Hard winter ahead

[shinobi]

I just saw a very wooly, wooly worm.
The late great weatherman Lee George would be proud.

[Napastyle]

Oh dear lord NO! I can't do another ice storm!!!!!! :bawl:

[hardrockers]

I may have made the wrong move, but I locked my propand in till March at 2.29 per gallon, with this months being 2.19. Did I make the right decision? I only had till today to decide and I figured it could go sky high.

[Scutter]

I would say you made a wise decision Hardrockers. The energy market is way too volitile to take a chance on right now.

[shinobi]

Hell yeah, hardrockers, you made a wise decision! Even if the woollyworm is wrong, fuel prices will always go up in the winter.

Napastyle, I doubt many of us can handle another ice storm. Seeing that worm reminded me to get an emergency kit together soon.

[hardrockers]

Thanks guys. I hated to lay all that money out and I could have made monthly payments, but in construction you never know what work will be like in the winter.

[kay9_medic]

Originally posted by shinobi
Hell yeah, hardrockers, you made a wise decision! Even if the woollyworm is wrong, fuel prices will always go up in the winter.

Napastyle, I doubt many of us can handle another ice storm. Seeing that worm reminded me to get an emergency kit together soon.


My spidey sense is telling me to shift gears now over to winter preps.

I have electric central heating, a single point of failure, so I'm moving forward getting a russian-style masonry oven built around one of my wood stoves. That setup will put out a lot of heat, I think enough to heat the entire house. I'm wishing to find a source of coal but I have enough seasoned wood around right now to go a couple of years at least. Rather than burn straight wood though I'm experimenting with a retort charcoal kiln I designed to pyrolyze all these big hardwood chunks I have into charcoal. Charcoal burns twice as hot as plain old wood in a wood stove, it's compact and doesn't smoke. I priced commercial charcoal yesterday at $.48 a pound, that's quite a bit considering it's cut with sawdust and a bunch of additives. I can make over 30lbs in a single kiln run.

Something that's quick and easy to do I'm planning is build wood frames out 1x2's the size of each exterior window, then seal the frames with a double pane of 6 mil clear shrink wrap and cover each window with a frame. Instant storm windows. That adds an R-17 value to the windows and it's cheap. The wife is busy making thermal window drapes on the sewing machine. And I'll go around and weather stripping the doors and everything else that can let cold air in, the electrical outlet plates, the dryer vent and such things.

The critical problem I had during the ice storm, and every other power outage for that matter, was drinking water for the animals and hot water for showering. So that's been a priority to solve. I have my generator wired into the house but again it's a single point of failure and 5 gallons of gasoline every eight hours is pretty costly so I've been pushing to get a solar hot water system finished. It's really nothing more than a bunch of 55 gallon plastic barrels painted black to absorb sunlight heat, set up on a platform on the south side catching rainwater from the roof gutters. I made a bunch of filter units out of this charcoal I'm making because my roof is asphalt shingle and I need to filter out that bit of oil that shingles produce and the odd bird crap that shows up. On the roof of the house I'll have a small windmill of my own design, 1 1/2 foot blades made out of sheet metal, pop riveted to a bicycle wheel. Cost me nothing to make the windmill out of scrap parts, the only money is a few hundred in the charge controller and battery. That propeller will directly spin a 30 watt DC motor scavenged from an old electric scooter. The motor will be wired to a charge controller at ground level, charging a golf cart battery. When the battery is fully charged, the controller dumps the excess power from the windmill into an electric heating element installed in the rain barrel system. That's the basic system and probably as far as I can go with it this year. We'll just haul hot water in buckets and use it to fill one of those camp showers as needed. The final finished version will have two other components added. One will be a solar collector on the south facing roof (nothing more than a shallow wood frame box enclosing PVC pipe painted black, like a big flat car radiator), piping that to the rain barrels in a closed loop, and circulating water through the collector. The second component will be adding a loop of the water system through my outside wood stove and heating the water there by way of a heat exchanger, if we're not getting enough sun or wind. All the pumping needed is by way of gravity and a small DC pump running off the golf cart battery. There will be a third water loop coming into the house, I haven't gotten as far into the plan to decide whether to plumb it into the house piping or just leave it stand-alone with two outlets, one to the bathroom shower and one to the kitchen sink. Using mostly scavenged parts, I'll make back whatever money I spend within 18 months or so. I'll make $80 a month just from turning off the central heater and hot water heater in the wintertime, plus be completely immune to power outages. And if all else fails, if we're not getting enough wind to keep the battery charged, I'll have a second fall-back - an engine salvaged from a 1958 Ford 9N tractor using a wood gassifer for fuel, spinning my generator off the PTO.

[judytesterman]

you know what they say..fog in october means snow in the winter..the old-timers say for every fog comes a snow..we are off to a great snowy start...should make admin happy:)

[admin]

Originally posted by judytesterman
you know what they say..fog in october means snow in the winter..the old-timers say for every fog comes a snow..we are off to a great snowy start...should make admin happy:)


Heck ya!!! I miss the snow!!!

[PC Wrangler]

I'd rather get snow than the ice we've had to deal with the last couple of winters. Snow can be plowed & shoveled away....ice, you're just stuck with it.

[hardrockers]

I found a black wooly worm on the porch and it was dead. If that is any indication of what he thought we facing, we are in for one hard winter.
Tonight is the first night to light the fireplace.

[shinobi]

Lee George never covered a dead wooly worm when teaching his viewers about wooly worms. I don't have any idea what a dead one means. Was it exceptionally wooly?

[hardrockers]

Yep.
Persimmons (sp) are supposed to predict the winter weather also. I forget if the seed is the shape of a fork or spoon to indicate a bad winter.

[joetowngirl]

Spoon = hard winter on persimmons