Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: wolfen on December 24, 2011, 07:46:43 am
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Heres what I had to install to replace th oil furnace I can no longer afford oil for
(http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/2027/20111125084025.th.jpg) (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/809/20111125084025.jpg/)
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Congratulate me everybody I've gone green :)
Subsequently at 48 years old my 9 to 5 I have enjoyed for a long time has turned back into the 5 to 9 I used to do when I was a kid.
Pros....its warmed than the oil heater
Smells better
CO detector doesn't sound off once a week
Looks like a dalek from Dr Who ( less the toilet plunger)
Anybody cal add fuel to it
I finally have a reason to buy the local news paper
I can recycle anything that burns
Cons..gotta keep adding wood
Oh. I forgot to mention, all the stuff hanging on the wall around it has been moved for obvious reasons
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Wood pellets are pretty damn cheap from what I've seen. I don't know the exact BTU/$ in comparison to oil, though.
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Oil furnaces?
Wood furnaces?
I've only seen the ladder, never the former. Then again, I've only ever been around Natural Gas furnaces anyhow
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Oil furnaces?
Wood furnaces?
I've only seen the ladder, never the former. Then again, I've only ever been around Natural Gas furnaces anyhow
Sames. Didn't know there was a such thing as an oil furnace. Have seen kerosene furnaces though.
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Oil heat is really common in the US, or at least in my neck of the woods. I'm surprised so many people haven't heard of it.
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my sister has a 3 story house and one small wood stove is enough to keep it warm as hell all through january. chopping wood ****ing sucks though.
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Oil heat is really common in the US,
thats because of the incredibly low tax on oil/petrol in the u.s
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Oil heat is really common in the US,
thats because of the incredibly low tax on oil/petrol in the u.s
here in south east alaska its the norm for anyone who doesnt use wood. every winter month oil truck comes to fill the reserve tank for the apartment complex. many people have wood stoves though.
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Beware that stove. My friend has the same kind in his cabin. It's not a bad stove, it really isn't. The only con about it is that it's a lot more difficult to get a fire lit and become a bed of hot coals compared to other stoves.
Wood stoves are great though. The good ones are where you toss wood into ever 4 hours. You can get wood for free.
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You can get wood for free.
Damn right you can
EDIT for below post: I'd like to chop your wood
But on a note related to that picture, that's a pretty badass looking furnace
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You can find multitudes of people willing to part with wood. And then you chop.
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Thanks guys, yes oil furnaces are all over here in the U.S. BUT Natural gas is more common in urban areas. 99% of kids ( to me a kid is anything under 20) have never heard of a Wood heater or a oil furnace, but Wood heat here is rare at best mainly because people in the U.S. now days are too lazy to go out fell a tree cut it up and haul it home, good thing for me, cause granted this year I have to hunt for seasoned wood, but I already have NEXT years wood stacked seasoning and almost ready to be split:)
Oh thanks Death fun, it IS a bad ass heater, with two 1/4 and some kindling, I can make it 120F in here real fast.
Oh one more thing for those of you who have never heard of oil heat before, don't worry, I'm right there with ya, from the time i was born until I moved into THIS particular house I had never heard of anything besides wood heat. so using a ax is no biggie to me, my grandfather split his own wood until he was 95 years 6 months and 3 days (thats the day he died) And I have spent only the last 18 years NOT spiting wood, instead I have been dealing with bad leaking heat exchangers, rusted out roof jacks, electronics thermostats that don't work at all or right when they do, and that crude oil smell, thats the advantages of oil heat. The " experts " say a oil furnace will last 20 years, I've had three heat exchangers in the one in the house now i the past 5 years, so to me "downgrading to wood heat" is a MAJOR upgrade.
And just to let yall kow how strong my 180 lbs is, I can split a 3foot dia 16" long green log into halves with two swings.
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My grandmother in NC had an oil furnace, it broke down constantly, and the fumes were awful sometimes. I've only ever had electric and gas. I'm kind of torn on which I like more.
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I've had wood heat all up until i moved to interior where i had to get used to fuel oil and electric heat among wood.
(http://vogelzang-cast-iron-stove.info/images/vogelzang-cast-iron-stove.jpg)
I had this stove for a while in my old place. Works great, it does 3.5 hour burns. Amazingly easy to get a fire going. The front tray on this one was really bad ass how it pulls air in underneath the fire on up as best as it was built to do.
Great for the small place i was at. I thought the hottest i could get it was 84. One night some how, i got it to 105. That was a hot night of sleep.
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Amazingly easy to get a fire going
Blowtorch + Gasoline
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i only needed newspaper, kindling, and wood. yes having a blowtorch saves time, but i could do without it.
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Birch bark is the best kindling. Second best is feather stick made of old pine, full of resin and tar. Paper as kindling is not the best possible option, in my opinion.
My parents' home (where I am right now) has electric heating complimented with two fireplaces; a large masonry oven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_oven), and a masonry heater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater). My grandparents living in Rovaniemi have oil burner with a water cycle radiator, and the apartment building in Helsinki where I live in, has district heating.
