Dream BIG

Burning wood pellets cost more than burning firewood. But not a lot more, honestly. Remember our chart of heating fuel costs per million BTUs? Here it is again, with info from November of this year:

Those are Maine prices, but they’re high in my experience. It might be because I live in the poor-people-land part of Maine. God knows what people with whales on their pants pay for things Downeast. They’ve usually got more money in their Ikea couch cushions than I have in my bank account, but that’s their problem. Or mine, I forget which.

Pellets are flirting with $300 a ton nowadays, even for the ho-hum brands, but you’d have to be burning some artisanal free-range pellets to spend $385 a ton. Same thing with firewood. I haven’t bought any lately, but you’d have to swallow the dealer’s buncombe about just how “seasoned” their firewood is to pay $350 a cord. Green firewood you dry yourself costs much less, and no matter what it costs, you’ll be drying it yourself, remember?

But let’s go with these numbers. You’re buying kiln-dried firewood, and pellets from forests filled with trees on the endangered species list. What would it take to produce the 800,000,000 BTU WAG (wild-assed-guess) I made yesterday, depending on the fuel, at today’s prices? Lessee:

• Firewood: $12,728
• Wood Pellets: $18,664
• Heating Oil: $22,840

Rely on my experience in these matters (if you dare): The firewood number is way off, but then again, it’s not. Firewood isn’t that expensive to buy, but then again, a firewood furnace is a woefully inefficient thing compared to something like an oil burner in good working order. Lots and lots of BTUs go up the chimney. It’s the nature of the steel beast. And the amount of BTUs you get out of the woodpile varies greatly, from log to log.  But the number is wrong in two directions, so maybe it balances out.

As far as wood pellets go, I actually know how much it cost me to get 800,000,000 BTUs. We paid a total of around $12,500 for 50 tons of the stuff. It averaged around $250 a ton. No one selling it that cheaply this year, though, but you can still buy perfectly usable pellets for $300 a ton, with free delivery and no tax (heating fuel isn’t taxed in Maine). So using today’s prices, wood pellets would cost $15,000 for 8 million BTUs-worth.

The other costs to consider are what the heating plants cost to buy. The firewood furnace only cost us about a grand. The pellet stove cost about two grand. An oil burner would have cost me $10,000 to install ten years ago, and probably more now. Yikes. And that’s just the cover charge to get into the crude oil dance, remember?

So buying a pellet stove and installing it ourselves and fixing it ourselves cost about half of what it would cost to buy, have installed, maintain, and buy fuel for an oil burner.

But our pellet stove cost even less than what I listed. Here’s how to save even more on your pellet stove: Buy a domain name with “wood pellet” in it. It costs $12 a year. Load WordPress on a hosting server. WordPress is free, and hosting is cheap. Get a free theme for your website. Write 12 search-engine-optimized reviews of pellet stoves and pellet brands and publish them on the website. Slap Google Adsense on the website. Whenever any of about 300 people (over 10 years) leave a comment, whether to ask a question or simply complain about something, answer it politely. Collect enough money from Google to pay for the website and the pellet stove, and make some inroads on paying for all the pellets, too. Easy.

But I’m not satisfied. I’m never satisfied, am I? I got tired of shoveling firewood into the furnace, and only sleeping 3 hours at a stretch in the winter. I got tired of humping 8 tons of pellets into my basement every year, and then humping them up the stairs 40 pounds at a time. I got tired of vacuuming out the pellet stove. I began to dream. Not only that, I began to dream BIG. I dreamed of a dial on the wall, and if you turned it, the temperature in the house simply changed. I dreamed of a heat pump.

[To be continued]

Smells Like Teen Spirit and Wood Pellets

So we burn pellets. Lots of pellets. We installed the pellet stove I’ve been maundering on about something like ten years ago. We have probably consumed somewhere between 50 and 75 tons of wood pellets using the same machine. I know it pretty well by now. In the intervening years, we’ve had to perform the following fixes:

• The slightly bent hinge pin on the shopper-abused combustion chamber door eventually broke off. I brought it to a welder who lives down the street and he welded it back on for a double sawbuck
• I’ve replaced the burn pot twice. They’re made of high-temp steel but they wear out
• I’ve replaced the combustion fan motor twice. All the hot exhaust gas exits through it, and it runs continuously when it’s on
• I’ve replaced the convection fan twice. It sucks air out of the room, passes it over the heat exchanger, and blows it back out into the room at 200CFM (cubic feet per minute). They never quit, they just get noisy
• I’ve replaced thermodiscs several times. They’re small, rudimentary switches that open and close when temperatures change
• I tried to replace the auger motor. It was broke. I bought a new one. We shivered while we waited for it to arrive. The new one arrived broken. I got tired of waiting and took the old one apart and fixed it. I got a full refund on the busted one
• There’s a rope gasket seal on the combustion chamber door. I’ve replaced that twice, maybe three times
• There are gaskets on the cleanout panels on the sides of the heat exchanger. I’ve replaced them umpty-nine times. I started buying sheets of automotive gasket material and making my own to save dough
• I replace the igniter, which works like a cigarette lighter in a car used to, back when people smoked and fumbled with cigarette packs in their cars when they wanted to crash into things, instead of texting like they do now.

