Barring a major cold snap, it looks like I am done with wood for the season. I am now heating the house with a minisplit and my hot water is swapped over to my solar hot water panels (in the winter i use them to preheat my water as with the panels alone its just not hot enough). Looks like a 3 to 3.5 cord winter. With a broken ankle I did use the minisplit more often and didnt heat my office so it was definitely not a normal winter. My timing is off a bit as I still have wood in the bulkhead and need to clean out the wood debris that collect there over a season so I may end up doing one more burn on a weekend for clean up. Once I hit march my PV starts to really crank out the power with the longer days so running the minisplit is break even on my power bill , Once I hit April then I will be building up surplus power getting ready for next winter.
Looks like I am shutting down for the season
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mark cline
Minister of Fire
I just had my second knee replacement surgery this winter and it went better than the first. I was going to call it quits on the boiler, but it’s supposed to to be in the mid 40’s during the day and mid 30’s at night , so I’ll burn this week, clean up the boiler room then clean my turbulators . I have to say ,that my battery powered wheelbarrow , worked like a charm. I never could have moved 4.5 cord into the boiler shed without it . My wood being 20” long , I had to remove the poly tray and fabricate a rack to hold more wood. The wheelbarrow would climb up a 4-5” plywood ramp into the shed almost effortlessly and only charged it once since beginning of December.
Bad LP
Minister of Fire
I’m still feeding the boiler once a day. We still have freezing nights and plenty of snow.
Propane is only been used for hot water and cooking since Jan when we moved here fulltime.
Propane is only been used for hot water and cooking since Jan when we moved here fulltime.
Mark, glad you are doing well with the second knee surgery and reovering well. You did well to do do any burning this winter with two surgeries. Bruce
We are going to be unseasonably cooler for the next week or two, so i will likely be burning until mid April. (Central Ont.)
Bad LP
Minister of Fire
We had a fire in the insert because we felt like it but the boiler is not getting chit down anytime soon.
mark cline
Minister of Fire
Woke up this morning with 6” of snow on the ground and 13F , good thing I didn’t shut down, going to be coo this week, so I’ll keep the 300 fed . Grand kids coming down next weekend, they love the warm floors, so we’ll see what the weather does after that . Chomping at the bit to get things going on the log home but the Dr says to take it slow. Covid has sure run the prices through the roof if you can even find supplies.
I did fire up the boiler this AM. The storage tank is about 60 degrees so I am running an old school smudge pot this morning without storage. Been a long time since I have run that way. Luckily its dry wood and I have a good heat load so I timed the load of wood to burn down to coals before the damper shut. Not great but heating the storage up to usable temp would have taken a lot more wood. Once the sun is up and the heat load goes down I will probably run the mini split.
mark cline
Minister of Fire
12F and snowing hard , top of storage is 170, so I’ll fire the boiler about noon . High today is only 18F , then 13 tonight, 4 more cord in the barn so I’m going to run through next weekend. High of 64 on Thursday but high of 35 Friday through the weekend 🤬
Crazy weather--up and down--hard to judge on what to do I imagine...Do you actually run through 4 cords on a weekend when its real cold like 12 or 13 degrees outside? clancey
mark cline
Minister of Fire
No, I meant that I have 4 cord in the barn , that is dry and ready when needed. Total for this winter might be about 5 full cord , but the weather is supposed to be highs of mid 40’s through mid April and lows about 30 .
Thought I was done burning this season but we got 2.5" snow last night so I fired up the stove. The snow was wet & heavy so it broke a branch off a nearby tree and onto high voltage line so we lost power for 10 hours. Got up at 2:30am and connected stove to our backup power inverter on our RV and stove picked up right where it left off. Didn't even have to re-light it. Started our generator in the morning and started charging the RV batteries. About noon the generator ran out of gas and power came back on 2 minutes later.
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