It’s Only a Matter of Going

If you’re just tuning in, we’re recounting our BTU journey through the years. We started with bankruptcy and electric baseboard heat, which is more or less the same thing. Now we’re moving on to burning firewood, and anything else made of anything combustible that will fit through a one-foot square furnace door. We’ve purchased a semi-broken floor model of a big ol’ wood burning furnace, and a freight company has dutifully plopped it on a sheet of ice in my dooryard.

I called my family over to the window to look at it. “There it is, boys and girls. Real heat is over there. It’s only a matter of going.”

It was late winter already. The snow comes and goes, receding like a tide. It tricks you into thinking it’s leaving for good, and then you wake up and it’s back with its family in tow. Sometimes you’d get a foot of a dusting.

Other times you’d get eighteen inches of partly cloudy.

That hump you see at the end of the driveway was the real problem. That’s the end of the driveway that leads down to the back of the house, and that’s where the furnace has to go. We abandon that driveway pretty early in the season, and use it as a place to throw all the snow. It’s usually five or six feet deep, and harder than Chinese arithmetic after a subzero week or two.

The furnace would have to go up and over, until we reached this door about halfway down the driveway:

We built a ramp out of planks that stretched from the door to the edge of the driveway before the snows came.

So my family looked out the window, and didn’t like what they saw. It turned into another in a long line of Howyagonnadothatdad, and they turned away from the window and went back to shivering in peace. How, you ask? With a winch and a strap and a 2″ x 6″ board.  That’s all it takes, come on guys, it’s just a matter of going!

So we went to Harbor Fraught, and bought a tow strap:

…and a winch:

…and if you need a picture of a 2×6, I think you’re at the wrong blog. Anyway, the kids didn’t really warm up to the idea yet, because even though we had some experience moving heavy stuff around, we never did it on ice skates before. They thought the ice would make it worse, but they didn’t realize it would make it easier.

So we cut the 2×6 in half. Then we went out in the cold, and used a 2×4 as a lever and a milk crate as a fulcrum, and lifted up one side of the pallet off the ground. We screwed one of the 2×6 boards flat on the bottom of the pallet, and the kid got the picture immediately. We were making a sled. We lifted up the other side and finished the job. The two of us pushed the furnace across the ice over to the end of the driveway pretty easily.

Now comes the part where you have to understand that everything is backwards. You don’t want a tow strap to pull the pallet anywhere. You want a tow strap to keep the pallet from sliding down the hill and eventually into the river. Gravity and a lack of friction will do the work for us if we let it. We had plenty of heavy work to do, though, to flatten the mound at the end of the driveway. We threw the snow further down the driveway to sort of even it out, until we could push the pallet on top of the snow from its spot in the dooryard. Then we got a very nervous Mrs. Cottage, and put her behind the wheel of the van, backed it out into the street, and hooked the tow strap to the pallet on one end and the tow hook under the bumper on the van.

We left a little slack in the strap. My son and I gave the beast a shove, and it started down the steep incline without much fuss. The strap tightened up, and we waved our petite heroine gently forward to slowly ski the pallet down the driveway to the foot of the ramp. We didn’t even break a sweat, which was a shame because it was plenty cold out there.

And now, ladies and germs, I’d sprung my trap. My son had seen that quarter of a ton slide right down where we wanted it, easy peasy, and could be easily gulled into thinking getting it up the ramp into the house would be just as easy. I let him think that, because Satan calls me for advice when he really needs to get stuff done.

I had bolted that cheap hand-cranked winch to the floor in the basement workshop, and I pulled the cable with the hook down to the pallet. I hooked it on, and said, “One of us has to turn the crank, and the other has to walk behind the pallet and push it and steer it. He jumped at the chance at the crank, which was great. I wanted him to choose that option, and didn’t want to force him to do it. You see, a winch works by increasing the weight you can move by gearing your motions down. You turn that crank a lot, and the weight moves a little. He learned that in short order. The boy did his best, and had to, because the crank handle needed more laps around the circuit than the Indianapolis 500. He slept pretty good that night, if I remember correctly.

I never told him that I wanted the job pushing it up the ramp and steering because if the cable snapped (the cable made by the low bidder in a Chinese sweatshop),the man behind the pallet would be killed, and I like him better than I like me.

[To be continued]

Only One Problem

OK, so we decided to burn firewood to keep the ice inside the refrigerator where it belongs. That was a good idea. Waiting until the winter to decide was a bad idea.

