Jay Gaulard

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Blog Posts About Heating

Blog posts about home heating. Read all that I have written about methods for heating a home, best practices and failures.

Finishing the Wood and a Backup Heat Source

I was hoping to move and split the wood this morning, but other issues took precedence. All I was able to do this morning was to move the good wood off the pond. I wanted to get it all (the dead stuff at the top of the tree), but that had to wait for this afternoon, after I got back from running around all over the place. Around 3PM, I was able to finish getting everything I wanted off the ice and then relocated the entire pile to its new home in front of the wood shed. If I get especially ambitious after tonight’s snowstorm, I’ll head out there, grab the axe and start splitting. But I’m fine with waiting until Spring to tackle that. I’m not sure I’m going to want to dig it out from under all that snow.

Snow Covered Pond

The whole thing is, I needed to get this stuff off the pond before it got covered with the snow. If I waited, the project would become exponentially more difficult. And if I decided to wait until Spring rolled around, I’m not sure I’d want to be walking on that ice. And fishing pieces of wood out of water just isn’t my thing. I’ll do it, but I wouldn’t be happy about it. Better to sweat a bit today and finish up what I wanted to than to wait for things to get worse.

Old Wood Shed

Cut Logs

Pile of Wood

This morning was all about running around town in an attempt to find a kerosene heater. I’m nervous about the heat situation up here. I need a heat source and then a backup and then a backup. After tonight’s storm, the temperatures are supposed to drop to -18 on Wednesday. This is after 30MPH winds on Monday. Some how, some way, I have a feeling we’re going to lose power just when things are at their coldest. I don’t feel like being “left out in the cold,” if you get what I’m saying.

I’ll write a separate post about what I’ve done to soothe my mind (heat-wise) later tonight or tomorrow. For now, check out the kerosene heater I picked up today.

Kerosene Heater


Collecting Firewood

Up until this morning, I’ve been on a firewood collecting spree (it snowed last night and is very wet out there right now). I’m attempting to pull at least a cord out of the woods this Winter. I think I can get it too because the more I search through the woods, the more I find dead and funky looking, misplaced trees.

What do I mean by misplaced? Well, let me give you an example. The previous occupants of the house we live in removed all the pines in the front part of the rear woods to allow for the maples to grow. They did a good job too because now we’ve got some pretty serious sized maple trees. For years, they used those trees for their sap and eventual syrup. If I ever find the wherewithal, I’d like to do the same. Even if it’s just boiling off the sap in a pot on a wood stove.

Anyway, among those maples are ash trees, white birch and a few cherry. I’d like to take those three out so more maples can grow. Also, there are a few dead trees mixed among the rest that need to be removed. Needless to say, I’ll be busy for a while.

I went outside yesterday in a hunt for some firewood. I walked down one side of the property and found a few dead elm trees, so I pulled them out and cut them up into firewood sized pieces.

Elm Tree Firewood

Right after that, I found a semi-dead white birch with no top towards the back and removed that as well. I didn’t get a chance to cut that one up, so I left it in lengths and added them to my already existing pile of white birch.

Lengths of White Birch Firewood

I found a fairly large dead maple tree a few days ago that’s situated right next to the pond in the back yard. I immediately targeted that tree for removal and began doing what I had to do yesterday. The only problem is, there are two sections of the tree and the smaller section’s top got tangled in the larger section’s. The most I was able to remove from that tree is three firewood sized logs and the remainder is just hanging there. My chainsaw isn’t large enough to take the rest of the tree down, so I’ll have to wait to get a bigger saw. I have my eye on a nice Husqvarna Model 450. They go for around $350. It’ll be a little while.

Dead Maple Tree

Cutting Maple Firewood

After I was finished battling the maple tree, I thought I would take a break and play on the pond a bit. It’s now frozen over and I’d say the ice is about 3 inches thick. Clear as day too. I know I keep saying that so I thought I’d offer a little proof this time. Check out these pics.

Frozen Pond

Clear Ice in Pond

Looking Through Ice

Walking On Ice

There are a few sections of woods in the back that are a bit gnarly. Broken pines and fallen trees. One of the areas I’m working on is the overall beautification effort. So, while I’m back there surveying for firewood, I take a detour to cut down a few stumps or logs laying irregularly. Through the years, these will decay and kind of clean the place up.