All that together cost about a thousand dollars, spread out over ten years, and required only a Phillips head screwdriver or a single nut driver to make the repairs. You can judge if that’s a lot of money or not. We produced maybe 800,000,000 BTUs with the thing, and needed every one.

I’ll tell you right now that the machine didn’t work right out of the gate. After we fixed the hopper switch, it functioned, but it didn’t work. Anyone who’s been in the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Massachusetts knows what I mean when I say, “It functions, but it doesn’t work.” There was a minor design flaw in the machine that would have been vanishingly easy for the maker to fix, but they never bothered to try. The burn pot is too shallow.

Pellets roll down a chute and hit the bottom of the OEM burn pot and bounce out. These pellets smolder in the ash dump because it’s hot in there, and they cause all kinds of problems. The greasy soot they produce coats everything with an impenetrable dusty carapace. The flame sensors malfunction because the soot acts as an insulator, and they can’t sense the flame when they’re coated with it. The viewing window turns black in an hour or two. The flue pipes get positively furry inside, when they’re not full blocked, I mean. And when you turned off the stove to clean it, you could never wait long enough for the smoldering pellets to go out. The house would go cold, and when you couldn’t stand it any more, no matter how long you waited, you’d open the door to clean it out and your house would fill with smoke anyway. And the smoldering pellets set my shop vac on fire once. I appreciate free heat as much as the next guy, but the burning plastic smell took some of the enjoyment out of it.

The Vogelzang VG 5790 isn’t supposed to be used as the sole heating device in your home. The manufacturer puts that right out front, so you’ll understand that it’s not reliable, and don’t come crying to them if you’re cold and don’t have another heater. But you can use it for your only heat source. We did. We had to. We suffered along with it for a while. I put up a shield wall of broken refractory bricks salvaged from the wood burning furnace around the burn pot, and that helped a bit. Then I found a guy making an aftermarket shield made of high-temp steel that you stuck on top of the burn pot to nearly double its height.

That was all it took. Every problem disappeared. We poured in pellets, cleaned it out once a week, and wondered just how dumb the manufacturer could be to piss off countless customers instead of fixing the problem. You have to understand customer service a little to figure out why.

You see, customer service is considered a cost to someone who went to Wharton. It can’t be anything else. The only way (for him) to get a bonus is to cut costs. So you put the girl who couldn’t work the coffee machine properly at the pellet stove warehouse in charge of answering customer complaints. She works part time. They give her a script to read. The enraged customer calls, and between their chattering teeth they explain their problem. The girl dutifully looks it up, and asks, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” She’s not the curious sort, or she’d begin to wonder why there are seventeen pages in her script, and the reply to every question is, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

This is usually followed by a lot of yelling from the customer, and, “I’m sorry we must have a bad connection. I can’t hear you. Please call back.” Then she goes to lunch, which lasts until Monday next. If you call back enough, they’ll eventually send you a new circuit board. The problem is never, ever, your circuit board, but it takes two weeks for you to receive it, and another week to figure out how to install it, and then another week on hold listening to Paul Anka sing Smells Like Teen Spirit until you get the same girl again, who asks you, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” A month of peace is worth a circuit board to them, I guess.

Fixing the problem would have been so much easier than making spittle-flecked customers listen to Paul Anka for hours, but fixing the problem would have been another cost. Wharton don’t play dat, homie. You can’t fire the girl who answers the phone, because you still need a customer service line, even if no one calls. She’s cheaper than an Indian call center anyway, and she’s already on the payroll. So it’s:

Hello, hello, hello hello…

[To be continued]

Galonka, Galonka, Galonka

Ah, we were entering the wonderful world of Error Messages. Now, if you’re new to new appliances, you might think that Error Messages was an actor back when movies were in black and white and well-made, instead of slapdash and in color like they are now. No, that was Errol Flynn, not Error Messages. And besides, you were thinking of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

More to the point, error messages are a byproduct of software, in the same way that tootsie rolls are the byproduct of cats. There are sensors in your pellet stove, and your car, and your coffee maker, and your IV drip at the abattoir hospital, and pretty much anything else electronic they can think of. Your car used to function. It had three dials on the dashboard that told you, well, something, I only looked at the gas gauge. Anyway, when your car was broken you’d have it towed to the garage and sort of turn into Mel Blanc:

“It goes galonka, galonka, galonka when I turn the key, and then it makes a noise like a gerbil in distress.”