You see, people in Maine understand that there are seasons, and the time to prepare for any given season is the season before. Of course, that only applies to merchandise on the end carrels at Walmart. You know, pool noodles in the winter, parkas in the summer. People around here start preparing for next winter about a month before the current winter has ended. They know what’s coming, and they’re ready for it. I didn’t, and I wasn’t.

Now, if you’re from away, you might have a mental picture of burning firewood. There’s a cozy scene of a family in woolen clothes sitting on rocking chairs next to a wood stove, with the dog slumbering at their feet. Believe you me, a little wood stove like that wasn’t going to cut it. Those heating calculations I posted yesterday require me to make about 30,000 BTUs per hour in the house just to stay even. I probably needed twice that to actually heat the place. A tiny cast iron box with a stove pipe full of soot and creosote wouldn’t put a dent it. We went looking for a wood furnace.

We wondered how the locals did it, so we looked around. Some of our neighbors had what looked like a porta-john, or maybe Darth Vader’s public phone booth, out in their yards. These turned out to be outdoor wood furnaces. Like this one:

There’s a reason they’re out in the yard, and not in the basement. They’re like nuclear reactors without the uranium. That’s a little one, and it makes close to 70,000 BTUs per hour. The big ones put out 400,000 BTUs. Your house would glow like the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man if you put that beast indoors.

I’m not the hardy sort, although I fake it pretty good, so the idea of going outside to stoke the furnace didn’t really appeal to me. And the price tag, about half the cost of our house, didn’t appeal to me either.

But we persevered, and wandered the earth online and in person, and finally found one of these:

It’s an Englander 28-3500. It burns wood. Lots of wood. Tons of wood. It’s about as elegant as a Mexican submarine. And even though it’s fairly big, you can put it in your basement and not pyrolize the walls. You open the top door to put in the firewood. You open the bottom door to slide out a tray full of ashes from time to time. There’s a squirrel cage fan hanging off the back, which circulates air in the passageways between the inner firebox and the outer sheet metal case, and then blows it out of the 8″ silver duct stub you see on top there. There’s a steel pipe sticking up a little in the back. That’s where you put the stove pipe and run it into your chimney. There’s a little lever you move left to right to let more or less air into the firebox. There’s a spinning wheel on the ash dump to let more air under the fire, if you really want to get the thing hot, and burn up your eight cords in eight weeks. It has a barbaric temperature switch in the back. It’s a spring that expands as it gets hot, and closes a circuit to start the fan when the air inside the jacket reaches around 90 degrees.

Here’s a guy using one to make a tiny fire of some sort. He should burn the mandolin he’s playing, although a full-sized guitar burns longer, in my experience:

The stove was touted as capable of heating 3,000 square feet of house. I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed that some houses, say, in San Diego, require less heat than houses, let’s say, in Minneapolis. So that figure might be of doubtful utility to me. I did some rough calcs on how much wood I could ram in the thing, and how long it would last, and how many BTUs were in that weight of wood, and figured that if I soaked the wood in gasoline before I started, I might get 60,000 BTUs out of the beast and heat 2/3 of the 3000 square feet they claim. But it’s important to understand input heat and output heat. If your furnace is 90% efficient, and rated for 50,000 BTUs, it really only delivers 45,000 usable BTUs. Burning firewood is much less efficient than other fuels like oil, so I figured a 50-percent haircut. I’ll take 30,000+ BTUs of heat. That’s the equivalent of almost 10,000 watts of electricity per hour. At the time, that was close to saving $2 per hour instead of running that much baseboard electric heat. It would only take us about 3 or 4 weeks to pay for the stove itself like that.

We found a floor model of this thing in the back of the Orange Place, with most of the parts thrown inside, shrink-wrapped on a pallet. It was getting to be late winter, and they needed room for the pool noodles, I guess, so we got it for a massive discount. I figured I could fix whatever was busted on it.

There was only one problem. It weighs 570 pounds.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and hitting the tip jar. It is much appreciated]

A Little Regler BTU Math

I apologize in advance. We’re going to do math.

Relax. We aren’t going to be doing that fancy math. The devil got up on his first day of work and went into his infernal office and put letters into equations that only had numbers in them a minute before. We’re upright folks here in Maine and will have none of that. Fancy math just leads to guys with MBAs telling you to come in on Sunday to make their numbers come out right. For what we’re trying to find out, regler arithmetic will do. And I already work on Sunday, thank you very much.