Stump in Woods

Dead Trees Cut Up in Woods

Also, if the dead fallen trees are hardwood, I’ll take a look to see if they’re any good. If they are, I’ll cut them up to pull out of the woods to burn.

The primary reason I went out yesterday was to take down a cherry tree and to clean up its vicinity. Leaning against the cherry was some dead hardwood and a large pine that had uprooted years ago. Let’s just say it wasn’t one of the prettiest parts of the thick. And by removing the fallen trees and the cherry, I’d be opening the area up so the small pines could grow. They seem to do a lot of that around here. I got some good lengths of cherry out of the deal.

Logs in Woods

Lengths of Hardwood for Firewood

Cherry Firewood

I think my ultimate goal is to make the ATV path wider so I can fit my truck through it. Pulling these lengths of firewood all that distance is going to turn into a massive chore. If I could make a nice wide path, I can drive the truck, turn it around and fill it up on the way back. That would make my life a lot easier. I’ve even got the truck and trailer parked in the back in anticipation.

Ford F-250 and Trailer


First Winter Fire In the Fireplace

It’s been getting kind of chilly around these parts lately. The days are very nice, but the nights have been getting cold. I think we may have broken the freezing mark last night. I did see a bit of frost on the lawn this morning.

What does this mean? It means that I get to start making fires in the fireplace again. Albeit they are very inefficient fires that make the rest of the house very cold, but the romantic side is worth it. I just have to remember to let the fire go out around 9PM. If it doesn’t, any warmth in the house gets sucked right out the chimney overnight. That’s not good.

Here is a nice picture of our first fire in the fireplace for the season.

Fire in Fireplace in New England


White Mountain Hearth Gas Log Set

I got this idea a few months ago and finally got around to getting things taken care of. In my mind, this was to be an easy project, but in reality things got a little complicated.

I decided long ago that the time for burning wood in the fireplace was over. Being limited to cool Spring and Autumn nights wasn’t going to cut it.

As you are probably aware, burning wood in a traditional fireplace is actually negatively efficient, meaning you do more harm than good. The whole problem stems from leaving the fireplace flue open after you go to sleep at night. The fire goes out and the warm chimney acts as a sucking mechanism to remove any heat you generated earlier in the evening and kindly places it on the outside of your four walls. While I’ll be the first to admit that I love a warm fire, I’ll also be the first to admit that I am not a fan of finding wood, splitting it, bringing it inside and burning it only to make the house colder than it was before I started.

I’m sure I told you about trying to put another pellet stove insert in the fireplace. I probably also told you about getting a wood burning stove. Neither of those ideas worked out and were way too expensive anyway. There is a payback period to these investments and let’s just say that the initial investor rarely gets paid back. I had to think of something cheaper and easier. That’s when I came up with the idea of getting gas logs.

I did a quick browse of Home Depot’s website and found some very inexpensive gas log sets. There were anywhere between $139 and $300. Not bad. I thought that I would simply “T” off of our existing propane line that we use for cooking and run a line over to the chimney through the basement ceiling. I would snake it right up through the clean-out door and into the bottom of the fireplace. Yeah, right.

I called the local gas log people to get some other prices. They talked me out of the Home Depot gas log sets immediately. I know their spiel, but knew they were right. I wanted to get quality and the price that they were offering wasn’t bad. I generally like to go with local places like this because I usually run into problems. When that happens, I need someone to call. In this case, they came in very handy.

Let’s make a long story short. I picked up a 50 foot run of nice heavy duty coated copper propane tubing. I went down into the basement to do the quick snaking job I had all planned out. I took one look up in the ceiling and got depressed. I took another look and realized that my whole plan wasn’t going to work unless I moved some heating pipes and drilled some holes. What made me think that this was going to work is beyond me. I called the gas log people and asked them if it was weird for someone to have two propane tanks. They said it wasn’t weird at all.

After a bunch of calls to propane places and deciding to cancel my account with my current propane company (for having exorbitant prices), I set up a time for both the gas log installer and the propane company to come and do their thing. The reason I used the gas log installer was because I didn’t feel like buying an expensive drill bit to go through the side of the chimney. Also, after watching what these people did, I am glad I went this route. I don’t need to mess with propane lines. The project was to install the gas logs while the propane company set up a new 120 gallon propane tank on the opposite side of the house than our original propane tank.

