Ode to Wood Splitting

I have had an outdoor wood stove for about three years now.  The wood boiler heats the water that runs through my concrete floors (yes, all three levels).  I love the radiant floor heat, and the wood cutting is not so bad.  As long as I keep the pieces no more than two foot in length and that I can lift them, no splitting involved.  I've gotten pretty used to a chainsaw, in my mind anyway.  I have a pair of chaps (thank goodness) to protect my legs and even have a few holes in them - hence the necessity of them.  But I have given up on cutting trees down.  I can cut them up, usually, but I leave the cutting down part to an expert or whoever else I can convince to do the job.
Today, I had some rather large pieces and decided it would be a lot easier if they were split.  I've watched people split wood with a wedge and axe and thought I should give it a go.  The first log I chose already had a hole down the center.  I figured half the work was done for me so I should start with an easy one to build my confidence.  I am sure some of you can figure out what happened...yes, the wedge slipped into the hole and of course got stuck.  How does one pull a wedge back out?  It really wasn't helping at all with the splitting of the wood.  Luckily, (of course) I realized the hole went all the way through and using a screwdriver, a rather large one, I was able to pound the wedge back out the top.
Then I was able to try it again.  This time it worked and I split another log (with a hole in it as well) and another.  Smooth sailing.  Maybe there is no need for a mechanical wood splitter, but then, I looked at the pile of logs I had left to split and thought my time could be much better spent and a mechanical splitter would take about half an hour to finish the lot.  Hmmm.  Can I justify the cost?  Or do I count the calorie burning, weight lifting/resistance as a gain and just do it by hand?

Stove is fixed, I think?

  So, the stove issue was finally resolved by the last ditch effort – replacing the rope seal on the door.  Of course it has to be one of the coldest days of the winter to stand outside with the stove door open, pulling off the old rope, applying an adhesive for the new rope and placing the new rope around the inside of the door.  That's it?  After a few months of scratching my head?

But now the wind monitor has really gone kaput.  This was the only monitor that told me the battery percentage (which is fairly useful) and the wind production.  The monitor has never worked properly in the two years that I have had it.  This is the second device the company sent, and it still doesn't work.  Whenever I run the generator, the device display goes out.  If I unplug the wires and replug them in, then it works.  But not this time.  It is time for a different wind and battery monitor. 

 

 

Stove Issue 2+

Cleaning the creosote wasn't the solution.  The water had reached a temperature over 200 degrees and by early morning it was down to 124.  I guess I better try adjusting the door today.  I picked up a real - normal sized crescent wrench from my dad's shop.  

It was an easy job - loosen the nut, tap the bolt towards the stove and retighten the nut.  I added wood to the fire and waited.  The temperature seemed to stay the same.  Maybe this has done the trick.  

I left for a few hours, but came back and the stove was over 200 degrees again.  What's the deal here?  In the dark, I readjusted the door making it even tighter.   Now I will have to wait until morning to see if the tighter door solves my issue.

Easy, right?  But that wasn't all...Today I noticed that my monitor for the wind and battery percentage was out - the screen had gone blank.  This usually happens every time I run the generator to recharge the batteries.  But I haven't ran the generator for a few days and it was working fine this morning.  So, I did what I always do, unplug it, wait a few seconds, replug it and...Nothing.  I checked the wires, they were all attached... I guess this one is beyond me.

There must be some device that will tell me what my wind turbine is producing and my battery percentage.  Voltage readings do little for me.

 

The Stove Issue

I didn’t fire up my outdoor wood boiler until around Thanksgiving.  But this year, I have been having this ongoing problem of the stove either overheating at 212° or burned to ashes at 125° when it should be regulating itself between 165 and 175.  I have pondered this for months.  At first I just figured I was filling the wood box too full when the air temperature was still above freezing.  That idea was struck down by our one and only blizzard of the season, right before Christmas - I had to open the windows because I was trying to cool the house down in order to get rid of the excess heat in the wood boiler. 

Was the wood too dry?  After all, this is the oldest wood I have ever burned, it was cut last winter, and it was a very hot, dry summer...Would that make such a huge difference?  And don't worry, I checked everything - the damper was working, the chimney wasn't plugged, the pumps are circulating as expected and the house was warm.  

Scratching my head, I decided to do the next thing on my trouble shooting list: call the installer/repair person/expert.  Just as I had thought, too much air into the stove is causing the fire to continually burn.   I scraped and chiseled (with the largest flathead screwdriver I own) the creosote from around the door.   

The second item was to check and adjust the door because it may not be sealing tightly.  For this I needed a crescent wrench, but I don't have one.  However I did find the smallest ever, monkey wrench?  It was in a small rusty toolbox I had gotten from my grandfather.  The wrench was a bit rusty, but the clamp adjusted - I was in business.  Keep in mind it is getting dark by now.  I couldn't seem to get the wrench adjusted right, but yet I couldn't really see what I was doing either.  Then something fell to the ground, hmmm.  It was the top half of my wrench.  It didn't fall off, it broke off.  

Well, maybe scraping the creosote would do the trick? 

Introduction to My Life Off-grid

I am by no means an expert and I really don't have many answers, but life off-grid for me has been a lot of trial but mostly error, and is full of surprises, some laughable and some not so much.  It is hard to explain to people why my life is sort of  "complicated" and why I closely watch the weather forecasts.  That is the reason for this blog.

Well, it all started with 80 acres of land with a pond and a house plan.  Perhaps locating the power grid before planning would have been helpful, but it was 80 acres of beautiful land with a pond.  And so an 8kw standby generator was purchased and the house building began in 2006.  

Things never go as planned.  Isn't that one of Murphy's Laws?  The house looks conventional and modern.  The walls (three stories) are built of ICFs.  All three floors are concrete with in floor heat.  The interior walls are not load bearing and were added at the end.  The roof is metal and there is a single stall, double length garage on the north side.  The south facing side is nearly all large windows, few windows on the west and only one on the north.  There are overhangs on the south side to keep out the summer sun but allowing the winter sun to warm up the floors.  I ended up finishing the inside myself (including interior walls).

After receiving an outrageous quote from the local power company to install power lines not only from the road to the house but also down the road, since there weren't even lines along the road, the decision to go off-grid was final.  The first part of the plan was to install an inverter and 16 L16 deep cell batteries that would be charged by the generator to keep the power in the house.  Then the 8 135 watt solar panels were installed on a pole.  Unfortunately, when the system was first hooked up, the generator started to charge the batteries, something happened that basically fried the generator.  Of course no one (installer, generator company) would take responsibility.  And so another generator was purchased and hooked up to the system in 2009.