I like fire as a form of heating, it is carbon neutral and when it's done properly, has surprisingly small particle emissions too. Also produces unique visual, aural and olfactory element that can't really be replaced by anything. If and when I get myself a home some time, I really do want it to have a fireplace of some sort, preferable a masonry oven so that it could be used for cooking as well as heating.
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And just to let yall kow how strong my 180 lbs is, I can split a 3foot dia 16" long green log into halves with two swings.
call me when you have to split oak logs -.-
and i have to agree with herra, wood based heat cant be beat. especially if you have some kind of pine to dump into the thing.
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Birch bark is the best kindling. Second best is feather stick made of old pine, full of resin and tar. Paper as kindling is not the best possible option, in my opinion.
I hated using paper. The best you can do is roll it up, or crumple it up as tight as you can. If possible, cardboard is way better. But on hand, somehow cardboard gets damp no matter how best you keep it and paper ends up being the fire starter anyway to warm the fire up enough to evaporate the moisture out of the cardboard. It's a really inefficient process because i never bother to put burnables on a shelf.
What is annoying is when you have harvested too much paper and cardboard from your trash for burning. Really, just saving all your egg cartons and having two stacks of news paper seemed to be nothing more than what was needed even in amount for the whole winter.
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Dryer lint makes pretty good kindling too. That's why it's a fire hazard.
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Thanks guys, yes oil furnaces are all over here in the U.S. BUT Natural gas is more common in urban areas. 99% of kids ( to me a kid is anything under 20) have never heard of a Wood heater or a oil furnace, but Wood heat here is rare at best mainly because people in the U.S. now days are too lazy to go out fell a tree cut it up and haul it home, good thing for me, cause granted this year I have to hunt for seasoned wood, but I already have NEXT years wood stacked seasoning and almost ready to be split:)
Apparently everyone in my early childhood neighborhood was part of the one percent. O_o (I'm 19)
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Apparantly, 99% of kids aren't from anywhere even vaguely resembling my neighborhood. Lucky bastards probably were on high(er-than-dial-up)-speed internet by 2006, too...
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I'm not really sure I'd call people who don't go out to cut their own trees for heat "lazy," given that the majority of people living in the US don't exactly have a forest's worth of timber on their properties. Also, some of us kind of like seeing trees kept where they are as much as possible. :p
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I used to live near the edge of a desert. Trees there... not for cutting down.
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check my math here, please.
desert = use passive solar heating
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Yeah, in the desert where it doesn't really get so cold during winter. You just use different sources of heating based on where you live. In southeast alaska where i'm from, most people just used wood. Interior alaska people had redundant sources of heating because of the long cold ass as **** winters. Do wood during the day, at night use heating oil, and having heating oil to rely upon when out of wood.
I'm assuming that desert is the arizona nevada area. You could probably get away with burning trash. But, you could probably also get away with no heating at all if the winter is just going to 50F.
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I'm assuming that desert is the arizona nevada area. You could probably get away with burning trash. But, you could probably also get away with no heating at all if the winter is just going to 50F.
My understanding is that it still gets nice and frosty overnight out there sometimes...
Maybe one of these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_store#Greenhouses) suckers?
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I'm not really sure I'd call people who don't go out to cut their own trees for heat "lazy," given that the majority of people living in the US don't exactly have a forest's worth of timber on their properties. Also, some of us kind of like seeing trees kept where they are as much as possible. :p
Cutting down the trees is also only half of the work. It's also necessary to remove the branches and cut everything for storing and drying. It's a lot of work, and you need a lot of space to store the wood.
And it's very dangerous - forest workers have a hight count of deadly work accidents.
My last 3 Flats have all had an electrical heating... It's expensive and it's getting worse each year (because on the price of the electricity an additional tax for refunding of solar and wind energy is applied ), but the landlords like it.
They don't have to buy oil, maintenance cost are zero and if the tenant can't pay the energy company has the trouble, not the landlord.
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Used to live in Texas actually. So electrical, oil, gas, anything but wood. Nowadays though those might be too expensive so burning other consumables might work. It's not like the winters there are long anyway. At most 2 months I think.
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My understanding is that it still gets nice and frosty overnight out there sometimes...
Maybe one of these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_store#Greenhouses) suckers?
I guess an electric heater or something i guess.
Poor people with blast heaters will heat their houses (temporarily with them). The one cool thing i saw in alaska was someone with an insulated room dedicated to a wood stove. The heat was fed into one pipe near the ceilling via powerful box summer box fan. The piping went under the floor of the entirety of the house and heated the place very well. To keep the air current going, of course the pipe met back in on the other side of the wood stove room.
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I guess an electric heater or something i guess.
Poor people with blast heaters will heat their houses (temporarily with them). The one cool thing i saw in alaska was someone with an insulated room dedicated to a wood stove. The heat was fed into one pipe near the ceilling via powerful box summer box fan. The piping went under the floor of the entirety of the house and heated the place very well. To keep the air current going, of course the pipe met back in on the other side of the wood stove room.
