The Great Freeze of 2022

 The Christmas weekend Siberian Express dropped morning lows to single digits where I am (6 and 8 on two different mornings, plus daytime highs in the 20s for a couple of days).  My animal housing is not particularly robust against cold.  The chicken tractor design  that I used (based on Justin Rhodes' plans) is open in the front, and my rabbit hutch is very open: again, the emphasis in the design is on keeping them cool, not warm.

If it routinely got this cold--particularly with wind--I'd have the rabbits in an open shed, probably, where tarps could easily be draped across the front to block the wind.  And the chickens would probably have a coop they could be closed up in.

As it was, all of the animals made it through okay.  Everyone's water froze repeatedly.

On the coldest day, even the water I put out mid-morning froze by afternoon.  So I kept swapping out crocks for the rabbits and waterers for the chickens.  After the first couple of days, the highs started going back above freezing again and the daytime water wouldn't freeze.

None of the animals exhibited any distress; all behaved pretty normally.  No frostbite on the rabbits' ears, although the roosters had a touch of frostbite on their combs (note the last two spikes in the picture below).

I was able to keep the house habitable with the wood stove, but it struggled to warm it up the first morning (the storm blew in early morning on a Friday, and Saturday morning was the six-degree low). The house was in the upper 40s Saturday morning, and the stove took most of the day to get it warmed up into the normal range.  Fortunately, I was able to be home to tend it. 

I'm glad it's not routinely like this.

Stove Season is Here

 My last fire in the wood stove last spring was about the third week of April, though I didn't use it daily past early March.  That was substantially later (by about six weeks) than previous years.  Similarly, the stove season this fall is kicking off a little earlier than in the past.  Previously I haven't used the stove before the first week of November, but a week early, it was easy to see that things were heading in the direction of cooler weather.

I have a soapstone stove:

Allegedly, the soapstone is denser than firebrick and provides a flatter heat curve--the stove top won't get as hot, but it will stay warm longer.  Now that I am starting my third year with it, I'm not sure it offers much advantage--though it is true that it doesn't get as hot as a basic cast iron or steel stove with firebrick. My stove top temperature usually runs about 350, and I don't think it has ever been above about 450.  Nonetheless, when the chimney has been swept, it has been clean.  And as can be seen in the picture above, it's burning pretty clean, too.  The interior might get sooted up at some point with every burn, but then it always clears away.  Soapstone is at least more attractive than firebrick.

One of its idiosyncrasies is that the manual recommends at least one break-in fire, with just a few relatively small sticks, to gently heat the soapstone and help purge any moisture that may have accumulated in the off season.  So I did that this last week, with two relatively small burns on successive days.

They put out a little heat, but not much, and the stove top got to around 100-110, which is the target ("warm, not hot").  I didn't keep feeding them, and both died down fairly quickly.  The house was in the mid-70s at the time, so I didn't really need heat.  The first real fire came a couple of days later, when the house was lingering in the upper 60s, slowly drifting down, with a series of cool cloudy days that offered no prospect for solar warming.

It's wood-burning time again.

The Miracle of Bark

My wood stove setup is not the greatest.  The stove itself is nice: it's a Hearthstone Shelburne and can keep my 1400 square foot house reasonably warm in Georgia.  As the picture in this post shows, the chimney is not very tall.  It's about 12 feet at best.  It's apparent that it doesn't draw strongly.  Once the fire is roaring, it draws in enough air and burns well.

Sometimes when it doesn't seem to getting off to a very fast start, I throw in some bark.  Much of my firewood is oak, and the bark usually detaches as it dries.  A lot of hardwoods are that way.  It burns extremely well.  It very reliably improves the burn.

 In the picture above, the intensely burning area is a few small slabs of bark, with a sweetgum log on top.

This is a closer view.  Oak bark does not burn for long, but it's not a flash in the pan.  It burns long enough to get split wood (or an unsplit small piece) burning aggressively.  Throwing several sheets of bark into the stove at once heats the stove up to about 400 fairly readily (stove top temperature).  Although 400 might seem low, the max is about 600 and soapstone stoves seldom get above about 350-400).

Bark also functions well as kindling.

All of this may sound counter-intuitive, and some people dismiss it as being useful, because bark resists flame.  This is definitely true for small pieces that I throw into the stove with bark intact: the fire has to be going somewhat well for that to work.  It takes a few minutes to burn through the bark and get to the wood underneath.  However, when off the original wood (split or otherwise), the bark by itself does burn well.  Contrary to what a lot of people have indicated, I haven't noticed that it leaves more ash. It may...but I never use enough for that to be apparent.  I have never fed a fire nothing but bark, although I have enough of it that it could be done.

Oaks have good bark and some other hardwoods do.  Wood like cherry and peach has very little usable bark, but it burns okay, too; it's just paper-thin.  Southern pines don't have too much bark to them, and it often doesn't seem to separate, but western pines sometimes do: ponderosa pines can have very thick bark, and very old douglas firs can have bark up to 14 inches thick (though trees of that size aren't likely to be often used for firewood).

Bark works.  It's a reliable go-to.

Wood cutting

This is not an area where I can claim much expertise, but I have found a few things that work.  I have a wood-burning stove, and have wood from a variety of sources:  fallen dead trees, trees cut down because they're too close to the house or have other issues, and trees (usually dead) cut down by the power company because they are close to power lines.  The latter are usually cut into fireplace- or stove-length logs for me, but the others are very long and need to be sectioned.

 Shown above (the one on the left) is a tree that was leaning over the house last spring.  It was damaged in an ice storm, developing a crack in the main trunk, so I wanted to pull it down in a controlled way rather than risk having it break apart in a storm and fall on the house. So I asked someone to help me get it onto the ground.

Once it was down, it was as shown below.

 

It wasn't terribly large in diameter, but was pretty long and was blocking the area where I normally park, so it had to be cut up.  Below is a view from the other end.

It could be cut up with a manual saw, like a bow saw that can be bought at any hardware store.  However, it would take a lot of time and probably be pretty fatiguing to cut up that much oak by hand.  I used a chainsaw.  Since I don't use the saw very often, I have a battery-powered one (so I don't have to mess with 2-stroke engines, fuel stabilization, etc.).  Battery-powered saws are also a lot quieter.  Nice ones are made by Stihl, Husqvarna, Oregon, and others.

First I cut off most of the smaller limbs then began making cuts to the trunk, using cubits as a rough guide to length (my stove will take 20" logs).  Eventually I had just a long section of trunk and used a timber jack to lever it up off the ground for remaining cuts (I got mine at Northern Tool).

 

Timber jacks are easy to use.  Just set the hook, pull the lever toward the ground, and the trunk--even a very heavy one like this water oak--pivots up.  It starts to get harder to do as the remaining amount of trunk is reduced; eventually, some other support will be needed to do the last cut (like a saw horse or two concrete blocks).

The finished result (with some unrelated pine logs in front) is shown below.  It took less than an hour to cut the tree up (and as can be seen, the interior of the trunk was rotting).

From this point, to make firewood, the larger logs need to be split--using a gas-powered splitter, wedge and maul, axe, or other method.