The question at hand is this: what’s the cheapest form of heat we can buy? No fooling, it’s got to be cheap, coming and going. By that, I mean it has to be cheap to buy the equipment to run it, and it has to likewise be cheap to make BTUs with that cheap equipment.

I turned to the unlikely source you could name. I asked the government. Now I understand that the government is what the devil made on his second day at work, and he’s been working at it non-stop ever since. But in Maine, the government is occasionally a time-warp, and it functions like Eisenhower was still in office. Or maybe Coolidge, on a really good day.

The Maine state government has one of those old-skool bulletproof websites that’s filled with nothing but information. They thought about putting an image or two on it, but their Brownie camera was on the fritz, I guess. So I asked the state gov, “What’s the cheapest form of heat I can buy around here?” Here’s the answer, up to date to today:

Aw, man, that requires too much math for me anyway. I know for certain how many unfortunate romantic liaisons there are in a gallon of gin, but how many BTUs are in a gallon of kerosene or propane or bunker fuel will remain a dark and bloody mystery to me forevermore. And they all taste even worse than gin. Besides, even ill-informed me knows that the furnaces I’d need to burn any of that stuff cost too much money to be practical. I need better answers. Hey look, the government came through again:

 

I know a million anything sounds like a lot, but we need many millions of BTUs to live where we do. This chart is getting things done for me. Of course the prices were different back when I really needed this chart. A chicken egg didn’t cost four bucks back then. You could buy a house for twenty-five grand after the great recession did its work, and I did so. But the ratios were about the same.

So feast your eyes on “Electricity – Baseboard,” and compare it to whatever fuel you’re using. I was heating my house, sorta, using that method, and the only decision I had to make was to run electricity through the baseboard heaters and pay the power company in gold bullion, or to pile up ten dollar bills in the middle of the living room and burn them to keep warm. The cost was about the same.

We could rule out natural gas right away. We ain’t got none here. There aren’t enough people to make it worthwhile to run it out into the boonies, and even if you wanted to, the ground is so full of granite that you’d need Oppenheimer to get back to work to blast the way in for the pipe.

But hey, look at that firewood number. On a good day, it’s as cheap as natural gas. It’s about 20-percent of the cost of electricity. And believe you me, we got trees in Maine. And I could use an 80-percent discount. Only shoplifting and highway robbery pays better than that. And highway robbery in January in Maine is a tough gig, man.

Now this is where internet wags are going to weigh in and tell the world, from their apartment in Tallahassee, that a real man don’t buy firewood. Nosirreebob. You go out and chop down trees like Paul Bunyan and kill something on the way home for the pot. Listen to me folks: No you don’t. You buy firewood. Why? Because you need a big woodlot to cut your own firewood, and you don’t have one. Firewood sellers do.

Let’s do the math. How many cords of wood do we need? That’s easy.

Heating Load=House Area×Heat Loss Factor×Temperature Differential

So my equation goes: Heating Load=Ginormous Victorian dustcatcher x heat running out of every seam in the joint x Oh my god I have to make it 90 degrees hotter in here in February and still wear a sweater.

So I need about 8 cords of firewood. There’s something like 22 million BTUs in a cord of hardwood firewood, so we’d end up with 176, 000,000 BTUs languidly making their way out of my house over a heating season. Eight cords is a lot of wood.

A cord of wood is a stack 8′ long by 4′ high by 4′ deep. It’s 128 cubic feet. The firewood “junks” as we call a piece of firewood around here, are usually 16″ long. I’m not going to stack anything 4′ deep, because that’s not how you dry firewood. One junk deep is it. So I’ll need a pile 24′ long by 4′ high. Actually, I’ll need 8 of them. I certainly don’t want a single pile 4′ high, 192′ long, because I’ll start in my back yard and end up in the street our front, and the plow driver hates that.

So maybe you’re starting to see the problem with you can get your firewood for free if you’ll just cut it. Just stacking that pile is plenty of work, believe you me. We’re doing some math again, and not talking about how firewood warms you twice and similar shite from armchair Daniel Boones. It would take about 24 full-size trees to make 8 cords. A woodlot can produce 20 to 40 cords per acre, but that’s only if you treat it like Sherman treated Georgia. If you want wood every year, you can only cut down 1 or 2 cords a year per acre. I don’t own an 8-acre woodlot.

