biodiesel
Retrofitting for Wood Stove Heat
If you’re seeking to heat your entire home with wood, you would benefit most from a free-standing stove… A fireplace-inserted wood stove –like ours, which sits inside the fireplace, as opposed to in-front of it– will not effectively heat your whole house unless you have a centrally mounted fireplace and ensure that the insert is extending beyond the hearth…
Use Less, Savor More
This was a big week for the Towsey-French household as we not only completed the second phase of our heating system upgrade (the first phase occurring in 2007), but we also added a major insulating blanket directly above the majority of our primary living space. We hired a highly recommended firm, Air Tight Insulation, who [...]
Bear Bricks Back in Action
We’ve been burning bear bricks on and off for about two weeks now (mostly in the late evenings), so we were able to warm up most of the house to about 72 degrees today without ever tapping into our B100 biodiesel. This is fortunate because today is the day that we replace our furnace heater [...]
Energy & Heating Fuel Update
With Fall approaching fast, many of us who use liquid fuel for home heating are checking our fuel reserves. With the ever-volatile state of fuel prices, liquid fuel enables you to gamble on whether the cost will skyrocket or plummet before the heating season arrives. Next to football, this ‘fuel gamble’ continues to be my [...]
Spring Energy Update
The milder temperatures have certainly benefited us in helping reduce energy consumption the past couple of weeks. Regardless, we still want to make sure we have plenty of fuel on hand, so we made the decision to split a pallet of bear bricks with Keri’s dad, who also wanted to take advantage of those keen [...]
Home Heating Fuel Update
As posted on January 21, 2009, we’ve been using bear bricks as our preferred wood fuel since that same day. Since that date we’ve consumed 61 trays of bricks (12 two-pound bricks per tray). In 49 days we have used 732 total bricks, or approximately 1.24 trays (apx. 15 bricks) per day. As stated in [...]
Today’s Heating Fuel Prices
Listed here are today’s prices for home heating fuel delivered from our friends at Star Oil in Portland (Star is the distributor for Oregon-sourced and refined bio-diesel from Sequential Biofuels): #2 Oil (good-ole fashioned petroleum heating oil) 100 gallons: $1.92/gallon 200 gallons: $1.72/gallon B20 Bio-diesel (20% bio-diesel, made almost exclusively from waste veggie oil collected [...]
Stretching Our Fuel Reserves
After busting through a boatload of firewood during the super-cold temperatures we experienced from December 13 through the Christmas holiday, I checked the level on our B99 biodiesel tank and the gauge is sitting just below the 7/8 marker. This means we’ve got well over 215 gallons of delicious recycled veggie oil fuel remaining. Burning [...]
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