Firewood in Norway is more than just a way to heat a home...

[fire_man]

I wanted to share this NY Times article with fellow Hearth members - it talks about how firewood in Norway is more than just a source of heat - true Hearth members can relate.

A few interesting points in the article:

Norwegians argue terribly whether splits get stacked "bark up" or "bark down"
There was talk of making a TV series devoted purely to firewood.
A Norwegian believes “You can tell a lot about a person from his firewood stack.”

I think I want to move to Norway!!

If the link does not work try this: Type in FIREWOOD IN NORWAY on Google. The link is accessible there. (Thanks to English Bob for this tip!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/w...od-elicits-passions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=5&

If the link does not work try this: Type in FIREWOOD IN NORWAY on Google. The link is accessible there. (Thanks to English Bob for this tip!)

 

[Babaganoosh]

Can you buy me a subscription to the new York times please?

 

[BrotherBart]

Great article. Thanks.

 

[Babaganoosh]

It's blocking me, saying I need a subscription.

 

[fire_man]

Strange - I don't have a subscription but I can click the link and read the article.

I just read on the NY Times site something about only being able to view a link 10 times when posted on a social media site.

Phooey.

 

[peakbagger]

Its worth going to the hassle of getting around the paywall. Start up a new web browser and switch it to private browsing mode. (IE explorer, click on the Gear logo, pick "safety" and then select "in private browsing" )Past in the link on the address bar and edit the link to remove all the text to the right of .HTML. The New York Times website thinks its bran new viewer and gives you free trial access.

One of the members on this site Tom in Maine has been running a radio show, Hot and Cold for a long time with Dick Hill for two hours on Saturday morning on Maine on heating your house and other things related to home maintenance. Unfortunately the only way you can listen to it is if you happen to be in range or the radio station (most of central Maine).

 

[ixlr8]

Its worth going to the hassle of getting around the paywall. Start up a new web browser and switch it to private browsing mode. (IE explorer, click on the Gear logo, pick "safety" and then select "in private browsing" )Past in the link on the address bar and edit the link to remove all the text to the right of .HTML. The New York Times website thinks its bran new viewer and gives you free trial access.

Just tried this with both IE and Foxfire, didn't work for me, it still wanted me to log in.

 

[billb3]

I wanted to share this NY Times article with fellow Hearth members - it talks about how firewood in Norway is more than just a source of heat - true Hearth members can relate.

A few interesting points in the article:

Norwegians argue terribly whether splits get stacked "bark up" or "bark down"
There was talk of making a TV series devoted purely to firewood.
A Norwegian believes “You can tell a lot about a person from his firewood stack.”

I think I want to move to Norway!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/w...od-elicits-passions.html?pagewanted=all&_r=5&

That story is from 2013 ( date is in the URL )
was linked to here then also.

There was a "TV show" of sorts which was nothing more than a video camera pointed at a fireplace ( at least at night) . If you 'watched' it every now and then a hand would throw another split or two on the fire. Prime time there may have been some commentary/discussion like how to split and store wood, etc.

 

[PA. Woodsman]

There was a "TV show" of sorts which was nothing more than a video camera pointed at a fireplace ( at least at night) . If you 'watched' it every now and then a hand would throw another split or two on the fire. Prime time there may have been some commentary/discussion like how to split and store wood, etc.

You mean like the "Yule log" at Christmas, where they show a fireplace burning and play music?

 

[Flamestead]

Its worth going to the hassle of getting around the paywall. Start up a new web browser and switch it to private browsing mode. (IE explorer, click on the Gear logo, pick "safety" and then select "in private browsing" )Past in the link on the address bar and edit the link to remove all the text to the right of .HTML. The New York Times website thinks its bran new viewer and gives you free trial access.

One of the members on this site Tom in Maine has been running a radio show, Hot and Cold for a long time with Dick Hill for two hours on Saturday morning on Maine on heating your house and other things related to home maintenance. Unfortunately the only way you can listen to it is if you happen to be in range or the radio station (most of central Maine).

Was Dick Hill a researcher at UMO? Early work on heat storage?

 

[peakbagger]

Dick Hill was at UMO for years, I would expect his biggest accomplishment is mentoring generations of mechanical engineers, but he is also well known as the invertor of an early high efficiency boiler that was produced by several firms. There are various articles, video and other stuff about Dick and his collaborator at this link http://www.hotandcold.tv/

 

[English BoB]

Type in FIREWOOD IN NORWAY on Google. The link is accessible there.

BoB

 

[711mhw]

I catch Tom's show every Sat! Good stuff!