But what if I did? If I cut down 24 trees, and skidded them out of the mire, and cut them up (by the way, you don’t chop firewood. Ever. You cut it or saw it or split it or stack it. You don’t chop, unless you’re nuts), then split them and trucked them back to the house. You only needed about $100,000- worth of trucks and chainsaws and mauls and kevlar pants and earplugs and whiskey for your frostbite. If you were a pro, it would take you about 60 hours to do all that, working all the time. Then again, if you’re a pro, you’re selling firewood for $350 a cord to people like me, and you’ve got oil heat at your house.

[To be continued]

Much Ado About Heat

What to do, about heat?

That’s not to say much ado about heat. I live in western Maine. Heat matters. You can insulate all you want, but believe me, you’re going to have to make some BTUs in the first place before you start chasing them around the house and shooing them away from broken windows and mouseholes. I’ve been making heat in This Old Hovel for a while now. I’ve tried various things. Let’s review:

When you buy an old wreck of a place in Maine, there’s a pecking order for utilities. You can’t get any water until you have heat. Don’t misunderstand me, the water department will come in July and turn it on. That’s if they’re unaware that you’re daft and don’t have working heat in a house you bought in a place where it occasionally reaches twenty below zero. If they sense that the rusty blue thing hooked up to the oil tank is kaput, they might shrug  and turn the water on anyway in August. They figure you’ll have to come to your senses by Halloween or so. But in the fall and winter, they ask.

The old heating system burned oil to boil water to sluice around the house in copper pipes and radiate its goodness all over the place. Oil heat is pretty standard in Maine. That was, in every sense of the term, a non-starter. The house had been abandoned with water left in the pipes, and it froze hard, and split open all the pipes. I assumed it cracked the boiler jacket, too, but who knows? Even if it didn’t, we couldn’t hope to re-run a hundred and fifty miles of baseboard heat.

But it was February-ish. We needed some heat, pronto, or we couldn’t move in. So I went to the Orange Place and bought some electric baseboard heaters. Rather a lot of them, actually. My son and I came up to the frozen north and had a jolly time installing them. They run on heavy-duty circuits, with 220-volts and many amps involved, but they’re not difficult to wire. You have to spend some quality time inside  the electrical panel, which gives a lot of people the willies. But the electric company just wants dough and they’ll give you a meter right away and don’t care if you’re your own electrician. They can always send the next bill to your executor or heirs, I guess.

At about the same time, we ran a new main water line from the meter to a manifold that served the water heater and a spigot for filling buckets. We also piped a sink upstairs. The water company would want to see something in the plumbing vein, in addition to the heating milieu. We could flush the toilet with buckets for the time being. I added an expansion tank to the water lines shortly after this picture was taken. Pex plumbing is great. You can splice into it pretty easily.

We were roughing it. We ate out of a big cooler that my wife had packed for us for about a week. I do believe that it served only to keep the food from freezing, not from getting too warm. My son was just a young teenager and wasn’t used to these sorts of privations. But he didn’t complain too much. Or he did, but I couldn’t understand him with his teeth chattering like that. Either way, we managed it OK.

With something like heat installed in the house, the water department was, ahem, on tap. If you’ve wondered what it’s like living in a small town in Uppastump Maine, it goes like this: There’s basically nothing here. You can shoot a cannon down the main street downtown at rush hour on Monday and not hit anybody, although that’s frowned upon here. However, don’t let that fool you. If you call the water department, there’s a pickup truck with two guys at your front door in about fifteen minutes. Try that in Massachusetts. They’ll be some forms for you to fill out first. They’re kept in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’ Not here. The fellows pushed right past me, wordlessly, and went all the way through the house, down stairs, and straight to the spot where the water meter needed to be placed. They have the town memorized.

So we attempted to live in the house shortly after that with nothing but electric baseboard heat. If you’re not familiar with it, electric resistance heating is 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat, and your bank account into a shambles. Man, we slept in all our clothes for a while until the spring came.

So something had to be done, heatwise. We didn’t have much in the way of scratch for equipment or fuel. I did a little poking around, and discovered the drop-dead cheapest way to heat your house is burning firewood. Great. Now we need a furnace.

[To be continued]

Who Did It Better? Like Humans Do

Exhibit A: The originator.

