…which I love, by the way, with a warmth of affection only matched by the propane heater in my bedroom…
There were some lingering issues.
Like what to do with all that firewood. Fortunately I still have neighbors who heat with wood, and one of them came and filled his pickup as full as we could fill it to get it off my hands. He’ll (probably) come back at some point to take the rest off my hands. Which will leave me with the question of what to do with the woodshed, but that doesn’t really class as a problem.
What DID class as a problem is where to take the old woodstove, and how to get it there. That sucker’s heavy. Even stripped down I could get it out of the cabin by myself but I couldn’t lift it high enough to get it into the Jeep. Happily, the aforementioned neighbor came to get firewood and between the two of us it was easy.
I took it to Ian’s Cave…
My friend Ian has many fine qualities. He’s brilliant and talented and obsessively hard working when the project interests him and he likes guns but he’s not a civil engineer. He had this idea, back when we built his place in 2009, that little or no winter heating would be required. He was – not as right as he usually is about that. We did retrofit it with Landlady’s cast-off woodstove (which worked just fine in her cabin, though it was too small) and found that we couldn’t get it to sustain a fire at all. Too little firebox, too much stovepipe, not enough draft. And it’s been that way ever since. But I needed a place to put my larger and still perfectly good woodstove, so…
…Now it’s got a home. So a (very) few things are getting done.
Brilliant! Now, to find a home for the smaller wood stove.
Is it just me? For a guy who is normally obsessive about keeping a plan B, you seem to be moving remarkably fast in regard to heating your Lair.
I would have thought youd keep the woodstove as a ‘just in case’ sort of thing.
Convert your woodshed to a sauna, using the extra woodstove. Doesn’t have to be fancy. My dad used an old chicken house heating it with a homemade stove made from a 45 gallon metal barrel, and it worked great.
It’s good that you had help moving the old stove. That whole “I can do it all alone” mindset is fine when you are younger, but at our age it’s not a smart thing, as I just learned.
As for the woodshed, once empty and cleaned out it would probably make a good storage shed for things like your trailer, that refurbished garden wagon and anything else that would benefit from being out of the elements.
From previous comments that woodstove was never Joel’s favorite major appliance.
Joel, does your affection for the new stove have anything to do with the fact there will be no more chimney cleaning and soot?
Yes. To all the comments. Yes I cast off a lot of firewood very quickly. Yes this violates Uncle Joel’s Rule #1: always have a Plan B. And technically nothing would have stopped me from keeping the woodstove in reserve but I do have a sort-of backup in the bedroom heater. Yes I plan to never scrub another stovepipe ever again in my life. Yes I have grown to hate the woodstove with the incandescence of a million suns. It’s all fun and games until the first chimney fire and the millionth time you’ve had to chop kindling and clean the mess.
How is your PV system handling your new ‘fridge in the winter solstice?
It basically doesn’t notice it. I expected to get a big boost from the winter cold, but so far we haven’t really had any of that, it’s been a freakishly warm winter with nights in the 30s and 40s. But the PV system is having no issues with the fridge at all.
In regards to the current season here’s Christmas from a different angle….
https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-star/17702/