Wood for the Winter

If you remember my posts from last fall, we were busy building our rocket mass heater stove.  Last winter we used a combination of electric baseboard heaters and kerosene most of the time, since the rocket mass stove we built wasn't very reliable.  This year, the plan is to use our new wood stove, once we get all the pipes put together.  Just as a comparison, the rocket mass heater had hours and hours of labor invested in it, but only a few hundred dollars worth of duct work, straw, and perlite, since we scavenged the bricks and dug up the clay from the yard.  The new wood stove only took a few minutes to carry into the house, but the cost of the stove plus the expense of having a professional install a new liner in our chimney puts it closer to two thousand dollars.  If we get what we pay for, then this stove better work!  

We have some firewood already stockpiled, but we don't think it's enough to get through the winter. Fortunately, all of our big pretty ash trees that grow in our fence lines have died over the past few years due to the emerald ash borer.  This is sad, but also nice that we have several years worth of firewood standing and drying out, just waiting for Brandon to chop up.  He felled a few small ones, and then this big tree.  

Because the tree died recently, it still had most of the small branches, and when it crashed to the ground they broke into kindling laid out in a tree shape!  How handy, right?

 Now comes his favorite part - chopping up the logs!  Chop, Brandon, chop!!

Goodbye, Rocket Mass Heater

Last weekend, we demolished the rocket mass stove. It felt good, really, despite the disappointment and the wasted effort of building it.  It's hard to love a giant stove made of dirt in the warm spring weather anyway, so remembering the struggles we had to use it without filling the house with smoke kept our spirits up as we lugged buckets of rubble from the house.   

Before we started I said I wanted to take one last picture and Brandon suggested I title the photo "Death of a Hippy Dream".  I'm sure the concept of the rocket mass stove is sound.  I've read enough stories from satisfied users to believe that it's real thing, not just an on-line conspiracy to trick hippies into a lot of exercise, but we did not pull it off.  Something, probably more than one thing, was wrong with our design.  As much as I hate to admit defeat, it defeated us.  It didn't break our spirits though.  

Busting up the cob was kind of fun.  We used a hammer and a chisel and it didn't take many strikes for it to crumble.  

We designated some buckets for the rocks and bits of rubble embedded in the cob, and others for the now dry cob, and hauled it all outside.  

 Hey Brandon, say "I love Rocket Mass Heaters!"  No?  

To celebrate the final moments of my rocket mass dreams, I tried a bottle of our newest brew while we worked, the Lucky Leap Year Beer, and I was very impressed with our brew skills, again.  We might not be good cob stove designers, but we can brew a good beer!  

We worked for several hours on Saturday and managed to deconstruct the entire bench up to the barrel.  Taking a cob stove apart is much faster than building one.  

Once again, this project has coated everything with dust.  My goodness, we used a lot of bricks!  My muscles are still sore from carrying those buckets of dirt and rocks.  

On Sunday morning, we were anxious to remove the last of the dirt from the house, and demolished the perlite and clay cylinder the surrounded the fire brick heat riser.  

We dumped all that perlite in one of the places that the chicken coop was parked so I can begin to work it into our clay soil for the garden.  Buying perlite was one of the expenses of this project, but it won't go to waste.  

We made piles of the block, brick, rocks, rubble, and cob.  The straw and the sand in the cob were materials we had to buy for the project, as was the metal duct work, but all the other stuff was gathered for free.  We should have plenty of material for an outdoor bread/pizza oven, and maybe even the wood fired hot tub I've been threatening Brandon with.  Doesn't a rocket stove hot tub sound like fun?  

Almost gone!  I can't believe it came apart so fast.  

Nothing left but a pile of dirt.  Goodbye, Rocket Mass Heater.  

Coming Home

On my way home from work yesterday, I stopped my car and rolled down my window so I could say hello to the horses and ponies that live on a farm just up the road from our house.  The red pony greeted me with a slobbery sounding horse raspberry noise. Classic horse conversation!

What looked to be a dark pile of hay was actually three more ponies enjoying their dinner.  Sorry to disturb your meal.  

I exchange a few wary stares with the cows chilling by the pond further down the road.  I hope their fur coats are warm, because their barnyard was so cold part of the pond was frozen.  

