Category: Wood Heat

So Nearly Spring!

It is almost Spring! Along with the recent time change, the weather is acting accordingly. There are geese in migration and there are other birds showing up, though I have yet to see my first Robin of Spring. The temperatures are warming up with higher daytime highs and nights that are not nearly as cold as they once were. The days after the time change come to sunset later than before, giving us more time to do our evening chores and walk the dogs without having to carry a light. Mud season seemed worryingly early this year, and I wonder if the ground will dry up before the sun warms the ground enough to start the pasture grass and trees. But we will have to wait and see on that still, as the dead grass from last year is now fully exposed, and nothing has even hinted at the blossom.

I have a couple of things on order from eBay and from a reputable antiques replicator that specialized in 18th century products. The first is a corn sheller from the late 19th or early 20th century. I want to grow and dry our own corn to give to the chickens. The one I have on order is in excellent condition. I hope to see it put to good use. From the replicator I have a cast iron cauldron, for fun, and a colonial candle mold, to make candles for my replica tin punched lantern that I received for my birthday. I am really excited about it! I remember first seeing one pictured in a history book in high school and swearing then that one day I would have one. Well, my birthday was finally that day! It looks as new as a Colonial American would have seen it the day he bought one in the 18th century. When the mold arrives tomorrow, I may just melt the wax in the cauldron and make me some candles. I will have everything I need to do it! By tomorrow evening I will be lighting the lantern for the first time.

There is a lot to rearrange here on the farm to carry on with plans we have talked about lately. Missus wants a shop to sell things from. I want a workshop to make things in. Both require a lot of work, and to accomplish them, I think we will need to arrange the layout of some of the internal fencing differently. We will also have to put some animals over the road permanently. In other words, I have a busy spring ahead of me. On top of it, there is the usual with firewood gathering. I need to get a lot of it before it warms up too warm to do such hard work. The splitting can be done any cool morning on the farm. But gathering is away, and just for that reason is inherently more dangerous. But while I am splitting, I can easily take a break, get a drink, and so on. Much safer as it is at home. It also does not require a long drive, so can be started and worked on any day of the week, rather than the days there is no school for the girls, and so on. We expect to be working wood in a new part of the yard, too, and I have to set up a good workspace. Time to review my workflow.

I have the shop reduced to just things that are supposed to be in there. There is a lot to clean up and find homes for, though. I don’t have the space I need for it all and will need to set up some sort of cabinets or workbench still. I would also like to get a jointer’s bench, if I can. I’d like to be able to work in the shop on nay day there is no power, just as well as on the days there is. There are a lot of ideas floating around in my head that will keep me busy redoing it for the whole summer, I’m sure!

With the nights only getting to the mid 20’s, and the days hitting the mid-forties, the house is lovely and comfortable, and easy to keep warm when it needs it. I am thrilled that there is still wood in the woodpile! It is not all well-seasoned, but in a pinch, it will do!

I am still adjusting to the time change. This may be why I am up so late right now. It is approaching eleven o’clock. It is best I get to bed. Tomorrow will no doubt be a bust day! The repairman for the dryer will finally come to replace a part in it. That has been two months in the ordering. I’ll be glad to get it in and be done with it.

The Weather and Heating

According to an article I just saw, January was in a drought, officially, in our part of Idaho. I can confirm that anecdotally. I have not seen much new snow at all. None, really. If you were to look in our yard, you would find snow that has been there since December. Forecasts for the rest of February are not promising.

As for temperatures, it has been warming for the last week, giving the feeling of an early mud season. The grass has been wet, and some of the snow has melted away. There is still a lot covering the ground, but the clear patches are getting larger.

Our upstairs furnace started producing carbon monoxide on the 29th of January. We had a visit from the fire brigade, and then after the weekend, we had a visit from the repairman. The repairman took one look at it and said he could not fix it because it is in a bedroom, and as a combustion furnace, it is out of code. We had some things to discuss in this house, let me tell ya! The furnace upstairs is there because there is no route for ducting from the downstairs to the up. The downstairs furnace has not operated since 2015.

