Getting Ready For Fall - Storing Wood

The end result of the kids clearing off the front porch in order to make room for...

...lots of wood for winter.  We only have one source of heat in the house, a wood stove in the living room.  Amazingly, it does heat the entire house, top to bottom and back to front. 

There was an old oil furnace in the basement when we moved here 2.5 years ago,  along with 2 old oil tanks.  All 3 were done and had to come out and have not yet been replaced.  We have a 2-year-old used oil furnace and tank bought and waiting to go in but we need to finish digging out the basement dirt floor first.  A lot of drudgery work as each heavy bucket load has to be carried up the old, crooked steps, dumped into the tractor and carted away.

http://huonview.blogspot.ca/2010/09/apple-crates-in-place.html
We tried storing the wood in large apple crates like the ones above and putting the crates in the garage throughout the winter but this did not work out so well.  Too bad, too because the crates were easy enough to move around with the forks on the tractor.  On the days when the sun was shining outside, the ice on the wood inside the crates in the garage never thawed.  If it rained, snowed or was freezing rain outside, the liquid, one way or another found its way into the garage under the garage door in spite of us putting old towels, blankets, etc. under the door.  This liquid would invariably turn to ice, seldom thaw before winter was over and create a slippery floor that we had to walk on several times a day to get wood.

I expected the front porch to be a worse choice but last winter when we tried it as a last resort, it turned out to be much better.  If the weather warmed up, the wood warmed up also and the snow and ice melted.  We only had to go a step or 2 outside the front door and we seldom had any ice where we had to walk.  So we're doing it again this year.  The only possible downside is that most people would not like the look or mess of wood on their front porch but I don't really mind it at all.  It looks like the country to me!

Our First Farmhouse

When I got married over 20 years ago, I finally got my wood stove...sort of.  The old farmhouse we moved into had a wood/oil combination furnace.  It wasn't hard to run, even for a newbie like myself but it must have been a lot older than it looked.  It only held it's heat for just over an hour, after 1.5 hours, there were only hot embers left and after 2 hours, nothing.  I've read online that 6-12 hours is more the norm.  Even replacing the bricks inside didn't help but this furnace always threw out good heat.  It warmed the entire 2 full storied old house really well, even before we insulated, just as long as you  went down to the basement every hour. 

This became a huge problem for me when we had 5 kids over the next 7 years.  It became impossible to get to the furnace every hour with 5 very small children upstairs.  I had no problem going down when they were all asleep but when they were all awake, it took less than a minute for one of them to topple an infant out of a sitter, fall off a chair, table or countertop (which they'd never be on if I was there), hit each other with any number of items, fight like the dickens and hurt each other ... it just wasn't worth it to try to keep the fire going.  I just turned on the oil instead.

Hubby would come in from the barn for lunch after 3-4 hours of milking the cows in an old tie-stall barn and have to start the fire over again.  After 3-4 more hours of barn work in the afternoon, he'd have to it again at supper-time and guess what...!  After 3-4 more hours of doing the evening milking, he'd have to again start the fire.  Needless to say, he got tired real quick of this, really annoyed and tired of paying for oil he didn't really want.  And neither of us wanted to get up repeatedly throughout the night.

For my part, I didn't really like the oil heat.  Sure, I was happy and grateful to be warm, especially with small children but the off and on, off and on, off and on of oil can't begin to compare with the nice, even heat of wood.  You warm up, cool down, over and over and we would shiver while waiting for the furnace to 'kick in'.  The biggest downside to the furnace, whether you used wood or oil, was that it required hydro.  In a power outage, you had no heat.  Thank goodness we had a generator!

http://www.air-tech.ca/

A very similar furnace to our old one but probably not as big.