The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it makes the rest of the article farcical.
It takes somewhere between 7 and 9 cubic metres of wood a year to heat about 800 square feet of house. It costs about CAD 1500 for a tandem load of sawlogs plus the cost of fuel and maintenance of the chainsaw and hydraulic splitter plus about 100 hours of labour bucking, splitting, hauling, and stacking. And still there are mornings when I had to break the ice on the dog's water bowl in the kitchen when it's been below -30 C for several days in a row.
You're not going to survive a winter in that part of North America with just "a few scraps of wood" for heat. "A few carloads" is maybe going to take you to Christmas and they'll simply find your thawed corpse during a warm spell in March.
I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months.
E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
That's it. The line in the budget for heat is there and was left intentionally blank:
> Heat:
You can't just hand-wave away the cost of electric heating at the temperatures they get in upstate NY, even if the 0.04 number is accurate year-round (which it almost certainly isn't), and wood-burning stoves use way more wood than the author appears to be imagining with their "scrap wood" comment.
[0] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/massena/new-york/unite...
Kinda like those people that got free _waste_ oil from restaurants to run their vans. It's not something you can replicate literally anywhere but it does exist. Industrial waste has to be disposed of somehow and often people are happy for you to accept it for free.
That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.