Okay, so here’s what the breakdown is:

– White Mountain Hearth Refractory Sassafras Gas Log Set – $600
– Fireplace hood – $100
– Gas log set installation – $350
– Initial propane set up with 109 gallons of propane – $440

I’m sure I am missing something in there. If you are thinking about a project like this, please take my advice and realize that the cheap $200 gas log set in Home Depot idea quickly turns into a project costing well over $1000. But, once it’s done, you won’t need to deal with messy wood, bags of pellets or any of that stuff.

Now, I can (and already have) pour myself a nice glass of wine and sit in front of what looks just like a wood fire, but for much less hassle.

Here are some pictures and video I took of the gas logs, the propane tank, setup and a live fire. Enjoy.

White Mountain Hearth Refractory Sassafras Gas Log Set
PS – be sure to watch in HD.

White Mountain Hearth Refractory Sassafras Gas Log Set

120 Gallon Propane Tank For Gas Logs

Gas Log Stainless Steel Propane Tubing

Emergency Propane Shut-Off Valve


Cleaning the Chimney and Pellet Stove

Ah, it’s October 3 and the chill is in the air. The temperature was in the 40s last night and I couldn’t get enough of the covers. What a change from the humid 90s we were feeling just a month ago.

There are a few things that need to get done in the Autumn. They creep up on you and become less and less pleasurable the colder it gets. Among others, the two chores I am talking about today are cleaning out the fireplace chimney and also cleaning out the pellet stove in the basement.

Now, everyone knows that when spring arrives, you basically close up the damper in the fireplace and call it a season. I mean, the last thing on your mind is to actually clean the fireplace and chimney to prepare it for the next season. That would make too much sense and why do today what you can put off until tomorrow, right?

Well, today was the day I decided to clean the chimney. I pulled out my chimney brush and those fiberglass rods I bought from the pellet stove place last year and went to work. I think I bought five six foot rods. That length of rods pushes the brush all the way to the top of this colonial that we live in and pops it out of the top of the chimney. It took less than ten minutes to get the whole thing brushed.

There are a few things you need to concern yourself with when cleaning out a chimney. First, you will need to remove the damper and take it down. You won’t be able to get the brush up into the chimney flue without removing the damper. Second, after pushing and pulling the brush up and down the flue for a while, you will need to remove the brush and vacuum out the area up in back of the fireplace. Basically, this is the area behind the damper. This is very important. The guy at the fireplace store told me that serious problems occur when people fail to clean that area properly. It can get very hot back there and with all that buildup, well, you get the idea.

Overall, the job of cleaning a chimney isn’t very difficult, but not something to look forward to. If you have a relatively new home and a chimney in good condition, I highly recommend you go to a fireplace shop and buy the equipment to clean your chimney yourself. Have the pros only come out for an inspection every few years. You will save a lot of money by doing this.

Oh yeah, when I clean the chimney of the house we are currently living in, I do it from the bottom. This house’s roof is very steep and cleaning the chimney from the bottom is quite simple. As long as the house is warmer than the air outside, most of the dust is vented right out the chimney.

Now, regarding that pellet stove. I haven’t exactly cleaned this yet today, but by tonight, I hope to get it all finished. I really want to try out those new soft wood pellets I got a while back.

For my yearly cleaning of the pellet stove, I simply disassemble as much as I can and use my shop vac with a HEPA filter to vacuum everything I see. About every other year, I disassemble the fan area and the exhaust piping in the back to do a real thorough cleaning. The stove burns fairly clean, so this is all it’s needed through the years. I am excited to try these new pellets because they are supposed to offer a hotter burn with less ash. We’ll see.


Fire Burning in the Fireplace

It’s getting a bit warmer out there. I think it’s supposed to be around 60 on Friday. Maybe I can get my left over wood chips from last year spread around the bases of some young trees I planted in the Autumn.

Anyway, I got a fire going tonight. If you think I’m not a creature of habit, I will tell you that I did the same thing last year, but on the 11th. I even took a video of it. That’s pathetic.

As I was watching the fire tonight, I started thinking. For some reason, I thought of all the fake things in the world. I thought of all the vinyl, plastic, press board, composite decking…you catch my drift. I also thought of all the different ways people try to get heat. Oil, natural gas, kerosene, pellets, electric…you catch my drift again. It’s pretty weird. For thousands and thousands of years, we had one way to get warm. Fire. Now, we have many more.