We decided to order some 400-watt panel heaters that hang on the wall and produce constant heat. The effect is similar to a radiator. I ordered three, but so far have only installed two. Between them and the woodstove in the dining room, the house is easy to maintain at about 70F throughout. That’s with the temperatures outside in the tens and twenties. I am actually concerned that when the temps get up into the thirties and forties, it will get too hot inside, and will be hard to keep at an even temp throughout the day.

I have yet to be updated on our electrical usage, but the two panels are using about as much electricity as two or three always on computers. Either way, we are no longer using propane, so there is a cost saved there where the money to cover the extra electric cost can come from.

As for our firewood, I think we will be running out early this year. I need to get more each year ready for winter. I have some green wood that we can burn into to keep warm after we run out of seasoned. There is still about a cord of seasoned left, mind. But once it is gone, I will need to watch the chimney more closely. Green wood burning clogs the spart arrestor. It also clogs the pipe if not kept clear, so I may have to have it apart for that. We are fortunate to have a bend in the bottom of the masonry, which is also out of code, but it collects what drops much faster than the rest of the pipe clogs, and it keeps me after that pipe, and aware of the condition of the entire thing. Once I have to clean that bend out, it is not much of a stretch to just clean the whole pipe. The whole job only takes about an hour. Small price for heating that has proven safer, easier to service, and much more reliable than our furnaces. Less costly to feed, too!

So that’s where we are at with our heating situation. It is a little unconventional, but it seems to be working. It is also redundant, still. I think in a perfect world, I would run a couple of dedicated circuits to carry only the heaters, and put a dimmer switch over each one, allowing them to be individually controlled, and turned down, especially for spring and fall.

Half-way through February, it is getting time to start making some solid plans for spring. Missus has said she would like to try a garden again this year. I would REALLY like to put water in near to the garden spots, so it is not all hose dragging and maintaining. It really kind of ruins it having to carry upwards of 300 feet of hose around the yard to be able to reach everywhere. It’s a pain where watering animals is concerned, too.

Out With the Old, Propane

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?

Emptied the Trailer

Yesterday was momentous! I got the trailer hooked up to the truck and went down to the thrift store, only to remember then that the thrift store here is not open on a Monday. I wasn’t going to waste the time or the fuel, so I went over to the salvage yard and began sorting the stuff in the trailer onto the ground there for the big electromagnet to pick up and put to use in something new. One that was done, I went to the dump to take care of the rest of what could go from the bottom deck of the trailer! When I was done, there were only a very few items left that I knew Missus wanted saved, and that I was not quite ready to throw out myself. After I got home, I rested from the chores a bit, then took out those few items, and emptied the trailer out once and for all!

Why is this momentous, you may ask? Well, the trailer deck is much lower than the truck bed, AND the trailer has a ramp leading into it! This is something worth everything when one is loading in firewood! It has been tied up with this load of ‘not sure what to do with it’ stuff for ages now, and with this done, I can now easily get firewood (as compared to hefting the wood into the bed of the truck) as well as get more if I should decide to heft wood into the bed of the truck. I might have to plan a trip to fetch wood this week! It would be good to top off against what we have used this year so far and it never hurts to pile up against next year. With our plans in flux and the hot summer we had, this year did not see the accumulation that I wanted, but it is still not too late. On top of that, I need to get wood that will be ready to turn on the lathe come warmer weather, or when I can get the shop heater cleared away from for burning.

The dogs left only one bomb overnight yesterday morning, and I got ahead of them and thought that we may be onto getting them trained to go outside only. Then yesterday evening, they spotted over four places and left two bombs. So much for progress! So when I woke up at 4AM this morning I got up soon after and stayed up to be ready when they woke, that way I could walk them straight away, and probably a couple of times (as it is still early now) to try to get them out enough to not have excuses to mess. You ever have such things running around making noises, and sometimes walking by sniffing as they go? It does not help one’s trust. I feel like the dad in some sitcom, or worse, in A Christmas Story as he looks over his newspaper to have just missed the neighbor’s dogs running through his living room on the way to the Turkey in the kitchen. What’s that smell? My imagination? Good! Incidentally, they spotted once that I could tell, but did not bomb overnight last night! Good doggies! I think it might be progress of a sort.

Where Have I Been The Past Few Days?

