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Maggie’s The Woodchuck and Firewood Hoarders Thread
- Thread starter bogeybrown
- Start date
I knew they used a fair amount, but your heating a house and shop. Is there an antifreeze of sorts in the water so you can leave indefinitely in the winter?
My stuff is all packed away right now as we're between homes, but what Packratt posted is it. And yes, your picture is very applicable.
The exhaust good is a nice compliment to keep the smoke at Bay. Good idea.
I throw a little coal in mine with the wood during the real cold nights. Love the sweet smell of bituminous coal.
There is not water in the system. It's a straight antifreeze of some sort. I'm not sure how cold it has to br to freeze it but I know it's gotta be a lot colder that I've ever seen it and its been -40 here the first year we put it in and I had it shut off to got to Florida and it didn't freeze. It's a pretty good sized home and the shop is 60x50 plus a small office so it gets hungry when it's cold.
Yeah we added the hood because it's inside of the building sort of. If it were outside we wouldn't have needed it. The exhaust on this one is so high you don't smell it much. This one burns almost exclusively oak.
Are you "down under" or are you down south?
You look like you could be in the Appalachians, anywhere. Ya, split a bunch of those and sell the fence posts to horse people and make your fence out of steel posts and wire.
It's fun and games when you get to do it. If that's the only alternative, it's not so easy and fun.
Wow! Cut that yourself or delivered and you buck it? Clean, straight stuff for sure. A lot of BTU’s sitting there.
So I thought I would help all you wannabe lumbersexuals out with a little information on wood cutting from the experts in NYC.
While sitting at the dentists office I picked up the current issue of men's health and found this jewel.
Years ago, the magazine had some decent info in it. Now it's just a bunch of cock holsters asking shit about how to deal with co-workers.
This particular issue was their so called military issue...
While sitting at the dentists office I picked up the current issue of men's health and found this jewel.
Years ago, the magazine had some decent info in it. Now it's just a bunch of cock holsters asking shit about how to deal with co-workers.
This particular issue was their so called military issue...
Thanks for the tips and insight
. Oddly enough, I beleive that saw is electric, and proper chaps don’t protect you against those. Can you imagine the liability cost built into the cost of every power saw we buy? They will sell them to ANYONE with cash in hand.
Are you "down under" or are you down south?
People in Appalachia use locust and it lasts longer than steel. Poplar isn’t any good for posts or firewood.
Thin that crap clear out of there. Takes good trees and kills them all. I watched that when I was in Minnesota.
you should try locust that grew in the desert. That's next to impossible to split.
Are you talking for fence posts? Out in the West, they use a lot of cedar/juniper. For what ever reason it's got something in it when it grows that it doesn't rot as fast. It's not really tough wood like locust though.
I've found throughout the years that oak wilt will pretty much take its course no matter how much you cut around it. I remember one particular place that is burned into my memory. It was about 5-8 acres of wilt. We clear cut close to 150 acres around it. A couple years later it was killing trees around the clear cut. It sure will change the landscape when it comes through
Oak wilt like any other tree fungus needs to be burned as well. That kills the spores. But, in a housing area, or when it's too dry in a wooded area, there is no chance you are gonna be able to burn it.
As much as people hate it, because they don't understand it, a low intensity fire is the best tool for killing a lot of things you don't want in the forests, i.e. beetles and fungus.
As much as people hate it, because they don't understand it, a low intensity fire is the best tool for killing a lot of things you don't want in the forests, i.e. beetles and fungus.
Fence posts. Black locust lasts longer than cedar in the moist Southeast. How well our locust splits depends on how strait the grain is. For some reason some are strait and some are twisted. I wonder if it's the same tree as the ones in the west? Eastern black locust looks like a green weed when it's small.
My father in law has a stihl battery operated saw. It works for the little stuff. Like cutting branches in a park at night so it won't scratch the paint on a ride....
OMG...the lumbersexuals are taking over! Ha...if they could only start a chainsaw.
MtnCreek,
We have honey locust out west. Super hard, and as you may have guessed, with a lack of water makes them even more dense. The leaf pattern is like a fern with relatively small leaves. Branches start as a thorn-like growth. So as kids we never climbed in these. Cottonwoods on the other hand grew large and dense, but brittle. They burn just a little slower than paper.
Growing up we had about 3 miles of fence in the range land that had to be taken down in the fall and put up in the spring with a special spot called hells canyon with a 45 degree or sharper slope. Mix in a fence post pounder, roll of barb wire, barb wire stretcher, hand tools, bad ass Stihl to cut away the dead fall and you now have an idea of what my spring looked like. Made football practice look like a spa day but the scenery was awesome.?
Picked up the Stihl from the shop after getting it’s post-New Years tune up. They still have the Mac. Damn cork fuel tank gasket once again leaking like a sieve. No time to mess with it myself this time. Shop guy commented “That’s a bad ass saw!”
That would be Hells Canyon Idaho? From the ground it always looked steeper than 45 degrees.
I really wish I hadn't lost the pictures of my setup when I lived in NY. It started with an outdoor wood boiler which chewed through too much wood. So in place of the wood boiler I built a shed and put in one of these boilers:
http://www.newhorizoncorp.com/products/wood-boilers/eko-line-boiler/
Those boilers are very efficient, but only when burning at max output. So, I put in a 3000 gallon tank filled with water. I made copper coils to fit inside of it to heat that water and to draw out heat for the house. Then I had heat exchangers in the house to keep the two systems isolated. The storage tank was sized such that I could be away for 4 days and it would cool from 190 to about 145 before the house would switch over to oil.
