Addicted

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Looks like its time to try the soot eater and clean the stove up. Outdoor temp was 80+ today. Last burn was two nights ago. Going through withdrawals now.
 
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On payback, you need some indirect thinking to really justify. Yes, if you kept your house at the same 68F, maybe even turning down lower at night, a purely-financial justification becomes tougher. However, we now keep our house around 73F, all day and all night, which would have cost us many thousands of dollars per year on oil and electrons. Now I don’t need to freeze my willie off when I wake up at 4am to take a leak.


Very true. The propane costs of keeping the house at 72 degrees as compared to 65 would have been more then double. The house is 1960's, all tile floors and adobe walls and LOTS of windows. The adobe walls work great in the summer but terrible in the winter.
 
Very true. The propane costs of keeping the house at 72 degrees as compared to 65 would have been more then double. The house is 1960's, all tile floors and adobe walls and LOTS of windows. The adobe walls work great in the summer but terrible in the winter.

Sounds like my house, uninsulated stone, 2 ft thick.
 
Sounds like my house, uninsulated stone, 2 ft thick.

That's a hell of a thermal mass. Do you find it helps to keep your house warmer in the winter once the stones are up to room temp, or does the cold find it's way through?
 
Do you find it helps to keep your house warmer in the winter once the stones are up to room temp, or does the cold find it's way through?
I don't have near the thermal mass that Ashful has, or my Sis in an adobe in NM. But it's logs with about 1" of wallboard-type stuff with aggregate, so it has considerable mass. No insulation. If I let it get cold inside, I'm lucky if I can raise room temp a degree an hour. The air leaks don't help...
 
I was hoping the burn season was over, but with temps in the low 40's today and tonight both stoves have been going again tom keep the wet chill out. 44 and rain is not horrible weather but when yesterday was close to 80 it feels nasty.
 
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I was hoping the burn season was over, but with temps in the low 40's today and tonight both stoves have been going again tom keep the wet chill out. 44 and rain is not horrible weather but when yesterday was close to 80 it feels nasty.

Don't feel bad Heavy Hammer, my stove is hot again tonight as well. Weathers just nasty and windy.
 
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That's a hell of a thermal mass. Do you find it helps to keep your house warmer in the winter once the stones are up to room temp, or does the cold find it's way through?

My walls hold near 53F year-round, and my rough calculation of the mass of the stone is right around 1.0 million pounds. This means our summer air-conditioning bill is surprisingly low, despite the size of the house and number of windows. We are only cooling to fight humidity, solar heating (windows), and human activity (computers, TV’s, cooking).

On heating, well... those walls are 53F all day and all night, every day. If I wanted to keep the house at 53F, it would cost me nothing! But, since we keep it closer to 73F, and the house is quite large, we use a lot of fuel. I haven’t tried parsing the data I have in this way (maybe a project for one evening this week), but I suspect my dependency on outdoor temperature is far less than most. In other words, I am probably using way more fuel than others in mild weather, but probably way less when it gets blistering cold. That’s because I’m always heating off of 53F, no matter what the outdoor temperature.
 
Really chompin' the bit to run a non-cat stove for the first time.
You've got a cat now? Planning on buying a non-cat? (You can put your stove in your signature, that's helpful.)
I'm trying to get up to speed on running the non-cat we got for my SIL. There's a bit of a learning curve, for sure.