I’m not sure it’s better this way. I mean, we have a pellet stove and that saves a lot of trouble because I don’t have to go cutting down trees, splitting wood, stacking it and bringing it inside. Now, I just open up a plastic bag and pour pellets in the stove hopper. It sure does save me a lot of time and trouble. With all my extra time, I get to sit at the computer or walk around outside in my slippers with a beer in my hand. Every time I go for a walk in the woods, I think I’m a hero for doing it.

I’m just saying, fire isn’t fake and burning wood for heat isn’t getting out of any work. It’s as pure as you can get. It doesn’t get people depressed because it’s honest and difficult. If we all burned wood for heat, I think we’d be a better people, less spoiled and nicer to one another. I’m not sure how I came up with that, but I think that people who do honest work learn to appreciate where they are a lot more and don’t take things for granted as much.

There, I’m done. Just some quick thoughts.

Here’s a video of tonight’s fire in the fireplace. I’m not sure why there is camera shake because I wasn’t holding it. I had it resting on the fireplace poker.


Wood Burning Stove Update

I have some disappointing news for you. There will be no wood burning stove. Not now and probably not ever. Oh well.

I called the fireplace guy yesterday and told him that I wanted to go ahead with the install. We were at the point of having my debit card in hand for the deposit, when I started digging into the necessary clearances. I hadn’t looked all that hard at these because I thought it was very straight forward…pop a free standing wood burning stove into the fireplace. Done deal. Right?

Not so fast. Apparently, the manufacturers of these stoves want huge clearances from any combustibles. We have space, but not the space the stove people want. I decided throw my hands in the air and say that I just don’t care. Haha.

My new project is to figure out a way to make the existing fireplace more efficient. My brother and father mentioned to me that there was something called a “Tube Fireplace Heater.” Click here to see what I’m talking about.

Also, I wouldn’t mind getting some ceramic, tighter fitting glass doors. That would be cool. An outside air vent would be the icing on the cake.

So, even though my little project of getting a wood burning stove fell through, I still have some things to think about. And, after all, that’s what keeps me going.


DutchWest Cast Iron Non-Catalytic Wood Stove

As promised (almost), I drove down to the wood stove store today to check out the scene. I was having a little trouble with the price of the wood stove insert that I wanted and needed to see if there was anything less expensive. I also wanted to see what the free standing wood stoves looked like. We can easily put one of them in the fireplace.

When I got there, I did my typical “guy” stroll around to browse all the stoves and inserts. I see it every time. The guys walk in with their hands in the pockets making grunts and noises, like “hmmm” and “hmmph.” It’s so funny because I do it too. There is kind of a lot to take in. Good thing the sales guy walks out to put things in perspective. I must say, I really love wood stoves and stuff like that.

I saw the “Hampton HI300 Wood Insert” that I wanted. It’s just as nice as I thought it would be. If money wasn’t an issue, I would tell them to pack it up and bring it over. Since I really don’t want to drop that kind of coin, I am becoming more and more interested in a smaller free standing wood stove. Remember, we already have the pellet stove, so we don’t really need that much more heat. Just something to keep my toes warm, something that doesn’t use electricity and something that will burn all the wood I am cutting down so I don’t have to watch it rot in the woods.

The sales guy introduced me to the more “economical” line of DutchWest wood burning stoves. They are pretty good looking and don’t have a lot of frills. Here is a picture I just took from the brochure.

DutchWest free standing wood stove

It’s cute, isn’t it? It’s also about $1000 less than the other one. A large part of the expense comes from the lining of the chimney and the installation. Heck, if all I needed was the stove, I could just run over there with the trailer and pick it up. That’s not the way it works anymore. Now, you need to have a 35 foot piece of insulated lining stuffed down the entire length of the very tall chimney and attached to the stove. All of that extra stuff actually costs more than the stove itself. At least I managed to drop the price somewhat.

I am hoping to have the stove stand on the stone outside the fireplace. The stove is 17 1/2 inches from front to back and the slab of stone is about 20 1/2. If we can do this, I can still access the side door to put longer (up to 19″) pieces of wood. That would be good. Otherwise, I will have to load shorter pieces through the front and cut about two inches off the stove legs so it fits inside the fireplace.

Anyway, I’ll get into all that stuff later if I decide to get this stove. I’ll make my decision by Saturday.


Hampton HI300 Wood Insert

This is terrible, just terrible. I think I have found myself walking down a very bad path.

