Reducing Our Winter Power Bill

Throughout winter we had our fire place burning almost 24 hours a day.  The main reason it does not go out is the fact that I work from home and when you are sitting still in front of a computer you can feel much colder than if you are busy and moving around.
Over winter we made use of the fact the fire was going and used it to to do some of our cooking which is not something we have done until this year.  In the past I had tried but I found the fireplace did not get hot enough and the food took hours to cook.
But this year the thought hit me, it didn't matter if it took hours to cook as long as I planned it that way.
So this year I took a different tactic and planned ahead.  Instead of using my slow cooker like I did last winter I cooked on the stove.   I found the best way to make any kind of meat dish was to brown the meat first in the pan I am going to cook in then add all the rest of the ingredients and place on the fire for the day and let it slowly cook away.  I also trialed speeding up the process by bringing the entire pot to the boil on the stove first then transferring to the fire to be left to cook for the rest of the time.
All of the curry's I made this way were lovely and tender.

I monitored our power usage and it was slightly lower that last winter but I am not sure how much I can contribute to this method of cooking.  However it was easy to just get dinner ready and forget about it for the rest of the day.
Now that we are heading into the warmer months and our fire will be getting used less and less it is time to go back to cooking in the slow cooker and on the stove top for curry so we do not heat up the house.

Did you cook on your wood stove over winter?