I fell off the wagon (wood wagon that is)

[mikeyny]

I am guilty, I fired up the gas boiler yesterday. I needed a break from burning wood. It's not that it's too much of a chore to burn 24 7 but It is nice to have break now and then. Besides, it is warm here in ny for a few days, so we won't burn too much gas anyway. The funny thing about it is that I didn't realize how much of your time is spent actually thinking and monitoring your system and the weather,keeping track of temps and wood consumption. Loading in itself is interesting. It takes a bit of thought about how much of what type wood to load in depending on the outside temp. How to load it the best way and so on and so on. And then the temps. Too much wood on a warm day gets too hot, dump zone kicks in, seems wastefull. So anyway, it was nice not to think abut it for a day. Woke up, didn't have to check the temps or wood. No worry if I made it thru the nite or not. House was warm as usual, no fuss, just another bill to pay.It's 3 30, shut down the gas boiler, wood boilers running again, the big game comes on in while. It was almost 24 hrs. I just got my fix. I feel much better now. MUCH BETTER. Anyone ever fall off this wagon??

Mike

 

[heaterman]

You would be amazed at how much of all you described is eliminated with a well thought out and correctly installed storage system.

Get yourself about 1000 gallons for next winter and see if your work load isn't cut nearly in half.

 

[pcampbell]

You would be amazed at how much of all you described is eliminated with a well thought out and correctly installed storage system.

Get yourself about 1000 gallons for next winter and see if your work load isn't cut nearly in half.

1000 gallons?

 

[steam man]

We'll put you on probation this time but don't let it happen again.............................LOL

 

[hkobus]

Oh I wish that I could afford that right now. %-P When we bought this place and looked at the $2700 gas bill for the past year, was convinced we had to continue burning wood here. But the place had no wood furnace and is in town.. Make a long story short, we bit of a large project to close to winter. Installed all infloor heat and the Eko boiler, the boiler ended up in an out builing since I ran out of time to build the shop, no back-up or storage for the same reason.
Just waiting for some warmer weather to accomplish the same... ( groundhog was favorable to this thought :coolsmirk: )

As to the 1000 gal storage, I ll bring that ? to some other thread.

 

[Eric Johnson]

I know what you're talking about, Mikey. Used to be I would eventually give up on the wood sometime in early Spring and switch back over to oil. At first, I'd be thinking, "Man, that's a lot of heat with no effort." Then I'd look at the oil gauge after a week or so and go, "Man, that wood sure kicked out a lot of free heat."

I second heaterman's observation about getting a lot closer to perfection with the right setup. Most of us see that as the ultimate goal.

 

[Nofossil]

For me, the advantage of storage is that I'm no longer dealing with temp fluctuations in the house, and I have a lot more freedom as to when I build fires. My wood workload is something like this:

Every 1-2 weeks: Pass wood from under deck into boiler room - 15 minutes

Most days:
- Build & light fire - 5 minutes
- Six minutes later, go back downstairs and kick into secondary combustion - 30 seconds
- 1-2 hours later, refill boiler - 2 minutes
- If it's really cold, 2-4 hours later, refill boiler again - 2 minutes
- Catch up on forum posts - 120 minutes

I generally have a six hour window for when I build the fire. Longer if I don't mind the house temp dropping a couple of degrees. If it's warm or sunny, I can sometimes skip days. Having the boiler indoors makes tending much less of an issue.