Forgive me, for I have sinned...

[CowboyAndy]

Last night I had a wicked migrane, ended up falling asleep on the couch at 8:30 (usually go to bed at 10). Woke up at 11:30 still with a headache, wife was already asleep. I made the executive descision to let the *gasp* oil furnace run for the night.

Please, I beg for your forgivness...

 

[brooktrout]

That's okay. Just slide me on over a cord of that maple you got there in your sig and all will be forgiven ;-)

 

[Backwoods Savage]

You are forgiven. Now just be sure to split 50 logs by hand today.

Seriously, when those migraines hit, you do as little as possible. Sounds to me like you did the second best thing. First thing would have been to wake the wife up and ask her to tend the fire.

Hope you are feeling much better today.

 

[CowboyAndy]

You are forgiven. Now just be sure to split 50 logs by hand today.

Seriously, when those migraines hit, you do as little as possible. Sounds to me like you did the second best thing. First thing would have been to wake the wife up and ask her to tend the fire. Hope you are feeling much better today.

You don't know my wife very well...

even if the house were on fire, she would tell me not to wake her up until the bedroom curtains were on fire...

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Very well Andy. With that explanation, you no longer have to go split that wood by hand today. Just rest and recover from that headache.

 

[markpee]

I've burned oil too this Winter - perhaps we can start a support group? A 12-stack program?

 

[SteveT]

This year I planned to use my $270/ton BioBricks for 100% of my heat, because I was planning to be very miserly with my $4.89/gallon oil bought last summer. So much for the plan.....

Using the Webmasters quick and dirty formula for heating value of pellets vs oil (and I assume it works for BioBricks as they're just a big pellet) my bricks cost me equal to $2.70/gallon oil. I can buy oil now for about $2.00/gallon so I don't feel anywhere as bad about occasional use of the oil furnace.

You have company Andy.

 

[Adios Pantalones]

I've been getting it cranked up at 4:30 (when my dogs have me trained to go out) and then letting it burn out until I get home at 6pm ish during these warmer sunnier days (mid 30's) just to conserve a little wood. Still have about 2 cord to go.

 

[Todd]

I almost did the same the other day. I woke up not feeling that great, looked over at the stove and noticed it was time to bring in more wood, looked at the temp outside, -14, and just didn't feel like dealing with it. I was thinking, it would be so easy to flip on the furnace and take a day or 2 off but just couldn't bring myself to do it.

 

[Corey]

Say three hail Mary's and whip yourself 7 times with a cat-o-nine-tails...oh, and donate $50...and all will be forgiven!

Seriously, though, I know the feeling...I tweaked my back on Dec 28th (doing a silly little thing - lifting a 15 pound box up to the workbench!) It was way too easy to take a couple Tylenol, flip the switch on the gas furnace and hobble off to bed instead of hauling a load of wood in and stoking the fire. So the gas company scored a couple extra bucks last month

 

[Jags]

Please, I beg for your forgivness...

WHAT! Another slip like that and you will have to turn in your secret decoder ring and cape (nobody wants the mask and tights back after they have already been used.)

 

[kenny chaos]

My wife gets the headaches so I handle the wood alone. :red:

 

[Bigg_Redd]

Last night I had a wicked migrane, ended up falling asleep on the couch at 8:30 (usually go to bed at 10). Woke up at 11:30 still with a headache, wife was already asleep. I made the executive descision to let the *gasp* oil furnace run for the night.

Please, I beg for your forgivness...

It's OK.


If being tuff was easy everyone would be tuff.

 

[CowboyAndy]

Well, I am pretty confident that my sin will be offset from last week when I had fallen behind on cleaning the ashes from the furnace so the usible burn space was really not much, and we had -10* with 30mph wind so it was about -25 or -30* with the wind chill, and I slept on the couch so I could reload every 2 hours and the family would be warm and not use any oil...

 

[edthedawg]

Our place is big, old, drafty, and normally consumes oil at a rate of 150-200 gal every 3 weeks in the coldest parts of winter. We had the 275 gal tank mostly filled to about the 7/8 mark back in October, and I recall thinking how great it would be to make it to Christmas without having to refill.

Here it is Jan 6 and we still have almost half that tank remaining.

With the temps we've had, we definitely would have filled once, and would have either gotten another or would be looking at another soon.

The oil still runs all the time for the hot water. And we use the oil (24 yr old W-M boiler feeding cast-iron, single-pipe steam radiators) on the really cold days to heat up the bedrooms and give the stove a running start on the day, or to warm things upstairs a little better before the kids go to bed. I wouldn't say we're shy about using it, really - we never intended a single woodstove to exclusively heat the entire house. But I'm plenty tickled at slashing 70%+ of our oil consumption. To heck with the cost of oil being so cheap - this is cleaner and greener.

 

[karri0n]

Ed, I'm in the same boat as you. Do you turn your boiler off or just turn the thermostat down? Last year, we used a LOT of oil leaving the oil on all the time to heat the water, and this year, we've used next to none. we turn the boiler on for ~15 minutes during the day, and we keep hot water for the rest of the day and warm water until around noon the next day. We need to keep it on a bit longer if everyone wants to take a shower, but we turn it off promptly after getting out of the shower. This has saved us a LOT of oil, plus the fact that our thermostat won't go below 52, so if the temp drops when the fire is out the boiler would end up kicking on and it'd be off to the gas station to get more diesel.