[TheForge] Re: cutting wood

[Mike Spencer]

> ...plus you need electricity to operate the feeder.

Just so.  I like KISS, especially as the power goes off here for a few
hours several times a year in wet snow, ice storms, heavy winds or if
certain phases of the moon come on a Tuesday.  We're always smug that
our water (hand pump) and heat (wood stove) ignore the powerco on such
occasions.  (Yes we have a generator for the freezers, if needed. And
although my forge blower is electric, I have a crank blower that can
just plug in if the power is off.)

> Is the $7 a day [for pellets] then still to lofty to heat a house?
> How much does it cost per day w/a traditional wood stove/fire place?

I buy firewood in 8' lengths. (I have woodland, have cut my own, but
I'm keeping my own standing wood against the time when I might not be
able to buy it.)  A rough calculation says heating costs about $3.50 a
day but that also provides all our cooking and hot water during
heating season, too. That doesn't include 5 or so gallons of chainsaw
gas and incidentals.

I split about 5 cords a year with a 6- or 7-pound splitting maul.  I
suppose if I could easily be billing $50/hour for equally pleasant
work whenever I felt like it, I'd buy a power splitter or pay someone
else to do it.  But as it is, I enjoy splitting wood more than earning
the money to get it done otherwise.  Of course, every piece of wood
gets moved 9 times between sawing off a bolt and putting it into the
stove.  Good exercise.

> Can pellet stoves burn (dried) chipped wood?  Municipalities around
> here chip wood (wet) for disposal of prunings, etc., and some make it
> available free as mulch.

Hah!  One spring, when the management of the (newish-ly privatized)
local powerco deigned to trim a bit around the power lines, I stopped
and offered to let the guys dump their load of chipped brush at my
place.  In the summer, I gleefully used it for mulch to set back the
witch grass around the garden margins.  Yow!  Ants must have had to
fly in from Mexico and migrate from Ontario.  Everywhere I put wood
chips, it was promptly occupied by thriving colonies of ants. No more
wood chip mulch.

As for burning chips, I think you'd have to dry them and then have a
mechanical feeder.  They're kinda clingy and stick-togetherish, know'm
sayin?

I *have* seen a sawdust stove.  The owner was feeding it ordinary
stove wood and regaled me with yarns of other people in New Hampshire
who'd burned their places down because the fire backed up into the
sawdust hopper.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^