Keeping warm in a harsh, snowy winter

[crasmussen]

This is our first Winter with our yurt living in it full time. Our yurt is attached to our house via a mudroom. We had our carpenter divide our 800 square foot yurt into 4 rooms, a playroom and three bedrooms. The rooms all have open ceilings. We are off the grid and our main source of heat is by fire in the wood stoves. We have a small one in the house that heats 1500 square feet no problem and a large stove in the yurt. We too were having problems

heating

the yurt. The floor is well insulated and we do have the winter insulation package with that NASA foil insulation. We are having a pretty long and cold winter. We recently bought a cord of kiln dried hard wood. Yesterday I made a big fire in the yurt with the new wood and wow it definitely makes a difference using super dry hard wood. The yurt heated up twice as fast and we were able to maintain 72c which was pretty comfortable. At bedtime I threw in a few logs plus an applewood log. When I got up in the morning the fire was still going and the yurt was still warm! I did close the vinyl exterior flaps over our large glass windows, install heat retaining drapes, turned the ceiling fan on spinning the right way to push the heat down and hung blankets on the walls. I'm relieved that our three children are now warm in their rooms.
So it definitely makes a difference what type and quality of wood you burn. Before the hardwood we were burning damp hemlock and some cedar which burned fast and did not give off as much heat. A friend also recommended building a stone or brick wall just behind the wood stove to hold and radiate heat.

I think this will work from now on. Thank goodness I was so fed up we were going to add insulation and panel over the beautiful wood beams that give yurts their character and charm. Another expensive option was building a winter bunk house with a ton of insulation and propane wall heaters.
Any ideas on anything else we could do?