heat
Cold Weather Energy Update
The process to upgrade our home for more comfortable, efficient winter living has been many years in development and will continue to develop as we refine the systems and our use of these systems. It has required a good deal of time and financial investment (which we’ll be paying for some time), but the efforts have been well worth meeting our goals: Use local, clean energy and far less of it; Increase the comfort of our home…
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…
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 [...]
Lower heating costs and smaller footprint for 09-10
The US Government Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration projects average household expenditures for space-heating fuels to be $960 this winter (October 1 to March 31), a decrease of $84, or eight percent, from last winter. This forecast principally reflects lower fuel prices combine with slightly milder weather (expected) than last winter. The largest expenditure [...]
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 [...]
Bear Bricks on Sale
Thanks to a super handy tip from one of our readers (thank you, Chris!), I just found out that Coastal Farm Supply is running a coupon price on a pallet of Bear Bricks for only $200 –that’s a $50 savings over the Mt. Scott Fuel price. But there’s a catch: the sale is only good [...]
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 [...]
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