This is the first view I have of our house on my way home each day.  Can you see the little white house peeking through the trees?  Whew, thank goodness the house is still there!  I always have a feeling of relief when I see it.  I'm not sure where I think it might go...

Almost there!  The snow on the ground reminds me of the very first time we ever saw this property.  Brandon and I had spent countless weekends searching for a place with some land.  We were past the point of getting our hopes up based on pictures and descriptions, and the photos of the house on the listing for this property were so unflattering that we thought we were mostly just out enjoying a drive in the country.  When we arrived at this little house, which was set far from the road, and surrounded by snowy open spaces, we knew this was the one.  It didn't really matter to us that the house was dilapidated.  This was one of the first properties (in our price range - which didn't range very high) where the house wasn't crammed against a road, a junk yard, a fighting rooster farm, or a neighbor.  We love the setting.  

Is it just me, or does this picture look cold?!

First things first - Wake up, Puck!  Uncross your legs and come outside.  

Puck and I do chicken chores while we still have our coats on and there is enough light to see.  The baby chickens get fresh water and a lid added to their brooder.  The big chickens and guineas get locked in the coop.  

Or they would if the silly guinea would get off the roof of the corn crib and go to bed!  

Can you see the garden bed layout outlined by old barn wood on the ground?  These are the places the chicken coop has been parked.  So far, I have four spots that have been fertilized by droppings and bits of straw and wood chips.  I placed the wood so I wouldn't forget where the chickens put the fertilizer.  It's too cold to spend much time dreaming about the garden.  

I call this daily event The Swarm.  The dog and cats all congregate around, and on, the plastic tub with the green lid that holds the coveted cat food.  They swarm around and over it, whining and crying at me until I open the treasure and everybody gets a meal.  It would make a cute photo if they would just hold still.  

Some folks have a mud room for their wet muck boots.  We have a mud bench!  Literally.  The end of the long cob bench of our rocket mass heater makes a good place to put our boots since the cob absorbs the snow as it melts.  

The center of the bench makes seats at the table, and the bench nearest the warm barrel is becoming my favorite place to sit, so it has extra blankets and pillows. Not only is it warmest there, but I can see the fire in the firebox, so I know when the add more wood.  This stove needs attention about every twenty minutes, so I can't get too lazy unless I want the fire to go out.  

I'm getting better at starting a fire in the stove.  I like to play with fire, so I'm enjoying having fire tending chores when I get home.  I made a short video of the rocket stove in action, so you can hear the "rocket" noise that it makes.  I think I should get a tripod and film the fire for a long time, and then folks could play the video on their TV's when they want to have a rocket fire ambiance!  

Firewood Bravery

Our rocket mass heater comes with a built in firewood dryer!  I haven't completed my experiment with this yet, but my hope is that by placing some of the less dry firewood on top of the barrel while the stove is hot, it will dry the pieces of wood out, so they burn better.  

I asked google the best way to dry firewood quickly, and all I got were lectures about planning ahead.  Apparently, all respectable wood stove owners have their wood all cut and stacked well in advance, so it's nice and dry before winter.  Brandon and I are not respectable wood stove owners yet, but we did call a local guy and have him deliver a load of wood from an ash tree.  One thing I did glean from the internet lectures, is that ash is a good wood to burn if you have to go with unseasoned wood.  This wood isn't exactly juicy, but I can hear steam hissing from it when it burns, so it's not exactly dry either.  

Fortunately there was a small stack of dry firewood at the farm already, in one corner of a shed.  This wood is really old, and really dry, so it burns easy.  The small pile of wood in the green tub is how much fire wood I burned in the rocket mass heater in a four hour period.  

I burned about eighteen pieces, and as you can see, the pieces are not very large.  Not nearly as big as the pieces of ash that the firewood guy delivered.  I'm not sure how this relates to a real wood stove.  I didn't fire up the rocket mass heater for two days after burning this quantity of wood, and could still feel heat radiating from it.  

