14 degrees Fahrenheit and falling. Inside the house, with the wood stove going, it’s a very cozy 74 (measured in a loft out of the direct path of radiance from the stove – a few degrees colder on the living level) and rising very slowly. The walls aren’t cold. There are no cold drafts (indeed, that’s partly why I had to install the HRV! – the house wasn’t breathing). The air coming in from the HRV (which is in the other loft), isn’t so cold that I can notice it at the bottom of the loft stairs. If it were cold, it would come right down and I’d feel it as a draft. At the top of those stairs, I can feel just a slight zephyr of cooler air. Not cold, just cooler than ambient, which is admittedly a bit elevated by the wood stove. So yeah, everything’s working nicely and I have confidence the stove can maintain at least +60F against the outside. Maybe more, if I a aggressively fire it. Right now it’s fired high but I could probably get more out of it if I tried. At this level, the inside temp is definitely rising (slowly), so it stands to reason I could hold steady at this temp with it colder outside. If it went down to -10 or so outside, maybe the stove wouldn’t be enough to keep me warm, but quite possibly it could – if it gets that cold, I’ll let you know! If the stove can’t do it alone, there’s always the propane heater, too, which could run in tandem if needs be.
Speaking of heat, I was planning to just use propane in the office – with its foot thick insulated walls (and ceiling) – but I like heating with wood so much, maybe I’ll try to install a wee stove in there, too. It is a smaller space – about 150 sf including the attached washroom and has 8ft ceilings (unlike my 10ft average height in the house), so somewhat less volume to keep warm and more insulation to help that happen. I’d be afraid that a wood stove would overheat the space, but maybe not. The propane heat is essential for the same reason it is in the house: to keep the power system from freezing (in the house, also to keep the water service from freezing) whether I’m there to stoke a wood fire or not.
I decided that it was just too much work to try to harvest wood as I needed it and anyway, even the standing dead stuff was a little wet and some of the other wood I had to cut was legit wet. It could be made to burn, but not without great effort and of course it put off much less heat since so much energy was going into evaporating the water. I saw an ad for firewood delivered at a very reasonable price and ordered a cord. I do have to take the logs once, sometimes twice, through the bandsaw so they’ll fit in my wee stove, but by and large I don’t even need to split them further than they came. Some of the chunks are kinda large for the stove, but it’ll take them and burn them just fine. A few of them I split down much more into starter sticks and kindling, but not having to do the splitting on everything sure is nice. Next spring and summer I’ll spend some time on wood harvest and give it some time to dry out before use. Maybe get a hydraulic (but still manual, for exercise) splitter. We shall see. For now, at least, I have a load of nice dry wood to burn and it’s keeping me plenty warm. Indeed, it’s actually getting too hot in here, so I’m going to close the air dampers on the stove a bit to slow the burn.
I have been reading up on soap making – something one can do with lye produced using the wood ash – dunno if I care to bother, but it might be fun to try at least once.