solid fuel
Bear Brick Update
As posted on January 21, 2009, we’ve been using bear bricks as our sole source of wood fuel since that same day. In 22 days we have used 30 individual trays of bear bricks. that’s 360 total bricks, or approximately 1.3 trays per day. This is actually far less consumption than I would have guessed [...]
The Bear Brick Era Begins
Back on December 17, I published a post about my initial test of the manufactured wood fuel known as the Bear Brick. Here’s what I really liked about Bear Bricks: Relatively local, renewable fuel source, manufactured by Bear Mountain Forest Products in Cascade Locks, Oregon Produced using waste by-products: a mixture of douglas fir, cedar [...]
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 [...]
The Magical Energy Brick
Back on December 4, I wrote about the impressive North Idaho Energy Log. I’m still impressed with this tidy little compressed log, but I haven’t made the decision to purchase any additional logs beyond the samples I carted home on my Yuba Mundo utility bike. Instead, I stumbled upon a new fuel source to test: [...]
Home Heating: the Year in Review
Listed below is a quick snapshot of our family’s home heating fuel consumption and cost over the past year, minus the cost of electricity to power forced air fans in the furnace. As a reminder from past messages, we heat our home with two local fuel sources: B99.9 biodiesel made from Oregon-sourced recycled vegetable oil [...]
The Magical Energy Log
As I’ve posted here before, we’re heating our home this year by burning two fuels: Oregon-grown/harvested hardwood; and Oregon-sourced/refined B99 bio-diesel. Hardwood is fantastic but requires a good deal of splitting unless it’s aged at least one full calendar year, and even then it needs a very hot fire to burn effectively. In our specific [...]
Gauging Heating Energy Consumption
I’ve had a revelation as of recent, as it relates to energy consumption. I believe that part of the reason that people have a tendency to be less energy conscious than they may be otherwise is that we are sometimes insulated from the levels of our consumption. Yes, we get a bill from our utility [...]
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