You got to admit they are very nice saws but I still wouldn’t want to spend too much time down in the trench with one. When I cored a 5” hole in my basement wall it took me 5 hours .... boy was that fun at least I had no fumes to deal with.
I would have liked to make the boiler room bigger to store more wood, but had to compromise because we feared a bigger addition would not be as aesthetically pleasing in that spot. We decided instead to retain many of the hundreds of crates the limestone veneer came in, and we have been for the last months storing and stacking firewood in one of our nearby pole barns. The firewood is now palletized and we can move it with the forklift or the farm tractor. We should easily be able to store in the boiler room about 2 cords at a time. I think it will be a nice system, since I can go down one of the old roads in the forest carrying empty pallets on the front and back of the tractor, and fill them up as the wood is cut. It is easy to move the pallets around in the boiler room with our pallet jack, so handling should be reduced to the minimum.
With the foil/bubble wrap you will have a consistent air gap (because of the air bubbles) plus reflective foil, with this wrap. I’m curious, when you say “our ICS saw” What do you need this saw for? I know many construction companies that don’t have these saws, and I can’t help but wonder. Thats a $2000 saw!
ICS has a line of saws called the Redzaw which was brought out only three or four years ago. At that time we were cutting a lot of the limestone for our church and tower here, and needed to make deeper cuts than a typical cut-off saw with 14” wheel could handle, ICS agreed to donate one of their early demonstrator Redzaws with a 14” bar, and they made use of our project in their promotion of the new tool.
At the time I was aware of pricing (now several years out of date) the Redzaw line was about 75% of the cost of a regular duty ICS saw. Since we have handled several million pounds of limestone, and poured a couple thousand yards of concrete, we have found plenty of jobs for this useful tool.
On the topic of bubblewrap, how much R value do you think it adds to an assembly? Obviously I don’t know much about how that wrap works, and would be very interested in hearing how it is used by others. I presume you must use reflective tape on the joints.
Just a week before Easter I finally, at long last, got the roof put on the addition to house the new Garn boiler, and last Monday we moved the Garn into place. It turned out to be quite easy to move around with a pallet jack, since it is not nearly as heavy as it looks, although ours (a Garn 1500) is still every bit of 3500 lbs I think.
I have just about assembled all the parts needed to plumb the Garn into our system, as well as build the insulated enclosure around the tank, and will post more photos as the installation proceeds. Hopefully the plumbing and other work will be much quicker than my block-laying was.
After spending much of the spring and summer working in the vineyard and garden, I have finally been able to finish plumbing the Garn into our radiant heating system, and am now building the enclosure to insulate around the tank. We filled it yesterday, and no leaks are apparent, so we will fire it in a couple of days and make sure there are still no leaks before we begin insulating.
Here are a couple photos of the new installation. One shows the hx for the domestic hot water loop, and the other shows the two 1.5” pex lines from the Garn, their transition to copper, and the bypass so we can run the Garn in summer without heating the radiant injection loops.
The Garn is now fully piped and filled, and will be fired this very afternoon. More news to follow.