In my mind, firewood chopping is a boy chore.  So is taking out the garbage, changing the oil in the car, and mowing the grass.  This doesn't mean I don't do these things, it just means I put it off as long as possible hoping a male person will eventually do it for me!  Brandon has been keeping us stocked up on firewood of the appropriate size, but on an evening last week when he wasn't home, I ran out of little kindling and decided it was time I gave my inner feminist a pep talk and went outside in search of the hatchet.  There it was, dangling menacingly in the barn, daring me to chop my fingers off or put out my eye while I'm home all alone.  Scary.  

Telling myself that fingers can be sewn back on, I searched out some safety glasses to eliminate my fear of putting my eye out with a rogue splinter.  I look like a total bad-ass, right?  Of course I can chop firewood!  I'm not scared.  Gulp...

It was actually kind of fun.  Probably because the firewood was so dry it practically splinter apart each time I whacked it with the hatchet.  I ended up chopping five of the big pieces into little pieces, which was plenty.  

It doesn't take many small pieces of firewood before it's roaring hot enough to get the bigger pieces burning too.  Maybe next time I'll try chopping some of those big pieces of ash with the big ax.  Or maybe I'll wait and see if Brandon will do it! 

About Last Year

Several of the bloggers that I read regularly did a year-end round-up type post.  They talked about the things that happened in 2015 - their projects, their accomplishments, their feelings.  I thought I wanted do the same thing.  I thought I could write a post about all the 2015 things, and someday come back this post and remember the year in one brilliant essay.  You know, get it all down in words so I don't forget.  But, now that I'm sitting here with my fingers on the keyboard, I'm drawing a blank.  What to say?  

2015 was an eventful year for Brandon and I.  We hiked the machu picchu trail and spent weeks in Peru, and we moved to the farm after working on the house for nearly two years!  Surely, I have something wise to say about all that... Surely, something profound....

Nah.  I think I have the winter doldrums.  All the things in my brain right now are so... well, so mundane, I guess.  Tonight, leftovers for dinner in front of the television.   Whoop.      

Maybe I'll wash some laundry, too.  Sigh.  Oh, that reminds me of something about 2015!  I went an entire year without a clothes dryer, and I don't even miss it.  Except every time I realize I have nothing to wear and no time to get something dry!  Doh!

I find myself standing in the yard a lot lately, gazing at the garden spot while I'm huddled in my ugly green coat and Yoda hat.  Not that it's really a garden yet, but I can see it, in my minds eye, how it will look at some point in the future.  Not the specifics, since I know the garden design will come about organically as I find the time and materials.  I don't actually do anything to make the garden happen, but I stand there and think about it and watch the birds.  Do you know that I have forty-one birds in my care right now?     

We recently met some of new our neighbors.  A mother and a daughter stopped by to introduce themselves and to ask us if we wanted a stray dog they found (apparently, our other neighbor told them we only had one dog (gasp!), so we might be willing to take it in).  The little girl had a confidence that I found startling in someone so young.  She was precocious, and I felt like she was a kindred spirit in just the few minutes we spent together as I showed her the chicken coop and the guineas.  She told me that they had only lived on their little neighboring farm for two weeks, and "already had three times as many animals as before!".  Her parents got her a horse, her grandmother gave her a cat, they adopted a dog, and they were getting chickens in the spring.  She has the exact same blue water bucket I use for the chickens, only she uses hers for her horse.  And, her middle name was Lluvia, which is Spanish for Rain!    

Someone asked me today if we had moved to the farm yet, and when I said yes, they asked how we liked it.  We love it.  It feels comfortable, and cozy, and the land management possibilities are exciting.  There's so many things still on our to-do list.  But, we did get two of the hanging cabinets painted and hung in the kitchen.  No handles yet, but we're inching toward a fully functioning kitchen some day soon.  

I'm sure you are tired of reading about the rocket mass heater by now.  I'm almost tired of thinking about it.  Almost.  

Bock, bock?  

Puck, we're getting a reputation as not having enough dog on our farm!  Puck packs a lot of dog into one small frame.  And sheds enough hair for an entire pack!

Rocket Mass Heater - Maybe We Fixed This Stupid Stove?!