Over the last couple of days I have been focused on making sure of the girls in their home schooling, and generally either hiding from the rain on rainy days, or splitting up some of the firewood on sunny ones. I have given the lathe a break while I wait for a part I buggered up on it, and a tool to repair the part it attaches to, which I could replace, if they were in stock with Laguna. Well, not a huge deal, but I will not turn on it till the part and tool arrive, because I don’t want it to turn into a huge deal.

Meanwhile, I ordered Missus her Christmas present, but it is the kind of present that one must speak to the recipient about before committing to buying it. Currently she has got a Cricut, and makes lots of things on it. In a couple of weeks she will have a GlowForge and will up her game with it, and hopefully with an Etsy store where she will be able to sell things made from those tools, as well as her handmade art. She’s looking to start a side hustle. I’m looking to see to it that the rug under her is a red carpet.

Since there is a GlowForge coming, I have been spending time in Inkscape learning how to layout in that. I may or may not get enlisted in the process of running this side hustle, or I may just be able to use it to design a few personal things, or a placard for any furniture I make out in my shop. Whatever the case, I need to at least lay out designs and do basic operations to be of some use in the business.

That’s the most of it over the past few days. Obviously there was Halloween!

The day was pretty normal for us. We did not do anything out of the norm for ourselves, but the kids watched a couple of Halloween themed movies during the day. By evening our youngest complained because we were not going Trick-Or-Treating. So I put my two red lanterns on in the dining room and library, and turned off all the other lights. Missus put together two baskets of sweets in lieu of hordes of candy, then brought out a book and once the girls were settled into their sweets, she began reading Poe in her lovely English accent. I thought it was quite a perfect spontaneous Halloween!

It’s soon time to get our winter hay paid for and delivered. Maybe today or tomorrow will be a good time to get set up for that. This weekend is our grandson’s time over. I still have firewood to split up out in the Service Yard. I could do with getting it all done before winter settles in. If it goes at the rate the last few days has, then that won’t be too difficult a goal to achieve.

That’s about where things are at. The Holidays have officially gotten started with Halloween past us now. Next up is Thanksgiving, then the big one. After that comes the long, cold winter. It’s getting time to button down for that!

It’s Going To Rain, And Other Musings

The Weather Map As I Write

We live sort of center of this map above, and that big blob of rain is headed right for us. It is 43 out right now, so there is no threat of snow at the moment. Looks to me like it wants to make up for all that did not fall over the summer.

All week the forecast has shown us that starting today we would get five days of rain. That has been steady in the computer modeling that makes up the forecast, so I think it is something we can rely on. I best head up to the shop today to get some tarps for the firewood pile, lest it turn cold and we need to get a fire going to keep warm. It’s no good having wet wood!

The girls are both up, our grandson is over, and the kids are having a calm morning just about to put a show on. Grandma is going for a nap, and grandpa is too tired to do much because of all that got done yesterday.

When we were out getting wood, I noticed a piece that was put up high on the pile that was about 3/4 the size of the truck we drove, a jacked up Dodge Ram, and that it was precarious. I told the kids to stay away from it, and one I had to tell twice. Then Jordan, our oldest, and I took some wood from near it to the truck, and a noise caught our attention. That massive trunk took a tumble. We’d never seen one tumble before! They are usually stacked better, but someone irresponsible has been running the loader they use to pile the wood up. There were a few that have been placed in odd positions unlike the normal piling that they do down at the dump. It sort of negated one of the reasons I like getting wood there, normally. Not having to fell trees makes it a lot safer than going to the forest to get wood. But that was not one of those safer trips for sure, and I am thrilled to pieces that I noticed it and got the kids away before it took its tumble.

While we were out yesterday, my chuck arrived at the house. I can now drill with the lathe! That’s it! It’s whistles for everyone! I’ll probably help a lot when making narrow containers, too. There are definitely a few ideas rolling around in my mind that I look forward to trying. I have a piece of elm on the lathe right now that is too wet to keep working, so I am letting it have some time to sort itself out. I had been thinking of making a ball out of it, but maybe that is a good shape, and I can put a glass container down the middle and use it for Missus’s flowers. It is light on the outside, but walnut colored down the middle. Those two tones would look great with a burst of color sticking out the middle of them!

