Against last night's cold, we hung up blankets to wrap off the main living room where the iron stove is. I went ahead and shut off all the water and drained the pipes, so there was no danger from freezing -- that's how we used to do it when we lived in the mountain cabin, which froze whole months of the year. The fire inside the iron stove kept us all very warm, except the horses who are quite capable of handling far colder weather than this polar blast. They got extra hay and a ration of grain to help keep warm.
Today I decided to roast some pork in the oven because that's an all-day, low-heat process. It's helped to fill the house with a bit of warmth, as well as some wonderful smells. Once it was finished, I made some honey-wheat bread from scratch, with a bit of cinnamon just for the smell of it baking.
Black iron, in the stove and the roasting pan, has made this shock of cold a great deal better. That and some of the firewood I spent so much of last year laying in, of course.
17 comments:
Glad you're keeping warm and cozy. All this global warming can be difficult to handle :p
I heated our dome in Las Cruces for three winters off one cord of wood in a wood burning stove sized for a house three times the size of ours.
Two things about that. 1) Las Cruces winters weren't as globally warmed as this one; although they could get ugly. 2) Tough to do that today with a new wood burning stove with EPA particulate standards so tight you can't burn wood in them.
Bonus 3) Domes are enormously efficient to heat and cool compared to boxes.
Eric Hines
Our house in California had a great wood burning stove that would heat most of the house. But I often wondered what would happen to the air quality if everyone did that :p
A wood-burning stove heats you twice. Once when you burn the wood and once when you cut it to begin with.
Unfortunately, the first time it warms you often occurs in the summer. :)
Most of the bad name wood stoves get results from folks loading them up with uncured wood, stopping them down to make the fire last till morning, and filling up the valley with smoke- having a neighbor like this is misery. Like London in 1840.
Which creates a major resin build-up inside the pipe or chimney. Then when times like this come around, once in that blue moon, they crank it up to get the heat going and light their roof on fire.
This is why I burn pine as well as hard wood.
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Oil burner. That's all I'm gonna say.
Rocket Stove designs seem to be quite efficient and clean. If you add mass it's an even better heater. Seems like almost everyone makes their own too. This video is not bad.
My parents used to have a cabin in NH and we had an old Franklin stove. Creosote used to build up in the pipes - we used some sort of cleaner logs to get rid of it once or twice a winter.
Our current house has one wood burning fireplace in the living room (don't use it much) and one of those nifty two-sided gas fireplaces that has one outlet into my office and one into the den. I was never a big fan of gas fireplaces, but it's really nice to be able to come downstairs in the winter or come home from work and just flip a switch and - presto! Fire! :)
Not nearly as nice as a real fire, but still it is pretty neat all the same. I get cold much more easily than the Unit, and this way we can keep the main house pretty chilly and just warm my office or the den, which is where we spend the most time.
A two-sided fireplace is one of the nicest room semi-dividers I can think of.
This winter has been ideal so far for us: we've been able to enjoy a fire on more days than we can usually get away with, and yet there hasn't been a freeze hard enough to hurt either the citrus trees or the lettuce crop. Lettuce thinks this weather is perfect. The grapefruit sweeten up nicely, too.
douglas, thanks for the info link about the rocket stove.
A two-sided fireplace is one of the nicest room semi-dividers I can think of.
In my dream house, which I'll never build b/c I really don't want a big mortgage this late in life, there would be a two sided fireplace between the master bedroom and the adjoining library (which would have two chaise lounges big enough to sleep on if "someone" is snoring or you're having a restless night, or just to curl up on with a good book).
That's really a ridiculous luxury but it's fun to think about!
It's really cold here in the People's Republic, so I've been very grateful for that fireplace.
+1 on thanks for the rocket stove data. Somehow, I'd never heard of this.
The stove in the house we're renting right now is the most efficient I've ever seen. Probably the most inexpensive to be made, too, quite frankly. It consists of a 28" cube frame of 1/4" rolled steel with 2" slabs of fireproof concrete to fill in all around and the spaces in front where the door is mounted. There is a steel cover on the top so you can sit things like pots for water, etc. and it has legs made from the same steel as the frame. A stovepipe through the roof and that's it. It's amazingly simple in design, but I can't tell y'all how many times I cooked us out of the living room last year by heating up the concrete too early in the evening. It holds the heat and holds the heat and holds the heat and .... Thankfully this year, we remembered lessons learned. Good thing, too, because it's been a much colder year this year already, and the wood is in.
I should mention that the living room does not share the same space as the wood stove. It is in the next room over. The room with all the windows and the sliding glass door. If I've painted my picture appropriately, you'll understand just how much heat this thing kicks out.
I've been around fireplaces and wood stoves of all kinds all my life, I've never seen anything like this.
Now, off to watch the rocket stove vid....
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Sly, it's the mass of the concrete- great heat sink that then disperses the heat using the metal as the radiator (I'm assuming the concrete is the lining, right?). There seem to be about as many ways to build a rocket stove as there are people, and it's definitely a great thing to combine with a mass to act as a heat store and distributor over time back into the house. That vid I linked to is just a stove- fine for a workshop you only inhabit part of the day, but for your house, having sufficient mass to hold and release the heat over time is the key to even heating over the course of the night. That's why old masonry or stone fireplaces in the middle of a house worked so well, but stoves left to die down leave you a little cold in the early morning till you get them fired up again. Having a substantial hearth under a stove can help some. I just wish I lived in a house where I could consider using wood for heat, but it's out of the question for me, plus it's essentially illegal for almost anyone to burn wood here in SoCal. Can't build a wood burning fireplace in a new house...
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