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]