Have a look at these. They’re quite relevant to the situation at hand and for that purpose. Heating costs are going to go way up before long because of the flood of political folks into energy company investments (almost like another tax). The heaters don’t need much wood at all (about 1/5 compared to conventional wood stoves), and they’re stealthy (nearly no smoke, mostly steam, like a dryer vent). And they’re cheap to build and safe if built with close attention to all instructions in the e-book and elsewhere (especially double sealing the exhaust pipe with high-heat gasket sealer, muffler tape, clay, etc., e-book in second link apparently a freebee).
rocket stove mass heater
http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp
http://projectavalon.net/Rocket_Mass_Heaters.pdf
That was found during at search at this page (some videos there, too).
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?55601-Rocket-mass-heaters
Thank you, hub has looked into rocket stoves at my suggestion, but these sound very good, much better than what he found.
Thankfully we have so many trees on our property we can heat our house for at least 10 years without cutting down any important trees, and there is BLM all over the place. As long as our country doesn’t plummet too much deeper into totalitarianism we’ll stay warm, but who knows how much worse it will get before it gets better. Everyone here heats with wood, many poor people, so the only way they can stop everyone here from using wood stoves is to kill a lot of us.
PS - and it never hurts to conserve fuel, or to have little tell-tale smoke.