It’s -2F outside right now, three in the morning. The house felt cold, so rather than try to roll over and go back to sleep, I got up to answer nature’s call and to put some wood on the fire. It was a hot bed of coals when I got to it, so I scooped those to tone side and added three medium sized logs to it and let them light. Once the plasma had formed, I shut the door and set the damper for a fair burn, enough to keep the flames going, but not enough to burn quicker than a couple of hours. Missus will be up and able to add more wood when it goes down.
The furnace upstairs started producing carbon monoxide last week, and we have had to shut it down. We had a fella come by and give it a look, and he right away said he could not repair it simply because it was not properly vented for where it existed, in a bedroom. The only way we could carry on with it where it is would be to replace the existing unit with a direct vented unit, or an electric one. Also, he understood my reluctance to give up on this particular unit for reliability. It is an old Whirlpool unit, produced here in the USA, with a tag on it that states it was produced with Union Labor, that he said was about 60 years old. He said what would need to be done on the unit to get it working properly again, which I am not qualified to do, and am not so sure I would want to for the reasons he gave that he was not allowed to repair it. Sucking up all the oxygen in the room while there are sleeping inhabitants was mentioned.
So, with the furnace shut down, we are heating on wood alone at the moment. It is enough to keep the cold at bay and make the living spaces quite bearable even in the temperatures we have been experiencing, which has ranged only from -8F to about 30F, on a good day! It’s bee cold! But it has been easy to keep the whole house at mid 60’s and above, even through the night.
Missus has been using a wall panel heater that uses half the wattage of a normal space heater and having great success with it. It is not the kind of thing that heats a room up to hot, at least in the large room where she is using it. But I think in these smaller upstairs rooms, they ought to keep the space quite nice, and hold the cold back plenty well if they are put in the right places. I have ordered three more of them and will be giving them a try. We also added more smoke alarms in preparation for any methods of heating, as we did not like the idea of carbon monoxide being made in the house. The alarms sense it, in addition to smoke. As they are on battery, they will have an advantage over the sensors that went off last week. Not that we would be producing carbon monoxide when the power is out, and the sensors would have to be on a battery to function. Then we would be on the woodstove alone, again, and I think I have only ever set the alarm next to it off one time in all the time we have used it to heat.
With all these changes, we will be shutting down our propane tank and using strictly electric heating and the woodstove going forward. The money we save on propane will go to the electric bill instead, with the woodstove doing the bulk of the work during the winters. I think our propane dealer is going to be disappointed. We are their best paying client apparently, because of the way we pay. Rather than requiring a fill and then struggling to pay the balance, we have always paid $50 a payday (twice a month), then asked for fills out of our credit on account. We have a credit now, and a full propane tank, and no way to use it. At best, I could probably have it connected to our barbeque and use it up that way, but that is sure going to take time! How long can I operate a barbeque on 300 gallons of propane? It has lasted us half a winter on constant use with that old furnace!
I’d like very much to have the propane tank moved out of the garden it is in and put somewhere more convenient for filling and use at one of the outbuildings. I think there is a lot of use in it still. In addition to the barbeque, there is the idea of being able to heat water on a range for chicken processing. This all leads to a change in how we use the granary, which we have considered before using as an outdoor kitchen. Is this the year to do that?