I’ve mentioned that an unexpected side effect of having lots of thermal mass in winter is that you really can’t afford to let it all get cold. So D&L burn their pellet stove 24/7 for almost six months in the year. That means we’re already behind schedule in stocking them up.
And the plan involves really stocking up since Neighbor D is due for a knee replacement, I think later this month. He won’t be up to schlepping big sacks of stuff for a while. And of course L never is, weighing as she does about as much as a hummingbird.
I can’t believe how much of this stuff they go through; that’s not two months’ supply. Don’t even want to know what it costs.
“You work cheap, Joel.”
Yeah, if you only knew…
I haven’t really started woodcutting yet; I did this much just to see what needed tweaking/repairing in my chainsaw and sawbuck.
I much prefer pallet wood and old lumber, but this hasn’t been a good year for that. Half an hour’s work increased my pallet supply by 50%, enough that I think it’s worth dragging out the sawzall and generator to cut them up.
That cut up brush/driftwood won’t make a pretty stack.
I count 54 bags of pellets; at 50 lbs/per, that’s 2200 lbs that looks like it’s sitting on a wood plank floor. What;s supporting that floor?
And, as for quantity, is there not a supplier within driving distance who sells pellets in bulk? Some years back (and in a different, colder state) a neighbor who heated with pellets constructed an enclosed trailer that held about 4,000 lbs of the stuff, and a garage-type structure to keep the trailer in. Would something like that not work in this case?
It’s not a plank floor, it’s just planks laid on a paver-over-cob floor. And I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a way to buy pellets by the binful, but I don’t know and they don’t want to. Bags are convenient for use, and they’re really picky about quality: apparently cheap pellets have a lot of crumbles and dust that screw up pellet stoves.
Someone told me recently, that if you strip the bark off juniper, it burns better. This winter I think we may be experimenting with this theory/rumor.