Paying for our Next Years Heat



Early autumn shot, complete with pooch
Hi Everyone


Well its that time of year again. 

Finally the weather is cool-ish but not rainy.  

And the bugs are gone 
(Yay ! there are no more bugs !)  
This was a terrible year for mosquitoes – I suspect that with all the rain the little XYZs just kept giving birth to a new crop.  But now they are gone !!




So – what is the perfect cool bug free activity?  Cutting and stacking wood of course.

We have a wood stove here for our heat.  And the heat it produces is lovely – keeping us very cozy.  Last year in the fall we insulated under the cottage and now our slate floor acts as a big heat sink and stays a nice warmish temperature, not quite like under floor heating but much better than it used to be.  In any case, to heat a cottage with a wood stove one needs – well, wood.  And a fair bit of it.

We have quite a big property so access to wood is easy.  But there is the whole cutting, splitting and stacking thing.  To start us off for this year we had a few logs that we had felled last year but not gotten around to dealing with – so we are starting with these.

Clearly there are a few steps – cutting the logs into stove lengths (which must be done fairly accurately – there is no end of headache if they are too long – guess how we know that? (😊)).  

Carefully cutting to length


Then we split it all.  We are very lucky in that our neighbour has a hydraulic splitter that we get to borrow. And so much faster and stronger than my little electric splitter.

Isn't this the slickest machine!


We also purchased a bunch of fittings that use 2 x 4 lumber to create a bit of a rack for the wood.  We just need to set it up and fill it.  



Oddly I love stacking wood.  I find it very stress relieving, kind of a nice rhythm and then a terrific end product when you are done.   



Of course it is very important that the racks are set on firm flat ground or pieces of wood before you fill it.

Oops - not on firm flat ground apparently


We are figuring that we will go through 5 racks in a heating season.  The racks we are using end up about 4 ft x 8 ft, so approximately a face cord per rack.  We managed to get 2.5 racks done with the wood that was already down. 


Next we need to find a tree (or two)

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