“That’s pretty weird. I’ve never fixed anything like that before,” the mechanic says while scratching his head with a wrench.

“No, you don’t understand. It makes those noises when it’s running OK. It just won’t start now.”

Well, now you get error messages. You get them whether the item is working properly or not. Your car is purring like a kitten, but the dashboard is lit up like a drunk on New Year’s. It’s spangled with icons that must make some sort of sense if you speak metric, I guess, but they don’t look like anything I recognize. Your triangle is herniated. Your ziggurat is palpitating. Your ghostbuster is flummoxed. Stuff like that. Of course when the car actually won’t work, the whole thing goes dead, and there are no error messages, and you’re back to telling a mechanic, “It wish I could get it to go galonka, galonka, galonka, again…”

So we had gone through a daunting set of challenges to get the pellet stove installed, not the least of which was finding money to buy all that stuff. We dutifully followed the directions for installation. It was deflating to press the button and get nothing for the effort. It was even more deflating than New England footballs to get weird error messages instead of real help.

You see, there are only like four error messages available on a pellet stove. They’re given inspiring names like: E1, E2, E3, and E4 rendered in 1970s digital watch fonts. You have to look up what each one means in the Chinglish dictionary you threw away with the box. Each one has to cover a lot of ground, as you can imagine, being only four of them. Each one reads like a very vague laundry list. For instance, our pellet stove was deader than Scrooge’s doornails, but lit up like a Christmas tree with error messages. The error message suggested:

• Your moon might not yet be in the seventh house
• Your air intake might be blocked by a wildebeest that was sucked into its maw. It’s unlikely, but I’d check if I were you
• You might have forgotten to plug the unit in
• Error messages don’t appear unless it’s plugged in, so make sure it’s plugged in to read the last message
• Don’t put firewood in the pellet stove hopper
• Use only approved pellets in your stove. You may have to wait for white smoke to appear from the chimney of the college of cardinals before they select a pellet stove pope to approve your brand
• Jupiter isn’t aligned with Mars. Align your Jupiter with a Martian wrench (not supplied)
• Shit’s wack, yo

It goes on like that at some length. I gave up, and sat down and gave it a long think. I have a superior thinker-upper, you know, having been raised on Dr. Suess books before they were bowdlerized.

Let’s see. This was a floor model at the Harrow Stockpile. That means an endless stream of people who stopped reading books in the sixth grade because their lips got real tired had been futzing around with this unit, until they got bored and bought another gun safe. What would they do? Why, they’d open and close the swinging door to the burn chamber enough to bend the hinge pin (I had it re-welded a few years later), and they’d open the hopper door on top, look in, see nothing but sheet metal, and slam it shut.

I opened the hopper door. There was a switch under the lid that is supposed to keep the auger in the bottom of the pellet hopper from turning if the hopper door was open. The manufacturers and designers envisioned a person dumb enough to open the lid, winnow their hand through 120 pounds of wood pellets, and reach far enough into the stove to get their finger caught in a giant screw that turns slower than a blue-hair with their blinker on. That’s not a bad bet, actually. There was a little wand sticking out of the switch, just a delicate little band of flexible steel with a bumper on the end that gets pushed down when the hopper is closed. It trips the switch to tell the machine that the owner is not currently up to his armpit in the hopper, and it’s safe to proceed.

The wand was bent. I bent it back, closed the hopper door, pressed the button, and land sakes, the beast roared to life.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting, and recommending Sippican Cottage to your friends. You can also support Sippican Cottage by using our Ko-Fi tip jar. Many thanks to Stuart for his recent generous contribution. It’s much appreciated]

William Howard Taft’s Sedan Chair Boogie

Alright, we have to get a 300-pound iron thingie into our house. That’s a given. That’s after we get the 300-pound iron thingie to our house, because the Harrow Stockpile store doesn’t deliver. But after humping the 600-pound wood furnace into the house, we’re unconcerned. Besides, we can kidnap foreigners.

Our neighbor takes in stray foreign exchange students. They want to attend the local high school for some reason. He usually ends up with an unmatched set of Europeans, with the occasional Asiatic or South American mixed in. They have been uniformly pleasant and intelligent. They’re uniformly athletes of one sort or another, too. Hmm. Teenagers who like to lift things. Maybe we can use them for more than ringers on the soccer team, which they most decidedly are.

