Changing of the guard

[Snowy Rivers]

Well the cold weather that we have seen for the first week+ of this month and most of the last have finally changed.

The temps went from below frezzing yesterday morning to above 50F by yesterday afternoon.

The outlook is for highs in the low to mid 50's F for the remainder of this week and through the weekend.

Got up this morning and the temperature in the family room was a very toasty 74F

Just a tad too warm for me, even with the Advantage on the lowest setting.

As soon as it gets daylight out the temps will climb even more, so it was time to shut the Advantage off and rekindle a tiny fire in the Prodigy for now.

The tiny little Prodigy will likely tend to the duties by itself for the next few days.

OMG I love the ability to have the choice of which stove to use during the widely varying weather conditions.

Now that I have tons of shells stacked away, the weather decides to get warm.

Oh well, easier to deal with than the sub freezing temps me thinks.

Snowy

 

[Snowy Rivers]

HMMMMMMMMMMMM, after breakfast it was obvious that the weather is just too warm for a fire today.

No sense in roasting the house while we are away.
SOOOOOOOO I shut the little stove off until we get home from work this eavening.

The house temp will likely be down to the mid to upper 60's by then, but it wont take long to bring it back up with the weather as mild as it is today.

Other than being wet, the weather is nice.

Later troops

Snowy

 

[Delta-T]

a gentleman I used to work with also has a selection of whitfields to choose from depending on the severity of the weather....he's always touting the value of variety and redundancy. Color me green...with envy.

 

[tjnamtiw]

Darn, you have 50's and here in Georgia it is going to be 10 tonight Go figure. Al Gore strikes again. I envy the heck out of you. Oregon is beautiful. Used to live in Bremerton, Wash compliments of USN and had my freezer full of fish and animal all the time.
How much do you give for your shells? I might try the local pecan nut cracker but I don't want to get 'rednecked'.....

 

[chris288]

She said in a previous post she pays 40.00 / ton

 

[tjnamtiw]

Oh, I missed that one! Wow, what a deal!

 

[slls]

My thermostat watches the weather for me.

 

[Snowy Rivers]

Yesssssss $40 a ton
The Pecan shells would likely work well too.

I run all my shells through a screen bottom bucket to make sure that there are no STICKS in the stuff.

My whole focus was on heating as cheaply as is safely possible.

The Older Whitfields that we have are refugees from Craigs list.

Total cost for the two stoves with the pipes and such plus the hearth arrangements is not even $1000 for the pair, and this includes everything.

$200 each on the stoves and then the pipe I bought new. (Wholesale) One section of pipe had been painted for a home show so I got it cheap.

The Quadrafire we have is a T Stat operated stove and we will use it if we need to leave for an overnighter or ???

With the large savings in heating costs, I dont mind at all, having to build a fire or shut one down or ???


During long stretches of cooler weather its easy to just keep the stove full and clean it once a week.

The mild weather and the shoulder seasons makes a little more work and decision making for me.

Nice thing about mulitple stoves is at least in the event of a breakdown, the house is not going to get cold while I fix something.

During the last cold snap, I could shut the large stove off for a couple hours to cool pending a cleanout and not have the house cool off much.

Years ago, when we used the Old Earthstove pellet unit, cleaning was a long drawn out afair that took a couple hours.

This and the fact that getting a fire up and going in the old Earthstove took 30 minutes or more of my time was a driving factor in the change.

The Old WP 50 would really heat when up and going but really had a tough time when the weather was warm, as it really did not have a low enough setting.

Got in Last night, the house was 65F and within less than 10 minutes had both Whitfields running and putting out heat.

By 9pm the house was toasty so I shut off the Advantage and let the prodigy run through the night.

I will shut it off here in a bit as its going to be 55+ F today. No sense in wasting the fuel to roast an empty house.

Later troops

Enjoying the milder weather, but just going to bet that we will see more cold shortly.

Snowy