With the pigs gone, that opens up a space at the back of the llama pen that I can do one of a couple of things with. One is to open it up for the llamas, obviously. The other is to put a fence at the back of the llama pens and divide out a driveway to give another entrance to the property. That would be good for hay deliveries, and bringing in firewood and the like. Maybe. It just requires a little fencing and some gates. Especially as it might be good to put gates at the back of the pen for access to loading and cleaning at a bigger scale than we are able to do now.

We still are looking at moving house. I want to keep going on a few things in case that falls through. I don’t want to put life on pause for something that doesn’t materialize. There is a guy who owns a piece of land near us who is thinking on buying ours. He has to try to work something out with someone adjacent to us, though, because he wants both pieces of land to have clear access from our place all the way down to the corner. If that goes, or someone else buys, then that will set the wheels into motion.

But today? A duvet day…

Today’s Turn

Today I hardly saw the lathe till evening. I spent the morning with out oldest loading firewood at the dump, then we came home, unloaded it, and split it all up. He was very eager to have dry wood because he has been having troubles burning some wet wood he has at his place. There just wasn’t very much workable dry wood there, though, so I suggested he take some wet wood, then when we got back to the farm, he trade the wet wood for some of my dry wood. I have plenty laying about, and a lot sorted out for this winter. So he did that. I have more for next year, and lots for this at the moment. He left with just over half a cord of wood all split up and ready to burn.

After he left, a guy showed up and took the last two of our pigs, leaving us free of them, and their cost on our feed bill. He went to pay me via Venmo, but my account is still suspended from the first time I tried to use it, so I told him not to worry about it. I wasn’t going to make him unload them after all the work he did to load them, and I was happy to get them off our feed bill, and was planning giving them away anyhow if we didn’t sell them to anyone. I was thrilled to see them go.

So it was a great day, seeing both of the boys, and getting firewood sorted out, and getting two pigs sorted out. I did work on the lathe a little tonight, but the wood is wet, and prone to catching. I was happy to leave it, before it ruined my new hobby.

First Snow, Autumn 2021

Last night the wind started, and eventually during the night the snow started to fall. By morning it was stuck to everything, and the wind was still going. The house was chilly, and wanting to be warmed up. So I went down to light the fire in the woodstove.

Did I mention that the wind was blowing, and the house was cold? I said, cool, didn’t I? Maybe it was cooler than that. Either way, the flu on the chimney was too cold to take a draught, and the wind was blowing down it. The wood was still a bit wet from the recent rains, too. Also, those wood shavings I am picking up off the shop floor are damp, or something, and a bit resistant to burning. I tried them anyhow, then paper from the butcher’s roll. Finally I went to get some of my kindling sticks and lit them. Now, that all sounds good and well, and maybe it seems understandable that so far some twenty minutes have gone by.

What was not reasonable was the amount of smoke that came out every direction from the stove! I could not get the least amount of it to vent up the chimney. It was as though the chimney was blocked completely! I could hear the wind still blowing outside, and according to the anemometer on the weather station it was running around 12 miles an hour with gusts of 17 or so. So it was going, but it was not too bad. But air just came down the chimney, and would not go out. I would get the fire going, and close the door, and it would go right out and start smoking out the stove’s intake. The house filled right up with it!

At last, I was about thirty minutes into this when the thermometer on the flue finally budged upwards a little, and as soon as it did, the smoke began to go up the chimney instead! So we aired out the house, which was not warm. We have had a good fire going since!

I have got a notification that the final stove parts will arrive on Thursday. I wonder how much of the smoke that came pouring into the house today would vent out through the intake if I got it hooked up properly? Or would it just leak and vent air into the attic or walls where the vent pipe travels?

The wind has continued, but the snow stopped early on in the day. It is 35 out right now, but with the wind gusting up just shy of 20, the chill factor is at 28. Nest week at this time it is meant to be in the mid 50’s again. Good time to get caught up on that firewood once and for all!

I am awaiting a call from Woodcraft to tell me the status of my delivery that is still stuck in Chicago. I worry that this very thing is a harbinger of why we live rural to begin with? Global trade is in danger, fuel prices are set to go up, and so are other fuels that are required for heating. This winter could be crazier than last! I just want to get my order here, and probably not order online like this again, at least for a while.