Exhibit B: It’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned.  They couldn’t afford a string section.

Great Moments in Maine Real Estate V

Thinking of moving to Maine? All smart people think about moving to Maine. It’s the “thinking” part that makes them smart, though. The moving to Maine part of the equation doesn’t usually ensue. But just in case you’ve grown envious of my semi-renovated unheated hovel at the end of civilization and sidewalks, here’s a selection of Great Moments in Maine Real Estate to get your juices defrosted and flowing.

But remember, we’re a staid bunch up here in the Pine Tree State, so no wagering, please.

In Maine, we march to a different drummer. We’re not all that interested in habits and mores from elsewhere in the (much) lower 48. People in Iowa might say, “The toilet paper unrolls over the top.” People in Florida might declaim, “The toilet paper unrolls better down and against the wall. In Maine, we like to avoid arguments and jam it on there sideways.

Our realtors are an iconoclastic bunch. Not like real estate agents anywhere else. I suspect that most Maine realtors flunked out of art school, and just needed a job, so they took up the single-family-30-year-fixed cudgels and started flailing away. But in their hearts, they will always be artistes! Here you see the results: I call it: Still Life With Abitibi. It’s an artfully arranged image, you must admit.

There are two possible scenarios in this photo. Either your dog really wants to get out, or the dates you bring home really want to get out. Either way, you really should touch up the paint before your next swipe right on Tinder.

I saw the coffee table at the foot of the bed, and immediately admonished myself to avoid making any jokes about getting plowed. I didn’t want to spoil the whole vibe. Why settle for barn door hardware on your closet doors, when you can have the whole barn in there? For some reason or another, this will be playing in my head for the rest of the day:

You must be wearing 15 pieces of flair to microwave a Hot Pocket and plop it on this table.

I didn’t quite know what to make of this one. I found it intriguing. The listing didn’t have enough information to form a solid opinion about the place. I decided to actually go there and see for myself. It was pretty hard to find the place. It was way out in the woods, and surprisingly, there was no trail of breadcrumbs or anything to point the way. After hours of fruitless searching, I finally stumbled into a sylvan clearing, and there it was. There was a petite real estate agent minding the door. She was a pretty little thing. She had dark hair, light brown eyes, bright red lips, and a lovely, if somewhat dated dress with puffy sleeves and a high white collar that framed her clear, unblemished face nicely. She wouldn’t let me in. She looked at her clipboard twice, and told me, “Sorry, but you’re not on the short list.”

[Update: Many thanks to Grandalekat for their generous contribution to our tip jar. It is much appreciated]

That’s So 1975

Oh, man, 1975.

Not just 1975. It’s 1975 distilled and congealed into a solid block of Qiana. Tree-trunk pantlegs revealing the occasional stack heel. Irish setter hairdos. It’s likely that these fellers have ears, but there’s no evidence. Tom Selleck tried to buy that guy’s mustache, but it wasn’t for sale, and he had a grow a thin, effeminate substitute himself. The drummer is embedded in his hair like an asteroid that hit a fuzzy planet. Hang glider collars on shirts that had never even shared a shelf with a natural fiber. Any fondue stains come right out of that stuff. You know, if you have a terrible fondue accident while reaching inexpertly for the quiche in the conversation pit. The piano player of course has the requisite bizarre gloss on a tuxedo, which wouldn’t reach full flower until a few years later when they just printed the pattern on a T-shirt. The belts were leather straps capable of towing a Jeep out of ditch.

And in case you missed it, people could actually sing and play their instruments in 1975.

Jazz Manouche

I don’t know how a button accordion works. I understand squeeze boxes with a piano-style keyboard. They say the sweetest sound in the world is when you throw an accordion into a dumpster, and it lands on a dulcimer you threw in there earlier. But this adding machine stapled on a bellows? No clue.

So this Gallic gentlemen, Marc Berthoumieux, has me double flummoxed. He’s playing Chinese checkers and music comes out. I don’t know how he squeezes such wonderful and inventive music out of it. Makes me want to move to Paris and learn to smoke greasy cigarettes and drink wine from a beaker and look existential while the waiter ignores me. If Rocky the Gibson wrangler announces that if you have a request, write it on a 20 Euro note and send it up, I’ll bite. Of course I’ll ask for Sunny. It was the official song of the twenty-teens, remember?

Month: November 2023

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