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]
One Response
Why do I suspect that a partial dismantling of that beast will only trim the bulky part to something around 400 pounds? I’m on tenterhooks awaiting the next installment of this adventure.
I do suspect a saving grace of this semi-portable inferno might be a very toast basement when it’s fully fired up.