I don’t feel ready for this winter. I don’t think we are ready for such things as I suggested above, at all. I have put off the firewood for long enough. I don’t have hay yet, and I have not confirmed yet with my normal supplier that we will even get any from him, and at what price. I won’t bother him about it today as it is his birthday. I have never felt so close to a crash that is going to result in serious casualties and problems, as I feel now. And I don’t at all feel ready. This could be a tough winter. Hopefully the news and the analysts that inform the media are wrong. But hope isn’t enough to survive on if they are not wrong.

Beautiful Foggy Morning

When I rolled out of bed this fine Sunday morning, it was pretty clear rom here to the mountains. But there was a low mist visible, and I remarked to Missus that it looks almost like we have our fog back. Within half an hour or so, we did! It is one of the things I have always loved about where we live!

The first time I came to Cache Valley for longer than a quick visit, I was taken by the fog, the “pea soup mornings;” as I called them then in a poem I wrote for my then girlfriend, now wife. The fog was thick, and the mornings mystical to me. Mountain fog is not the same as the coastal fog I experienced in my youth in California. It doesn’t seem to reliably roll in and roll back out again, the way the coastal fog would seem to do. Instead, it has to sort of burn off, or dissipate, when it feels the urge to. It also seems to often come with the sun, such as this morning when the wet ground seemed to have produced it in the first place as the sun came over the mountain.

It’s chilly, not cold, but after a vote, I put a fire in the stove, and can see it’s warm glow from where I am sat typing this. It is time to get to work on that firewood pile for winter, and finish up the cutting, splitting, and stacking. There is not enough prepared yet! It is time to consider going down to get more for our supplies, in case we do stay here next year, too. I also can start looking for wood to turn on the lathe! The weather is changing early this year, I think. I’ll check my weather station records to confirm it. If I am wrong, that usually puts my mind to rest. I think we are predisposed to think the current year is generally worse in some way to the previous ones.

Days like today remind me of what it is I love about living here in Cache Valley. They remind me of an old friend since gone, who would look overcome with love and warmth and joy when he would speak of the place. He grew up here, and told me long before I ever came here that it was the most beautiful place on Earth. It may not be, quite, but it is the most beautiful place that is not set aside as a preserve, and where someone could actually live. I wish so much that he was still here to enjoy it! I would love to have his company here, and a friend here.

I walked out to get the firewood, and was immediately struck by a phenomenon I have never before seen. There was a rainbow in the fog just distant, and the diffusion of light between me and it made it appear white. It was a white rainbow! I have seen circular ones, and I have seen moonbows, and I have seen one on an apparently sunless morning. I still never quite figured that one out. But to see one appear white, with only the slightest hints of any color at all, was amazing.

First Burn 2021

I have the wood stove lit. It is not the first burn of the season, as we did one the other day. But that one gave us headaches, and was a good sign things were not right! So, I have cleaned the chimney, and replaced the gasket, and not I have a little wood in the stove, and am burning it. The temperature is under control, and the flames go out quick when I shut down the draught. There is no sign or smell of smoke at all coming from it! I think things are in order!

Speaking of order, I ordered some new vermiculite for the inside of the stove, and I got a kit to allow air in from outside, though I will have to do more work on that to get it all the way from outside, as I don’t think the kit is made to go as far to the outer wall of the house as it is from our stove to our outer wall. The vermiculite was on sale, and they took off another fifteen percent at checkout, so I am happy to have added one of those fans that run off the heat of the stove, rather than electricity. Every little helps!

What makes me happy is that this is one of the reasons I bought the wood stove as a primary heat source for our house. I can service it myself. None of what I have done requires any particular technical skill. Mostly, it is following some basic directions and paying close attention to the state of things, such as the chimney. It is not changing out a certain part number based on the specific pattern of a blinking light indicating a fault.

I hope we are about ready for winter! I need to sort out that firewood pile, still. I need to cover it, too! Once that is done, and the parcel arrives from the stove manufacturer, we should be better off than we have been for a couple of years! One thing I can say about changing the stove gasket; it was cheap, and easy, and should be done as soon as there is any indication that it is failing!