacific northwest.
How much wood is that? *Nvm i found it, it's 3,62 cubic meters. I thought it wasn't a unit of measurement.
1,5 cubic meters of birch, ready for the fire cost between 180-250$ right now in sweden.
I would assume that we have an insanely low price compared to the rest of Europe. We practically consist of wood and lakes.
You could also buy what we call "long wood" for less than half and chop it yourself.
Oh fuck, just to add... The pine boards I just bought from Home Depot said "product of Sweden" and it was the cheapest boards they had that were suitable for my project.
How come I'm paying a nickel a foot for your lumber but you're paying an arm and a leg for your own raw timber? That's some bullshit, man. The world is weird.
Yes, here too if you get creative. One season, I paid a local tree service company $100 bucks and they dumped their logs in my yard. They were 8 foot long sections, anywhere from 10-inch diameter to 3 feet diameter (Pacific Northwest). I bucked it all down with a 16" inch gas chainsaw and split it with a maul. Took forever. My hands and back ached at bedtime every night. But when I was done, i had three-plus cord stacked and drying all for $100 bucks.
Nothing beats the forest permits tho. A lot of work, but the price is worth it.
In the states, I can pull a forest permit for like $40 and go harvest enough firewood for the winter.
Lucky you. There are regions where forests are more protected. And where pellets are cheaper than wood.
they created pellets (made from sawdust -- the byproduct/waste of the mill industry)
That's exactly the idea – to prevent sawdust from going to waste.
Get a good catalytic stove with heat circulation fans and combustion air inlets. They put out an astonishing amount of heat that actually heats your home and doesn’t suck cold air in or pull the heated air out with the exhaust. They’re not cheap, but they work great.
Thanks Ron Swanson
The bright blue flame indicates this was a particularly sweet donut.
0,0024€ per donut? So 1000 donuts for 2,40€? I doubt it
It's a promotional thing Lidl apparently do in Poland, it's over 99% off the normal price
So this dude basically wiped out the entire store for a YouTube video and now nobody else can get the deal. I'm sorry man but this is the kind of shit which makes me hate influencer. At least with "traditional media" they'd go partner with the store and secure a separate supply, instead of doing the cringe influencer shit where they film themselves holding up the entire line while they buy every donut in the store.
Eh, a few diabetes less. He did a good thing there.
The occasional cheap donut is fine.
Seriously? That's crazy! I wonder how many they have in each shop (I'm used to go looking for an offer and... no more stock left)
I first heard about the fat Thursday tradition from my Polish friends. I didn't know they use to fuel their heating /s
We are subsidizing the production of sugar and grains (which turn into sugar in the body) which enables this to occur.
The solution is to stop subsidizing sugar and industrial monoculture. If anyone else is interested, the book Dark PR is a great read.
I don't think Lidl is making profit on those donuts; it's just a promotional thing.
Yeah, the full image of the promotion shows that this price is more than 99% off https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HA8usLNbYAAYhYD.jpg
These aren't "Donuts" btw. "Pączki" are more similar to German Berliner/Krapfen, since they don't have a hole and are filled with jam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%85czki
This is the description of the video, translated with deepl (sorry, I don't speak a word of Polish):
The calculation was simple. One doughnut from Lidl costs 9 groszy and has 440 kcal. 133 doughnuts from Lidl weigh 10 kg and have a calorific value of... 18.5 MJ/kg, which is... exactly the same as wood briquettes. However, my doughnuts cost PLN 12, and the briquettes cost PLN 19. What did this data show? Check it out!
For what it's worth, that's still called a doughnut in the UK. For the sake of the post, though, I think calling them that is close enough to get the point across to an audience that would (like me) not know what a pączek is
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The cleanout of that will be fun, I'm sure.
The bright blue flame indicates this was a particularly sweet doughnut.
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