Cutting, bucking, splitting, and stacking

One of the things we've been working on the most this year is preparing our wood storage for the winter.  Ideally, we cut all the trees down in the winter and have the spring, summer, fall to buck (cut into small rounds), split, and stack the wood.  Because we only moved here in October then were traveling most of time until March, we were on a bit of a protracted time schedule for wood preparations.  While our house has radiant floor heating on the main floor, the upstairs is passively heated from the rest of the house, and we would like to heat as much with our wood stoves as we can.  Yep, that was intentionally plural.  We are fortunate enough to have not 1, but 3 wood stoves in our house.

This is the stove we affectionately call 'microstove.'  Don't tell her, though -- even though she's tiny she sure packs a punch.  It took us a while to figure this one out, but a few logs go a long way. 

This is our cookstove in our kitchen, we call him Stanley since it is a Waterford Stanley stove.  We do have a gas stove/range, but we're experimenting with cooking more and more on this.

Last, but certainly not least, may we introduce MEGASTOVE!  This thing is a BEAST.  This huge behemoth is in our basement and can handle logs that are almost 3 ft long.  This baby cranks the heat.  We use it on really cold days and it warms the entire house from below.  There is also a vent from the basement to the second floor which is only passively heated from the rest of the house.

Last year, we kept the thermostat at about 58 (much to my mother's chagrin) and tried to heat the house to a reasonable temperature (with mediocre success) using the stove in the kitchen and occasionally megastove.  Initially, the goal for this year was to use megastove as much as we can as it really helps to heat the house from the bottom up; however, the past week has shifted that a bit.  We decided we were going to try to bake something in the cookstove, so I did a little research on the best way to easily heat the oven.  What I learned was upsetting but I'm glad we learned it now -- last winter, we did a really good job heating the chimney.  :(  What we thought was the flue on the stove was actually a damper.  By closing it after the fire is lit, the heat stays in the stove and doesn't go up the chimney (as much).  This has totally revolutionized our cookstove.  Since that day, we've been cooking on it whenever it's lit, we've baked a quiche in it, and we're using MUCH less wood to do all these things.  I think we're going to use the cookstove a lot and save megastove for really cold days.

We also want to really cultivate the use of microstove.  Microstove has been infamously finicky and is prone to smoking us out.  We finally figured out that you have to treat microstove like a mini-campfire to get it to work -- there's no building a giant fire and tossing in a match.  That being said, microstove is in a room that is sealed from the rest of the house so we figure we can have dinner and/or watch a movie enjoying the warmth of microstove in the evening, shut the door over night, and enjoy our coffee in the morning in the residual warmth from the previous night's fire.  This is great because I think we went through a lot of wood last year building fires to warm us in the morning only to leave said fires to go work outside.  If we can avoid building the morning fire but still be comfortable with our breakfast/coffee, I think we can save a lot of wood. So far, we've used microstove a few times this fall.  We had a friend staying with us, and he was working in the room with microstove all day -- a few logs in the morning was all it took to keep him warm until late afternoon.  Score.

That being said, this summer, we're attempting to put up enough wood that we'll have plenty of leftover at the end of the winter.  Ideally, the wood we split/stack next summer will be for the following winter (i.e., a year later).  Burning really dry wood is better for the environment (it burns cleaner), and it burns hotter making it just a more efficient fuel.  So -- we're hoping we can put up enough wood this year that we can leave some for the following winter and then do the same thing next year.  After that, we're hoping we can be a year ahead of schedule every year.  We have what seems like a lot of wood stacked for the winter, but I'm still nervous about running out (we ran out last year, but we have WAY more than double what we had last year).  Cutting firewood is extremely exhausting, but really rewarding work.  I really feel like my splitting skills have gotten much better just this summer....if only we could keep our wood piles from falling over....

So far, our thermostat has stayed comfortably at 55 (sorry, Mom), but the house is MUCH warmer and more comfortable than last year.....let's see how it goes when it is actually cold.

Seal it up!

One of our long term goals for our house is to use alternative energy whenever we can, and eventually, we'd like to be completely off the grid.  Before we even start to think about what sort of energy we'll be using (wind, solar, micro-hydro...), we want to make sure our house is as energy efficient as possible.  A couple weeks ago, we had an energy audit done by the great folks at the Midcoast Green Collaborative. It was a really awesome experience.  If you've never had an energy audit, here's the run-down:

They come to your house and ask you a bunch of questions about your energy consumption: how much your utility bills were for the past year, what sort of sources you use for heat, what sort of humidity generators you have in the house (watering house plants, an aquarium, humidifier, pot of water on the wood stove, etc.), and other questions associated with general energy use (including the length of our showers).  Then, we did a house tour during which they pointed out a lot of things that we could easily fix (putting insulation on the exposed pipes in the basement, for one).  Here comes the really cool part, though.

www.buildingdoctors.com

www.tlc.com

All the windows, doors, flues, etc. in the house are closed, and they attach a fan one of the external doors.  They then proceed to suck all the air out of your house, they measure the pressure differential between the work the fan is doing and what is flowing into your house (through all the leaky spots!).  With the fan still going, they walk around the house feeling for drafty areas, and it is pretty amazing how many leaks there are!

Then, they walked around with an infrared camera to see any leaky spots that were out of reach or so small we couldn't feel them.  If I had one of these cameras, I'd be walking around with it all the time.

Not our house -- www.energytribe.com

We learned that there are a lot of leaks in our house, but we also learned a lot of really easy fixes that pretty much everyone can do for cheap to save some energy.  For one, all outlets leak. There is a REALLY cheap, easy way to fix this.  Get some outlet insulation for the outlets in your house.  There are pre-cut foam pieces for this.

www.greeningneighborhoods.com

Punch out the holes for the outlets, take off the face plate, put in the foam, and put the face plate back on.  Save the pieces you punch out to make room for the outlets, and for outlets you rarely use, add the foam piece to a childproof outlet cover, and put that in the outlet.  Voila!  Insulated outlet.  :)  This is so easy, I can't believe I've never heard of it before.  They make them for light switches as well, so do those too.

Next on the list....caulking all the spaces between our support beams and the walls.  This one is daunting for me as my caulking skills are minimal.  I'm practicing in the basement first so that I can not make our house look like crap.

I just wanted to share about the outlets since it is so ridiculously cheap and easy.