It’s not practical to have more than four people pick up something like a pellet stove. It’s too compact and vertical to get more hands in there. So with two exchange students, my moody son, and me, I figure we should be able to carry the beast into the house. The weight split four ways is 75 pounds each. If you’re a package deliveryman, you’re expected to lift fifty. If you’re a mason tender until you can explain to your mother why you don’t want to work for her brother anymore, you’re expected to lift at least 100. Believe me, I know. So as long as everyone pulls their weight, we can pull the weight.

First things first, though, You need a place to put it. We built a dance floor in the corner of the dining room:

The cat is doing the merengue pretty well in this picture, I think, but I’ll have to refer to the judges for a ruling.

The platform solves several problems. The floor sags and dips and slopes and twists and generally isn’t flat. The Chinglish instructions for the pellet stove have all sorts of directives about installing the beast (the stove, not the cat), but they neglect to mention that no appliance works very well if it’s not sitting flat on a level surface. We built a platform out of framing lumber and plywood. It’s basically framed like a floor that sits on top of the flooring. The joists taper as the floor slopes up towards the walls. It took some fussy layout but it wasn’t hard to build. We tiled the top with Orange Place we-don’t-want-it-anymore-you-take-it ceramic tile that cost less than the plywood it’s mortared to. Some leftover thin oak boards make a toe kick.

I got the cut sheet for the appliance and measured the exhaust pipe outlet carefully. We bought an all in one package of interlocking double walled pipe that came with a fireproof through-the-wall thimble. It’s a very safe way to vent a wood-burning appliance. The exterior side of the pipe and thimble looks like this:

The little metal flap off to the left is a shield over the cold air intake that feeds the firebox. The makers understand what sort of critters live out in the wild and put a very sturdy screen over the inlet, too. You can twist the cap on the bottom of the vertical pipe and remove it to clean the stack. There’s several of these twist-lock joints in the pipe. You can take it all apart and put it back together fairly readily.

So the pipe is the correct height over the dance floor (we’ll see, it’s theoretical at this point) and the correct distance from the outside wall to line up with the outlet on the stove. Let’s get the thing in the house and see how we did.

First, off to Harrow Stockpile store. I was still driving an Econoline van back then, until the road salt did it in. I convinced (bribed) the clerk that his forklift was just the tool to insert the palletized stove into the back of my truck. It fit with some form of metric sliver of space to spare. If he had sneezed with his hand on the levers I would have had the first Econoline convertible, but he was stalwart, if a little nervous. Andrew Jackson is a fine motivator, but he falters a bit when it comes to bringing calm to a situation.

Then we drove it home. We were going to use the usual walk-it-down-the-ramp method to plop it in the dooryard, and then perform some sort of miracle to shove it up a few stairs and into the house,  but just then my neighbor and his exchange student charges hove into view.

I turned the blarney up to eleven. This will be easy with four of us. You guys look like you work out. We only have to carry it like 25 feet. I continued down the bosh path until they threw up their hands and said No habla ingles, only in German, I think. I went in the house and put four milk crates in front of the platform. That way, we could plop it on there and move it slightly downhill into its final resting place. Then I went back out front with two 2 x 4s to use as outriggers. We were going to make a sedan chair for the pellet-burning version of William Howard Taft.

We slid the lumber through the gaps in the pallet framing, each grabbed a corner, and picked it up. There was a great deal of Danish oomphing and German huffing to mix in with our Anglo-Saxon whining, but we headed off to the front steps, and into the front door.

The kids are athletes. Athletes lift a lot of weights and run around a lot, I gather. Carrying stuff isn’t covered much in gym class. They kept asking me to put it down so they could get a better grip, and I just kept saying “No, keep going.” through gritted teeth. Athlete-scholars can’t be expected to understand things that ditch diggers like me know. Never put it down. We were carrying something heavy at waist level. Our arms were just slings. You can carry a lot of weight like that, much more than we already were. But put it down, and now you have to lift it before you can carry it again. That’s a different ballgame. Keep going. Almost there.

Rasmus and Felix and my son hung in there, and we made it all the way to the milk crates. My neighbor Rich, who looks after them, absolutely forbade me from giving them any money. He explained that part of their exchange program was to do this-and-that chores for the local people they met. It pained me to go against Rich’s wishes, but the Irish uncle gene kicked in and when we shook hands, I did the Andrew Jackson card trick with each of them. I think at least one of the kids spent the whole thing on Twizzlers and ate them all in one go and got a glorious bellyache, an outcome I could only have hoped for, not predicted, because I liked them both a great deal.

So my son and I put a scrap of plywood for a ramp between the pallet and the platform, unbolted the stove, and slid it down into place. We hooked up the exhaust and intake pipes, and wonders never cease, it all lined up. We plugged it in, filled the hopper with pellets, and et voila!

It didn’t work.

[To be continued]