 

[GENECOP]

Kyrre Lien for The New York Times Lars Mytting at his home in Elverum, Norway. His best-selling book, “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning,” inspired a TV program about cutting, stacking and burning firewood. By SARAH LYALL Published: February 19, 2013 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ SAVE EMAIL SHARE PRINT REPRINTS OSLO — The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the angry responses came pouring in. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors Enlarge This Image Courtesy Lars Mytting In a country where 1.2 million households have fireplaces or wood stoves, the subject naturally lends itself to television. Enlarge This Image NRK/Norwegian Broadcasting “We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” Mr. Mytting said. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.” Readers’ Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (347) » “We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.” He explained, “One thing that really divides Norway is bark.” One thing that does not divide Norway, apparently, is its love of discussing Norwegian wood. Nearly a million people, or 20 percent of the population, tuned in at some point to the program, which was shown on the state broadcaster, NRK. In a country where 1.2 million households have fireplaces or wood stoves, said Rune Moeklebust, NRK’s head of programs in the west coast city of Bergen, the subject naturally lends itself to television. “My first thought was, ‘Well, why not make a TV series about firewood?’” Mr. Moeklebust said in an interview. “And that eventually cut down to a 12-hour show, with four hours of ordinary produced television, and then eight hours of showing a fireplace live.” There is no question that it is a popular topic. “Solid Wood” spent more than a year on the nonfiction best-seller list in Norway. Sales so far have exceeded 150,000 copies — the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, to 9.5 million in the United States — not far below the figures for E. L. James’s Norwegian hit “Fifty Shades Fanget,” proof that thrills come in many forms. “National Firewood Night,” as Friday’s program was called, opened with the host, Rebecca Nedregotten Strand, promising to “try to get to the core of Norwegian firewood culture — because firewood is the foundation of our lives.” Various people discussed its historical and personal significance. “We’ll be sawing, we’ll be splitting, we’ll be stacking and we’ll be burning,” Ms. Nedregotten Strand said. But the real excitement came when the action moved, four hours later, to a fireplace in a Bergen farmhouse. Perhaps you have seen a log fire burning on television before. But it would be very foolish to confuse Norway’s eight-hour fireplace extravaganza on Friday with the Yule log broadcast in the United States at Christmastime. While the Yule log fire plays on a constant repeating loop, the fire on “National Firewood Night” burned all night long, in suspensefully unscripted configurations. Fresh wood was added through the hours by an NRK photographer named Ingrid Tangstad Hatlevoll, aided by viewers who sent advice via Facebook on where exactly to place it. For most of the time, the only sound came from the fire. Ms. Hatlevoll’s face never appeared on screen, but occasionally her hands could be seen putting logs in the fireplace, or cooking sausages and marshmallows on sticks. “I couldn’t go to bed because I was so excited,” a viewer called niesa36 said on the Dagbladet newspaper Web site. “When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher. “I’m not being ironic,” the viewer continued. “For some reason, this broadcast was very calming and very exciting at the same time.” To be fair, the program was not universally acclaimed. On Twitter, a viewer named Andre Ulveseter said: “Went to throw a log on the fire, got mixed up, and smashed it right into the TV.” But Derek Miller, an expatriate American and author of the novel “Norwegian by Night,” said the broadcast appealed to Norwegians’ nostalgia for a simpler time as well as demonstrating the importance of firewood in their lives. “The sense of creating warmth, both symbolically and literally, to share conversation, to share food, to share silence, is essential to the Norwegian identity,” he said in an interview. “Solid Wood,” the title of Mr. Mytting’s book, has a double meaning in Norwegian, signifying also a person with a strong, dependable character. Its publication appears to have given older Norwegian men, a traditionally taciturn group, permission to reveal their deepest thoughts while seemingly discussing firewood. In this way they are akin to passionate fishermen roused from monosyllabic interludes by topics like which fly to use and how to really understand what a trout is thinking. “What I’ve learned is that you should not ask a Norwegian what he likes about firewood, but how he does it — because that’s the way he reveals himself,” said Mr. Mytting. “You can tell a lot about a person from his firewood stack.” The book has proved particularly popular as a gift for hard-to-shop-for men. “People buy it for their dads, their uncles — ‘I don’t know what to get him, but he has always liked wood,’ ” said William Jerde, a clerk at the Tanum bookstore in downtown Oslo. Tobias Sederholm, a clerk in a different store, said that one customer came in after Christmas having received copies from seven different family members. Petter Nissen-Lie, 44, a lawyer in Oslo who every morning before breakfast lights a fire with wood he has chopped himself, said he understood perfectly what all the fuss was about. The other day, he said, one of his three axes broke at his vacation home in the mountains, and he took it to the store where he had bought it a decade ago. When he tried to pay for repairs, he said, the storekeeper declared that “this sort of thing should not happen to our ax,” and insisted on doing it free. “It was very important for this man to carry quality axes,” he said. Where does Mr. Nissen-Lie stand on the important bark-in-the-woodpile question? (Do you have an hour?) “I like to have the bark facing down,” he explained. “That’s the way I learned from my grandfather, and I believe it’s drier that way. But I respect that there are different ways to do it — and basically the most important thing is how much air you leave around the logs.” A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bark Up or Down? Firewood Splits Norwegians. SAVE EMAIL SHARE

 

[firefighterjake]

Got as far as ". . . for the New York Times" before I gave up reading . . . way too much text in a solid block.

 

[TreePapa]

.... Isn't it good, Norwegian wood ....

Sorry, had to.

"“Solid Wood,” the title of Mr. Mytting’s book, has a double meaning in Norwegian, signifying also a person with a strong, dependable character." .... Yeah. “Solid Wood” also has a double meaning in the U.S., but not so family friendly.