A furniture outlet in Bethel, Alaska, found a novel way to beat high heating costs, reports the Anchorage Daily News. The owner’s father built an 8-foot-tall, one-ton stove that burns cardboard and heats the 4,800-sq.-ft. building with its 20-ft. ceilings. Shaped like a huge refrigerator, it is constructed of 10-gauge steel and a scavenged blower. The stove is lined with bricks and metal trays of sand.
Heating oil in the city, 400 miles west of Anchorage, costs around $4.25 per gallon. The homemade stove has reportedly saved $2,000 in heating costs over a two-month period. The only cost is driving to a local grocery store to collect bales of cardboard. Consuming about 100 pounds of cardboard daily, the stove saves the grocery store about $10 a day in landfill fees.
