The Firewood Trap: When Heating Your Bus Becomes a Legal Issue

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a converted school bus on a cold morning when the only sound is the tick and pop of a wood stove waking up. I should know; I grew up in a house heated with wood. We burned wood every day throughout the fall, winter, and spring on the farm in New Hampshire. When I was a kid, I always thought my name was “Get Wood”.

For a growing number of people who’ve traded apartments and mortgages for retired transit and school buses, that crackling sound has become the centerpiece of their homes. But heating a moving house with fire brings its own logistics, let alone the issue of trying to buy insurance for a bus that moves with a wood-burning stove in it. However, one of the strangest complications bus conversion dwellers run into has nothing to do with combustion at all: it’s the patchwork of state laws that regulate where you’re allowed to carry a bundle of firewood.