Cool and very windy today. Early snow, then all day it’s been sometimes sunny and sometimes threatening rain. But always with the wind. I’ve had to burn the woodstove 3 times, which meant I needed to clean out the ashes but…
…first I had to empty the little bucket of cool ashes, because some of what came out of the stove would still be glowing red. And when I went to do that, I remembered that the big ash bucket was pretty much full and I kept forgetting about it. Dammit…
When I started living at the Lair in 2011 I dug a pit for ashes. That filled up pretty quick, and since then I’ve been dumping them into a heap at the edge of a little gully near the wash. Very important that nothing hot goes there. And you never know how long ashes will stay hot in the bucket, so definitely empty it first. But the problem today was that the wind is gusting to 25 mph all day, even down in my little hollow, right in my face if I stand at the top and pour out the bucket. That wasn’t going to work. So I ended up carrying the bucket down into the gully just so the wind would be blowing away from me.
Maybe that’ll teach me to stop forgetting about the damned ash bucket till the last moment. Probably not – never has before.
One of the joys of heating with wood! Good for you having a sensible disposal system.
Locally, we’ve had a few houses go up due to not-out coals and one 3-story apartment complex.
Must be the juniper and pallet wood. I can burn three cords of wood and end up with about as many ashes as will fit in that small trash can in the bottom picture.
My father-in-law burned the family house down by dumping not-quite cool ashes upwind of the house. By the time they noticed the situation it was way too late to save much.
That’s one nice thing about living in a CBS house in east central Florida.