Keeping the home fires burning

Things are different this year. When I usually head south for the winter getting ready for winter is more focused on getting the boat ready. This year my lovely wife and I are committed to being here for at least part of the winter. That requires winter prep.

My house is primarily heated in two different ways. There's an hot air oil furnace and a couple of woodstoves. Our favorite woodstove is the cookstove in the kitchen. Not only does it make the house toasty warm, we can cook on it and watch the pretty flames though the glass door.

For many years I did not get regular heating oil deliveries. The oil delivery company requires a minimum delivery of 100 gallons. That's a lot of money for a furnace that was rarely used. Instead of regular #2 heating oil, off road diesel works just fine. A trip with a couple 5 gallon fuel containers to the local gas station handled my limited needs just fine.

Right now heating oil is about half the cost of what it used to be. With that in mind I decided to get the oil tank completely filled for a change. One nice thing about the furnace is that we can leave the house for a few days and it stays warm. When we used just wood we'd either come home to a very cold house or had to have someone come by to feed the stoves.

I've some storm damaged hardwood trees that need to be cut up. They are dry and should make great firewood. The problem is that it's a tangled mess. There are broken tree tops hung up in other trees. It's too dangerous to handle by myself. (at least that's what my lovely wife tells me.) I'm stuck waiting for my tree guy to show up.

In the mean time I've burned some junk wood I've had around the house and Bio Blocks. They go by various names but they are basically the same a wood pellets for pellet stoves, only much bigger. They are designed to burn in regular woodstoves. The blocks burn well, are clean, and easy to work with.

This one is what one looks like in my hand.



I found out one of the local lumber yards will deliver if you buy it a ton at a time. This is what a ton of them looks like, all wrapped in weatherproof plastic. The lumber yard gave me a little flag to stick in the ground to indicate where to drop the pallet. The lift truck driver did a great job working in tight spaces.


The ton of blocks will hold me until my wood is cut up. I'm feeling a bit better about the winter.

This week I also bought 4 snow tires for my wife's car. Some people try and get by with all seasons. Heck, that what I would do myself if I was going to be here for only a small part of snow season. This year it's worth doing it right. Real snow tires on all 4 wheels makes all the difference in the world when conditions get nasty.

Of course, I'm still going to make sure the boat is ready to go if we decide we've had enough of winter. The heating oil and Bio Blocks aren't going to spoil.

-Sixbears

Failed experiment or breaking rule #2

It's always fun to write about all my little projects that go well. Sure, I document the little tweaks and fixes needed to make things go right, but today it's about outright failure. Sometimes things do not go as planned.

This happened at a time when I had a huge surplus of waste vegetable oil. We had been running two old diesel Mercedes Benz cars on veggie. Then I sold one to my daughter when she moved to Rhode Island. We were only running one veggie burning car and my wife work situation changed so she wasn't putting as many miles on the car. The veggie was piling up.

Then I found this nifty design for a waste oil burning furnace It seemed simple enough. I won't go into the details of construction as I don't want anyone else to attempt to build one. The idea behind it was that there was a cast iron plate inside the stove. Once the plate was hot it would ignite veggie oil falling on it from a drip tube. The trick was to light a fire under the plate to get it hot then it should be a self sustaining fire.

Since I'm only a partial idiot, I decided to test the furnace in the yard instead of in the house. I rigged up a temporary chimney with some old stove pipe, heated up the fire plate, and opened the drip valve. It smoked a bit at first but settled down to a nice steady burn. Great! Worked fine.

Then I installed it in the basement and connected it to the chimney At first things were working great. The basement got nice and warm. Then there was a little factor I had not considered. Outside the tank of waste veggie oil stayed the same temperature during the test. In the basement, the oil in the tank got nice and warm.

The warmer oil thinned out and flowed faster through the drip tube. The oil flowed faster and faster, too fast to completely burn on the fire plate. Excess oil pooled inside the stove. Then the whole pool of oil ignited. Suddenly the stove took off with a roar like a jet engine.

At that point I turned the fuel off, but there was plenty of oil in the stove to sustain the fire for some time. A huge black plume of smoke poured out of my chimney. Then the smoke detectors on each floor started to go off one by one.

That's when my lovely wife came down to the basement to gently inquire about what I was doing.

There are only three rules that my lovely wife insists I live by. Rule #2 is don't burn the house down. She felt I was getting seriously close to violating that rule. At that moment I was standing in the basement doorway with an industrial sized fire extinguisher and didn't have time to discuss it.

Eventually the fire burned itself out. Doors and windows were opened to air the house out. From that little experiment I thought I learned that the veggie furnace needed a better fuel regulation system. My lovely wife on the other hand concluded that the veggie furnace experiments were over.

The veggie furnace currently sits in the scrap pile waiting for the junk dealer.

-Sixbears