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]
6 Responses
“…the drop-dead cheapest way to heat your house is burning firewood. ”
Yeah, ’cause it’s basically free. Just let Hansel and Gretel and Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood wander about the woods and pick up all that downed wood. And on the next day, there you are with chattering teeth and a balky chain saw. Been there, done that. In my neck of the woods, it snows about once a decade, which is plenty. Otherwise, I’ll go visit winter if I have a hankering to. But, please, continue with this adventure; I’m eager to hear the part about tossing bits of the building/furniture into the soon-to-be-introduced furnace.
Hi Mike- Thanks for reading and commenting.
We had to purchase firewood. Burning firewood for heat is an industrial-scale undertaking. Some people around here have woodlots big enough to feed their furnaces, but we have to buy it.
Did the house have a fireplace[s]?
Hi Gringo- Thanks for reading and commenting.
The house has a single ornamental fireplace in bad shape. It has chimneys with lots of thimbles for coal and woodburning stoves. Quite Victorian, that.
We hit -35°F here in NW Wyoming for a couple of nights last year, and stayed below zero for almost two weeks straight before it finally warmed up. When I’d go out to toss garbage into the dumpster in the alley you could hear the gas whistling through the meter as it was fed to the house. A nice homey sound, just like watching your checkbook balance drop.
Days like that are when I’d fire up the wood stove and keep it going all day. Our only problem is that there is essentially NO hardwood to be had in the area. Pine burns hot and fast, and leaves a lot of ash, but as long as it’s well-dried creosote isn’t a problem. Douglas fir is about the best piney-sorta wood and its gotta be bone-dry, too. Cottonwood is a little better at leaving some coals, but not a lot. Our big aspens are dying so I’m burning a lot of aspen wood this year.
With all of the maple trees in Maine (heck, everybody in Maine does sugaring if they’re not catching lobsters, right?) I’d figure that good hardwood, even standing dead, is pretty easy to find. Around here cut and split wood dries out in about 6 months just sitting around outdoors, and faster if it’s kept out of the (rare) rain and occasional snow.
Jeepers, I seem to recall some pictures you posted in the “long-ago” dim and distant past of rows of stacked cut-and-split firewood, or maybe my old age is catching up with me again and confusing your posts with somebody else’s.
I’ll be eagerly awaiting the next installment of “Quest for Heat”.
Hi Blackwing- Thanks for reading and commenting.
Thirty-five below would equal the record low temp around here. And periods of below-zero temps lasting all day and night usually only lasts a day or two in the dead of winter. I guess we should start growing bananas and coconuts.