If there is something we ought to sell to US and Canada that seems to be the heating systems, insulation techniques and materials for houses. It sounds like there is an actual need for it and you guys would be really surprised to see how well it works.
Our baking ovens use a similar kind of principle as above. However, the point is to store the heat into a relatively big central stone (the oven itself) and radiate it throughout the house. For floor warming, I'm not sure about the usage of air, is it because the temperature in the house is expected to drop below freezing point frequently?
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I guess an electric heater or something i guess.
Poor people with blast heaters will heat their houses (temporarily with them). The one cool thing i saw in alaska was someone with an insulated room dedicated to a wood stove. The heat was fed into one pipe near the ceilling via powerful box summer box fan. The piping went under the floor of the entirety of the house and heated the place very well. To keep the air current going, of course the pipe met back in on the other side of the wood stove room.
If there is something we ought to sell to US and Canada that seems to be the heating systems, insulation techniques and materials for houses. It sounds like there is an actual need for it and you guys would be really surprised to see how well it works.
Our baking ovens use a similar kind of principle as above. However, the point is to store the heat into a relatively big central stone (the oven itself) and radiate it throughout the house. For floor warming, I'm not sure about the usage of air, is it because the temperature in the house is expected to drop below freezing point frequently?
I can't speak for some parts of the US, but up here in New England, just about everybody knows how to insulate, or at least how to start (step one, talk to Jimmy who's got that infrared heat-loss detector), but a painfully large number of people can't get the cash together for the lump-sum sunk cost so they end up bleeding out piece by piece.
I've also seen systems set up that were conceptually similar to the alaskan wood-heat forced air system, but instead using copper water-piping coiled around a horizontal run of stovepipe, then running the water (which may or may not have included other additives, i.e. antifreeze) through a closed system that feeds through the house's cement floors. It took a bit to warm up, but it could get nice and toasty.
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Housing in Winnipeg needs to be insulated. Otherwise, you'd be dead from hypothermia when winter strolls by as you're sleeping
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Yeah, in the desert where it doesn't really get so cold during winter. You just use different sources of heating based on where you live. In southeast alaska where i'm from, most people just used wood. Interior alaska people had redundant sources of heating because of the long cold ass as **** winters. Do wood during the day, at night use heating oil, and having heating oil to rely upon when out of wood.
I'm assuming that desert is the arizona nevada area. You could probably get away with burning trash. But, you could probably also get away with no heating at all if the winter is just going to 50F.
having lived both places i can say deserts can get pretty cold at night right before sunrise. ive seen frost form nights and then have the day be triple digits. i dont think i ever lived anywhere of moderate temperature. either too ****ing hot or damn cold. id love to live somewhere that is 60 or 70 ish year round. the apartment i had when i last lived in phoenix was rather cold, of course that was winter and spring that i lived there. and it was small so i could just heat it by turning my oven up to 400 for a couple hours.
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Yeah, in the desert where it doesn't really get so cold during winter. You just use different sources of heating based on where you live. In southeast alaska where i'm from, most people just used wood. Interior alaska people had redundant sources of heating because of the long cold ass as **** winters. Do wood during the day, at night use heating oil, and having heating oil to rely upon when out of wood.
I'm assuming that desert is the arizona nevada area. You could probably get away with burning trash. But, you could probably also get away with no heating at all if the winter is just going to 50F.
having lived both places i can say deserts can get pretty cold at night right before sunrise. ive seen frost form nights and then have the day be triple digits. i dont think i ever lived anywhere of moderate temperature. either too ****ing hot or damn cold. id love to live somewhere that is 60 or 70 ish year round. the apartment i had when i last lived in phoenix was rather cold, of course that was winter and spring that i lived there. and it was small so i could just heat it by turning my oven up to 400 for a couple hours.
Ever thought about the Piedmont?
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I guess an electric heater or something i guess.
Poor people with blast heaters will heat their houses (temporarily with them). The one cool thing i saw in alaska was someone with an insulated room dedicated to a wood stove. The heat was fed into one pipe near the ceilling via powerful box summer box fan. The piping went under the floor of the entirety of the house and heated the place very well. To keep the air current going, of course the pipe met back in on the other side of the wood stove room.
If there is something we ought to sell to US and Canada that seems to be the heating systems, insulation techniques and materials for houses. It sounds like there is an actual need for it and you guys would be really surprised to see how well it works.
I suspect you'd find that construction standards where I live (Edmonton, AB) and those where you live are probably quite similar. Our house is heavily insulated, heated by a natural gas furnace (and I have a natural gas fireplace in the living room), and so heavily vapour-barriered that we actually have to run the furnace air circulator a couple times a week to exchange the air and manage humidity. Our house doesn't leak air all that readily.
It really depends where you are. Most major centres here have natural gas, and a lot of homes now have electric heating. Older areas (and less accessible ones, like Vancouver island, and the entire area north of the 60th parallel) tend to use oil/kerosene heating, while more rural/remote ones use wood heating.