All cleaned up.
It’s going to be 35 here tonight, heralding cold weather down the line. I took a wire brush to all the rust on the furnace. I reblacked it after I cleaned the iron.
I also cleaned the inside with a shovel and a shop vac. I put a new gasket on the inside of the door. Then I went outside and opened and cleaned the chimney pipe, which is double-walled steel.
No fire tonight, but we’re ready when the time comes.
We used a Heatilator fireplace to warm about 400 square feet of bedroom and bathroom. (Those installations have a fan which blows the heated air into the room; the air is heated through contact with hot bricks lining the top and bottom of the hotbox.)
ReplyDeleteThe thing worked extremely well--so much so that I had to cut back on firewood during overnight hours.
I read the title and thought this post was about the state of the world...
ReplyDeleteWe heated our 2600sqft geodesic dome in Las Cruces with a wood-burning stove rated for 900sqft. A cord of wood would last us a bit over two winters.
ReplyDeleteGranted, that's a southern New Mexico winter, but they still got cold enough--routinely into the low 30s-low 40s during the day. Our heating also was helped by the spherical nature of our dome: lots less surface area to lose heat through than a traditional box house.
Too, wood-burning stoves have relatively large carbon footprints, which according to the Extremists' logic, will help fight off the cold longer-term.
Not looking forward to a north Texas winter. 'Course, I've always been a wuss when it comes to cold, even having been raised in the Midwest and done time in the upper Midwest, north of the Arctic Circle, and Germany.
Eric Hines
I'd like to be able to use the fireplace, especially since the local power company is weakening the durability of our grid (flipping from coal and gas to wind, solar, and gas). Unfortunately, the first thing that has to happen is repairing the chimney and flue. That requires $$,$$$ and finding someone to do it, then fixing the damage the repair process does to the roof. (Little things got ignored too long and became a Big Thing.)
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
Sorry to hear that. LR1. It's always something, isn't it? I finally got my Ford back, but it cost me nearly three grand to get it to work again.
ReplyDelete