Sometimes I think the rocket mass heater has been the most irritating, stressful, and disappointing project we've ever attempted.  At other times, I think it's most exciting, interesting, and cool project. Something about the rocket mass heater concept really captured my imagination.  I love the idea of a self built stove that's super efficient and also creates a unique, and warm, piece of furniture.  My internal potter gets a kick out of using clay from our backyard to build with.  There were times during the planning stages of this project, that I would get so excited that it would keep me awake at night, trying to figure out the best location and layout.  I found gathering the material, reading about how the stove works, and all the planning to be really interesting.  Making the stove was lots of physical labor, but it was fun because it was all new building techniques for us, like laying brick and stomping cob, and because we had friends who were interested enough in the stove and the process to help us build it.  

I think it's safe to say that Brandon wasn't as excited about the rocket mass stove concept as I was, especially in the beginning.  He was hesitant to dedicate so much space to it, was worried it would be too heavy, or ugly, or dangerous.  But, once we fired it up for the first time, and could feel all that heat radiating from it, he was loving it.  High fives to us!  This stove is awesome!

But... we started having problems because the draft would reverse.  Having a column of smoke billowing into the house is so much more horrible than I would expect. In a matter of moments, the house is filled with smoke and panic.  The panicky feeling is heightened by the loud insistence of the smoke alarms, one of which starts yelling at us to evacuate.  We would scramble to open the windows and doors to the outside, turn on the vent fans, close off rooms so they didn't get smoked, close the firebox with a brick, and run outside in the cold and dark to light a piece of paper in the exhaust and get the draft to go the right way. Try doing all of that when you can't breath because of the smoke - It's awful!  And now we're cold and smell like smoked ham, to boot.  Stupid stove.  

We thought the problem was with the exhaust pipe.  That it was too short, or getting too cold.  So we made it taller, wrapped it in insulation, and tried using a heat lamp inside of it to get the draft to work.  And it did work - for a while.  But occasionally, the draft would reverse. Stupid, stupid stove. We thought there must be problem with the design, a tight spot in the stove - maybe the barrel was too close to the heat riser which would create a pinch point and we should raise the barrel.  We really didn't look forward to dismantling the rocket mass heater because it was so much dirty work to put it together.  On our way home, late last Friday night, we decided to just bite the bullet and take the barrel off and see what what going on inside.  Brandon walked in the door, grabbed the barrel, twisted it, and then ripped it right out of the cob base!  I thought it would be so hard to do!   

We could see right away that the perlite and clay mixture that was used to insulate the heat riser was so crumbly that there were voids in the metal wire basket, and that the thin clay patty that I put around the top was broken and falling in.  Not very aerodynamic.  

We could also see that the space between the heat riser and barrel was big on one side and barely an inch wide on the other.  On Saturday morning we chipped the clay off the top of the perlite and used the shop vac to suck up all the perlite from inside the wire basket.  We made the wire basket a little smaller, placed it so that there was plenty of space all the way around, remixed the perlite with water and clay, put it back in the basket, packed it in there better than before, and formed a thick clay top that wasn't so flat, but more rounded, like the picture in the book.  

We used a chisel to smooth some of the cob on the inside of the stove, and to make a place to put some brick fragments to set the barrel on, so it would be three inches from the top brick of the heat riser.  We put the barrel back in place, and used a little cob to seal it in.  We could tell by placing a the flame from a lighter over the firebox that we had a really strong draft - going the right way! By Saturday afternoon, we had a fire roaring.  Of coarse, it was sixty degrees outside on Saturday, so we didn't really need a fire, but still - it was working!  

So the stove has worked for three days in a row now, and we've had no horrible smoke panics.  Thank you, Stupid Stove!  I can tell the draft is stronger than before because the stove roars louder.  The barrel doesn't get as hot at the top as it used too.  The dragon doesn't get such steamy breath.  Last night the cats and I spent some time reading, talking on the phone, and staring into the flames while we snuggled near the barrel.  

The cob is starting to get warm in vicinity of the barrel, which the cats and I appreciate.  I hope now that the warm air inside the stove isn't constricted, it will flow though the stove better, and warm the cob bench.  I'm not sure how long it will take for Brandon and I not to be gun shy about the stove.  I still half expect billowing smoke at any moment, even though the draft as been strong.  But maybe, just maybe, we fixed it!