A BTU is a BTU whether it comes from wood, oil, gas, or elec. What everyone is looking for is the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to paying for heat. I can very easily see where someone in a big city might just choose to turn up the thermostat and pay for the convience of the gas/oil/elec available to them. I can also see where someone that owns a large wood lot or has access to plenty of wood, would prefer to use wood and light up a fire when it gets cold. I know I can save a lot by using wood. The question becomes one of do you buy wood to heat your home or do you use the other alternatives. If you have to buy wood, the price can very quickly overcome the benefit of the high price of gas or oil. Even the type of wood you buy can pay a big part in just how economincal it really is. A pound of wood pretty much contains the same BTU value, regardless of species. Buying wood by the cord scale can very quickly become a loosing proposition. A cord of white oak can weigh well over 5000lbs where as a cord of Popular might only weigh 2500lbs. LB for LB, and BTU to BTU, its very easy to see where cord scales can work in the favor of someone buying wood and not accepting inferior species of wood to supply their heat. Also easy to see how it might not be in the purchasers best interest to accept a load of popular firewood. And its not a matter of the seller or supplier trying to rip someone off, it pretty much cost the same amount of time and money to produce a cord of popular as it does to produce a cord of whiteoak. So how do you discount a inferior product when it cost you the same amount of money to produce it as it would a superior product. When I cut my wood, if it burns it goes on my truck period. I can save money heating with inferior wood species as long as I am the one producing the wood. There are times that I do buy a load of wood, but dont expect me to pay full price for a load of maple, sourwood or popular, that you would normally ask for a load of Whiteoak or Hickory. If fact, if the price isnt around half of what it would normally be, I aint even interested, because I would much rather pay full price for a load of quality wood than I would pay half price for a load of junk wood. If i was in the business of selling wood, I would be trying to sell a quality product, at a respectable price, and try and educate my customers to the benefit of buying my high BTU content oak wood, instead of buying wood from Joe Blow who is selling a mix of the lower btu species. As a customer thats buying wood to heat my house, I would want to know that I was buying the highest BTU content wood available if I was buying someones cord scale measured wood, or that I was buying wood by the lb to eliminate the variances in weight by species.