To avoid having to always supply 180 deg water, I added radiant floor heating to most of the house (single story, mostly over crawl space, small basement). I had 9 zones - one for each room and one for a domestic hot water tank.
Back when I built all of this (almost 20 years ago) no one was making the controls to manage the switch from wood to oil, or to run the circulation pumps from the shed only when needed. At least not in the US. The local plumbing supply house did find some out of Europe - $20k for the controller, $300 per zone controller, and $500 for each thermostat. As that would have killed any savings of burning wood, I bought a MicroLogix PLC off ebay and built my own control panel. (That is basically what I was doing for a living at the time, not for boilers, but designing controls and writing software.) My system had an outdoor thermostat to calculate the starting point for the water to use in the radiant floor heating. I bought thermostats that had a 20 minute duty cycle and PI control, so I could use the run time of the pump to know if the water circulating was the right temperature (trying to maintain a 50% pump time). And then temp sensors on the water to/from the shed and water before/after the heat exchanger on the house water side.
I also had to modify the controls on the boiler. I added a timer to kill the boiler controller. It was rough starting a fire from scratch. But if I just turned it off after a 4 hour burn, it left enough hot coals to just throw more wood on top and reset the timer. But that also meant adding temperature switches to run the circ pumps to the tank so that it wouldn't boil the water in the boiler when the controller was off and it was full of hot coals. When it was cold, it would take a day to get the tank up to about 160. From there, I would load it morning and night, and unless it was really cold (day temps of 10F or less) it would work up to 180 or 190 in a few days. Once it was there, I could shorten the burn times and use less wood.
It worked like a champ. It was a little slow to react if you bumped the thermostat by 5 or more degrees, but had no overshoot. The floors were always comfortable.
Today, all of that control is available from US sources from what I understand (I've got forced air now, and really miss the radiant heat!).
The plus side of using that EKO boiler was that it cut my wood usage in half (used between 4 and 5 cords depending on the winter). The down side was that it really, really likes dry wood. The outdoor boiler ate anything that was burnable.
Part of me misses cutting the firewood and keeping the boiler going. Then again, I've had double knee replacements done since I moved to PA. Part of me is glad I don't have that requirement any more, too.
http://www.newhorizoncorp.com/products/wood-boilers/eko-line-boiler/
Those boilers are very efficient, but only when burning at max output. So, I put in a 3000 gallon tank filled with water. I made copper coils to fit inside of it to heat that water and to draw out heat for the house. Then I had heat exchangers in the house to keep the two systems isolated. The storage tank was sized such that I could be away for 4 days and it would cool from 190 to about 145 before the house would switch over to oil.
To avoid having to always supply 180 deg water, I added radiant floor heating to most of the house (single story, mostly over crawl space, small basement). I had 9 zones - one for each room and one for a domestic hot water tank.
Back when I built all of this (almost 20 years ago) no one was making the controls to manage the switch from wood to oil, or to run the circulation pumps from the shed only when needed. At least not in the US. The local plumbing supply house did find some out of Europe - $20k for the controller, $300 per zone controller, and $500 for each thermostat. As that would have killed any savings of burning wood, I bought a MicroLogix PLC off ebay and built my own control panel. (That is basically what I was doing for a living at the time, not for boilers, but designing controls and writing software.) My system had an outdoor thermostat to calculate the starting point for the water to use in the radiant floor heating. I bought thermostats that had a 20 minute duty cycle and PI control, so I could use the run time of the pump to know if the water circulating was the right temperature (trying to maintain a 50% pump time). And then temp sensors on the water to/from the shed and water before/after the heat exchanger on the house water side.
I also had to modify the controls on the boiler. I added a timer to kill the boiler controller. It was rough starting a fire from scratch. But if I just turned it off after a 4 hour burn, it left enough hot coals to just throw more wood on top and reset the timer. But that also meant adding temperature switches to run the circ pumps to the tank so that it wouldn't boil the water in the boiler when the controller was off and it was full of hot coals. When it was cold, it would take a day to get the tank up to about 160. From there, I would load it morning and night, and unless it was really cold (day temps of 10F or less) it would work up to 180 or 190 in a few days. Once it was there, I could shorten the burn times and use less wood.
It worked like a champ. It was a little slow to react if you bumped the thermostat by 5 or more degrees, but had no overshoot. The floors were always comfortable.
Today, all of that control is available from US sources from what I understand (I've got forced air now, and really miss the radiant heat!).
The plus side of using that EKO boiler was that it cut my wood usage in half (used between 4 and 5 cords depending on the winter). The down side was that it really, really likes dry wood. The outdoor boiler ate anything that was burnable.
Part of me misses cutting the firewood and keeping the boiler going. Then again, I've had double knee replacements done since I moved to PA. Part of me is glad I don't have that requirement any more, too.
Northern Utah north of Ogden? Monster Mulies.That would be Hells Canyon Idaho? From the ground it always looked steeper than 45 degrees.
Is that milled somehow, or machine created? I cannot imagine it happening naturally. What is the background on the log in the photo?
Better part of the way over Montecristo Pass and closer to the Woodruff side. Not sure if hells canyon is a proper name but that’s what we called it.
I’ve noticed certain types of trees will do that on impact from the fell. It’s certainly straight grained. Color looks a lot like our Mulberry. Barney may have more insight.
I apologize, I was thinking over by Green River. My dad's cousin lives in Ogden and yeah...THAT'S STEEP TOO!
its not a pretty stack but it turned out to be a great fence. a couple elms were getting towards the end of their life and needed to make room for shed.
I apologize, I was thinking over by Green River. My dad's cousin lives in Ogden and yeah...THAT'S STEEP TOO!
No worries amigo? Pretty country either way you cut it up.