Okay, so I already told you that I am taking some trees down in the woods next to the house. This is a good thing and it’s really starting to look nice over there. I actually took two more trees down today. I don’t like to do too many at a time because I would rather get used to the small changes I make and think about what I am doing before I go ahead and take down some more. Either way, I am building up next year’s supply of firewood.

This is where the problem starts. I still have about a cord of wood from the trees I cut down last summer. It’s is seasoning quite nicely and will make for some splendid firewood come this winter.

Now, I am almost positive that I have complained about the miserable (in)efficiency of a regular fireplace. We have one here and it does a really great job of sucking up what ever heat you already have in the house, out the chimney. Sure, the living room is warm, but you have to wear a snow suit in all the other rooms. Really, I don’t even use it much…just on those chilly spring or autumn evening when the pellet stove isn’t running.

So here I am, sitting on a cord of seasoned firewood and building up next year’s supply. What to do?

I am very happy with the pellet stove we got last year. It kicks butt when it comes to heating up about 3/4 of the house. To get that much heat, I need to keep it humming all winter. Last winter, I used four tons of pellets. I wouldn’t mind having a heat supplement helping out the pellet stove.

I am going to make a long whiny story short here. I really want a Hampton HI300 Wood Insert for the fireplace in the living room. Take a look at it:

It’s really nice, isn’t it?

I called the fellas down at the fireplace store today and told them what I wanted. He wrote up a quote and faxed it over to me. The thing is, it’s pricey. I know I’m not going to save any money by getting this little toy, so I’m iffy about the whole thing. To make matters worse, there is a tax credit that’s available called the “The U.S. Biomass Tax Credit.” It gives you back 30% of your purchase and installation price, up to $1500. That is just driving me crazy. You can learn about the tax credit here.

I know I am going to find myself in the car tomorrow or the next day driving down to the fireplace store. It’s bad, but I just want to feel that heat cranking out of that stove this winter. It even has a blower.

I’ll let you know what happens.


Is Installing A Pellet Stove Worth It?

I received a message this morning from the heating fuel oil company we use. The person who left the message was inquiring about the low quantity of oil that we used throughout the year and wanted to update their system with whether or not we were burning wood or some other source of alternative energy. I gave a call back to fill her in.

When I called her back, I told the lady that we did, in fact, have a pellet stove. I said that the oil was primarily burned for hot water and to heat one bedroom during the winter. She praised me on my intelligence for getting a pellet stove. I asked her how much oil we burned in the last year (they just came to fill the tank a few days ago). She replied with 256.6 gallons. I thought that was pretty good for a year.

That got me thinking…since the pellet stove was pretty expensive and the pellets themselves were an additional cost on top of the stove, was it worth it to get the pellet stove and pellets, or should we just have burned oil to heat the house for the whole year? I can’t remember the price per gallon of oil last year, when they wanted to lock me into that foolish contract, but I swear it was over $4 a gallon. Since I can’t remember, I did some quick research online to see what oil prices were last year at this time and I came across this website. It shows last year’s oil prices vs. this year’s oil prices in New York. Close enough. At this time last year, oil prices were $3.93 per gallon. Last year, the oil delivery company estimated that we would burn approximately 1000 gallons of oil for the year. That was based on other, similarly sized houses in the area.

Let’s do a little math.

If I signed the oil contract and burned the estimated amount of fuel oil, we would have paid $3930 for the year’s worth of oil.

Since I didn’t sign the contract and since we burned much less oil than the oil company’s estimate (because we used an alternative form of energy), we only paid $638.93 for the oil we burned. That number is from the oil prices on the receipts I kept.

Even if we didn’t sign the contract, but still burned the estimated amount of oil, we still would have paid $2490 for the year’s worth of oil.

Let’s see…I paid about $1100 for the four tons of pellets that we used for the season. We paid about $2500 for the pellet stove and installation. That equals $3600 for the pellet stove and one year’s worth of pellets.

I am going to go out on a limb here and imagine that I was feeling the same way a lot of people were feeling last year at this time and went ahead and signed that oil price contract. If I had signed it and never got the pellet stove, I would have $330 less in my bank account right now.

I know there is some more delicate math involved here, such as the actual price paid for the oil that was already in the tank before we moved in, but I am going to ignore that. This post has already almost put me to sleep. I just thought it was my duty to write it.

That’s the point? Well, I would say that even at today’s lower oil prices, it’s still worth it to get a pellet stove. The payback period is very short and you won’t cringe every time you hear the boiler kick on.