Daytime:
Terrible pic - the glass is totally clean/clear but something about furnace glass that my camera won't see through? Anyway, this is a tiny little insert that I picked up new for $1000. Free shipping, too! At that price I didn't expect much, and sure enough it's a small firebox, I can just barely get a 4-hour burn out of it, and the fan isn't as quiet as I'd like. But while it's running it kicks out great heat and is plenty to hold the house on an average winter day. The room it's in will be 78+, and the rest of the floor at least 68. Have to work on more ways to move that air around - it's at one end of the house rather than the middle.
Did I mention it was only a thousand bucks?!?!
That's my wife's stove. Not making a sexist comment, just saying she made it very clear to me that she expected to decide when she wanted to be warm, and I said "yes, dear!" Happy wife, happy life...
Cheating a little on this photo because I didn't have one of my own. I can't remember who on this forum posted about these IKEA bags but whoever it was, I owe you a beer!
I use these for bringing firewood into the house. I got a 10-pack on eBay for like $15 and they're just awesome. They're rugged as heck, last a long time, waterproof (until you wear holes in them - but it keeps the snow from leaking as it melts), and they stack pretty well because they have structure. It's a full bag rather than one of those canvas "loops" so it keeps the mess in.
I can carry two at a time (one in each hand) and with two trips get basically a week's worth of firewood into the house and ready to go. I also use them for kindling - I have three bags of splitter scraps and misc. pine that I split very thin. I keep those in the basement and dole it out in handfuls as needed.
This baby is mine:
That's an Energy-Mate boiler, as near as I can tell built in the late 60's to early 70's - older than I am, anyway. It eats wood like crazy and also only gets 4-6 hours out of a burn. No secondaries so it's inefficient as all he** but it's about as reliable as a couple of chunks of decently-welded steel can be. 40+ years and still going strong. This thing takes half a wheel-barrow full of wood just to get up to temp. But the second load will bring the entire house (2300 sq. ft., terrible windows and insulation) from 60->70 on a 20-degree day.
How you outdoor-boiler folks do it, I don't know. I get that those things are great... but I'm pretty happy about being able to load this thing in a 60-degree basement in my shorts!
I keep about a week's worth of firewood in a bin - you can't see it because I'm standing IN that bin to take this pic.
I don't have storage hooked up yet. To the left of it is my mad-science "HotPi" project where I've built my own boiler controller and am working on adding a DIY-built storage tank and DHW coil to the setup shortly. One day I'd like to plumb solar into the same tank. It all runs over a 1-wire network and I have a Web app where I can see how the system's doing while I'm out, put it into cold-start mode, etc:
Last one:
That was my firewood stack, not quite done as of September. About 10 cords, and I don't expect to have any left by the end of winter. (Need to work on insulating this house better...) Yes, I'm a cover-the-top guy. I've never bought that argument that it seasons the same either way. Sure, it seasons "OK" if you don't cover it... Probably "just fine." But it can't possibly season "exactly as well". The math just doesn't work - the inside can't dry out until the outside does. Every rainstorm is SOME delay while that happens. Even if it dries in a few hours, that's a few hours less that it can season. Maybe it turns out to be a minor difference, I dunno, but I live in a fairly damp area in the woods and I'l take every HOUR I can get.
But I do it for another reason, too. This area gets a fair bit of sun (which is why the wood is there!) That sounds great for seasoning, but once the snow falls it's a little bit of a setback. The snow melts... but not all the way. If it gets down into the spaces between the rows it turns the whole thing into a huge block of ice... and that does NOT melt. Last year, in that "surprise, you thought it was May but it's still winter!" period we had, I had to use a maul to break the pile apart in an area where the tarp had blown off.
