A bit of research

All this talk about splitting and burning wood has made me curious so I’ve done some searching:

• According to this website a cord (4′x4′x8′) of Hickory has the energy equivalent to 146 gallons of fuel oil.
• This site here stresses the importance of burning seasoned wood. According to them (and a few other sites) it doesn’t matter what kind of wood it is as long as it’s been sitting split and out of the rain for a year. This is interesting as I’ve always been told to steer clear of soft woods like pine.
• Here’s a big list of tips.
• A list of different types of wood and their burning properties. Hickory isn’t on the list but Ash is, apparently it’s one of the best burning woods. Good for us, we’ve got plenty.
• An interesting bit on the physics of what happens when wood burns. The main site has a boatload of great wood burning info. This page in particular makes me think about moving the purchase of a fireplace insert (or a new gas furnace) further up the shopping list. We have a Cozy Grate (pdf) heater which I’m sure offsets the drawbacks listed on the Conventional Wood Fireplaces page, but I wonder by how much…

Working ahead

Since we’re partially heating the house with the fireplace I really want to be sure that the wood we’re burning is well seasoned and dry. I’ve read that it’s a good idea to store the wood covered for a full year to let it really dry out. Each year cut next year’s wood and burn the wood cut the previous. I’m no where near that far ahead, this weekend Naomi and I spent a bit of time splitting and stacking wood and we’ve got about a month’s worth, depending on how cold it gets. We split about a rick and a half, a rick being a stack of wood 8 feet long and 4 feet high. I have in my head plans to build shelters using old shingles the previous owners left in our small barn, but until I get that done we’ve covered the stacks with plastic (just over the top of the wood, we want to be sure there’s plenty of air circulation).

My neighbor down the street, who repairs welding equipment for a living, built a log splitter back when they used to heat their house primarily with wood. He brought it over to my place a few weekends ago on extended loan. It’s really quite a contraption, it’s got an old four cylinder farm utility engine, uses leaded gas, and starts with a hand crank. It’s built on an old car front end (bolted and welded so the wheels don’t turn) and a steel I-beam for the ram and wedge.

Around the house in the woods are quite a few piles of old cut wood that’s never been split. Last year this is what we burned in the house and I spent a few hours every other weekend chopping this wood with my axe. I’ve learned the hard way to buy good tools, so my axe is a nice Fiskars, it has an extremely sharp edge that expands into a nice wide wedge. I could split all but the largest pieces with one swing. It was good work, a great workout and afterwords I had a nice pile of fresh-split wood. Friends at work kept asking why I didn’t rent a log splitter, I just didn’t think I needed one, my axe and I could handle any of the wood I was chopping. Then this spring one of the large Shagbark Hickories in front of the house blew over in a storm and I tried splitting one of those pieces with my axe. It was rather deflating when the axe head bounced. I didn’t try using a wedge, but I couldn’t get anywhere with just my axe. Needless to say, the log splitter has been great to have around this year, now that we’re burning real hardwood.

It’s getting cold…

Winter’s on the way and the ancient gas furnace and horrible insulation in the attic make for a cold house. We could keep it warmer, but it’s expensive. The gas company said our old furnace is only 30% efficient, that’s a lot of heat going up the chimney. Hoping to keep the house warmer this year we’ve been replacing the insulation in the attic.

The roof has leaked a few times in the past, so some of the insulation that’s there has gotten wet. It leaked so bad for so long that holes rotted in some of the roof decking, allowing access to critters as large as raccoons judging from the size of the poop that’s up there. We’ve just had the roof replaced and the holes in the decking were repaired. Obviously we didn’t want to just blow in new insulation over all that, so we’ve been shoveling and rolling up the old insulation and laying down new R30 fiberglass batt insulation. The plan is to eventually roll un-faced R19 over that, but for now we’re trying to just get the first layer done.

By far this has been my least favorite job yet (well, aside from replacing toilets, but that’s such a small job, no where near a scale like this). I’ve really enjoyed the other work on the house, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, there’s a lot of room to do things right, especially after all the clumsy repairs done on this house before us. It’s nice to see progress up there, but it’s hard work without the fun of an elegant solution or power tools.

It’s about time.

I’ve been thinking of starting a blog since we moved into this house a year and a half ago, July 2005. Naomi and I have gotten a lot done since then, lots of cleaning, repairing, updating, removing, replacing… We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. We’ve got a lot of stories to tell and plenty of photographs sitting on hard drives. We’ll have many more given how much is left to be done.

To start at the beginning: We were growing very tired of the cramped quarters in our house so we began looking around. We wanted a larger home but nothing huge, more than the house though we were looking for a little room outside. In our searching we stumbled across a fixer-upper on four acres near Eagle Creek. It needed work but I had built a deck on our small house the summer previous and felt that maybe I was up to the task. It would certainly be worth it, four wooded acres with apple trees, blackberries growing wild, a small stream (Falcon Creek) running through the middle.

Inside there was plenty to do. We had mice in the attic, basement, and kitchen, leaks in the basement (both from plumbing and through the foundation), walls that had to be torn down and rebuilt because of water damage (the roof had been fixed before we moved in), a kitchen that needed serious cleaning, and a long, long list of other repairs and updates.

We’ve had a great time so far. For the most part we’ve kept pretty busy; other than a long break this summer we’ve worked consistently on the house and the property. Thanks for coming by, hopefully I’ll be able to keep this updated regularly. Given what we’ve done so far, how much we are getting done now, talk about the kids, the dog, the fox, squirrels, woodpeckers, flooding streams, absence of updates here won’t be for a lack of things to say.