Stack effect

I had been frustrated recently by the fact that even after our rather assiduous insulation efforts, this old house was still not keeping heat as well as I would like it to this winter.

The evidence for this is in the firewood pile, which has been going away just as fast as it usually does. I want to slow this combustion down.

So I went on a mission, before the Superbowl, to seal up air gaps. One of the items I teach is how to calculate building heat load, and so am very familiar with the general injunction to fix the building envelope first, then do the insulation. But when we went through this house, before we moved in, we did new drywall all around, placed new foam board insulation under the new drywall, and put in new windows all around, so I had always thought that the place was about as tight as I should get it. There were a couple air leaks I knew about, but you shouldn't make a house heated by wood too tight.

Well, I was wrong. The remaining air leaks were large, and now I fixed them it's a lot more comfortable in this place.

I started with a window that had a saggy vinyl frame on one side. I put in shims and closed the gap. Then I caulked up a couple of cracks in our two old kitchen doors.

Next I switched to insulation. The cellar-head space, which is also the space behind the stairs, had never been insulated, although the cellar ceiling had R 19 fiberglass I put in three years ago to keep the downstairs floor warm. I put R 19 below the staircase and on one wall and watched the inside temperature of that wall, measured with the laser thermometer, climb from 59 F to 65 F. I need a bit more R 19 to finish the job. I think I may detail it with foam board over the glass, too, so the R 19 can't sag.

Then I put clear caulk on the gaps between the stair treads and the wall, preventing cold air coming up from the cellar this way. Standing on the second or third step of the cellar stairs, I saw light through a big gap under the cellar door threshold. Some spray foam took care of that.

Finally, standing over the floor vents for the old forced air oil furnace, I could feel cold air gently rising. I measured the temperature of this air at 47 F. Each vent is about a square foot of air gap! I knew that this mostly disused furnace was a source of cold air, but I never realized quite how much.

Aimee had some magnetic plastic stick-on sheets for keeping dog hair out of the vents in the summer. I went to get these and covered up all but one cold air return and two of the smaller vents.

The combination of these treatments, but especially the vent closing, was impressive. Almost immediately the downstairs began to climb from a stable 65 F to 70 F.

This is the 'stack effect" where hot air escaping though the chimneys and any cracks and gaps at the top of the house draws cold air in from below, in this case through the furnace. It also helps to explain why turning the furnace on for just ten minutes makes such a big difference to the comfort level in the house.

I would like to shut off all the durn furnace vents, but I'm worried that the basement will get too isolated from the rest of the house if I do that. We have a propane hot water tank and a lot of water pipes down there, and the more sealing and insulation I put between the main house and the basement, the less protected they are. I also have air ducts serving the basement itself, and I don't think I can stop using them.

The basement is cold. It's the dead of winter and old man frost has reached into the ground about as far as he will go. The basement walls, which are crude masonry and concrete, read from 23 F in the coldest spot, up high, where there's no soil protection, to 39 F in the warmest, down below. The air temperature is steady at about 35 F. Any air in those basement duct work is going to be chilled down. And if the stack effect means air is drawn through the duct work even when the furnace is not operating, that will just make things worse. The propane burner heats up the place where all the pipes are, which helps a good deal, and the pipes themselves are copper and conduct heat away from the propane tank nicely, but 35 F is still marginal.

When I reorganized the forced air vents to the kitchen, where we knocked two small rooms into one big room, I had a forced air duct left over, and I made a "Y" out of this, playing one jet on the basement water pipes, and the other into the crawl space under the kitchen floor where there are more pipes.

The result is that the forced air furnace is now a kind of fail-safe back-up to keep the pipes from freezing. So I can't close off those remaining three floor vents.

Not without putting some other source of heat in both places. Or insulating the whole thing with Core-Bond or similar. I'm not sure I want to do either because we use the basement as a root cellar.

I'll figure something out. The furnace will die of old age, probably, and I'll tear the stupid ducts out and put in some other kind of furnace system. The insurance company will require us to have a furnace, so I can't just not have one. Probably I'll run Pex hot water tubing under the floorboards and above the R 19, from a second, smaller propane tank, and so have underfloor heat. That will make Aimee, who likes to go barefoot, very happy.

In the meantime, I'm pleased with the results of my labors. I was able to shut down the big wood furnace three hours earlier than normal, while we watched the game in perfect comfort with the whole house heated to 72 F by the 20,000 BTU kitchen wood stove and a small electrical heater. And the oil furnace didn't kick in at 4 am like it normally does when it's cold out. The outside temp was 10 F, which is a bit warmer than it has been, but still pretty cold.

It just goes to show, you can never get too detailed about building envelope and penetration. Every gap counts.

In the bleak midwinter...

We had a few days after the end of term and before our regular road trip to Virginia to see Aimee's parents, and during that time I went over and over my to-do list of pre trip preparations, so our house-sitter Marsha would have an easy time of things. I checked over all the household systems again and again, brought down feed for the sheep, filled all the water containers, and generally obsessed compulsively in order that we might have a good trip without worries. Aimee did much the same, and in the end we left poor Marsha with a veritable dissertation of instructions, running to three pages, single- spaced, with email addenda.

It was all for nothing. A storm blew up a day and a half after we left which cut power to the house. Marsha was asleep at the time and so didn't notice. When she awoke, the oil furnace was out and wouldn't re-start, leaving an eight-foot 115 V baseboard heater next to the living room windows as the only heat in the house. She emailed to us down in Virginia, and waited, the house getting colder, for us to respond.

Eventually we did of course check our email, by which time it was 55 degrees F in the house, and certainly cold enough outside to freeze pipes. We called right away and, after running through some furnace trouble-shooting procedures over the phone unsuccessfully, gave instead verbal instructions for using the wood stove.

Wood stoves are tricky, and unless you've used one before, indeed, unless you've had lots of practice in using one, you may not be able to make it work for you very easily, which is why we have our house-sitters use the oil furnace instead. It's one less thing for us to worry about while we're away.

But needs must. I walked Marsha through the lighting process, step-by-step, and gave tips on what to expect from each shape, size and type of log. There followed a few anxious hours during which we waited to make sure she was getting the hang of it. We were pleased to see that she managed quite well and when we next called back, the house was up to 65 degrees F. We breathed a big sigh of relief. The pipes at least were saved.

There was also the small matter of one or another of the ewes having somehow walked off with one of the two water tank heaters accidentally attached, cutting heat to one of the two water tubs. The tank heater was nowhere to be found, the sheep having hidden it carefully in the snow. This meant the sheep would run out of water in  a day or two.

Then we saw the weather reports: giant winter storm "Euclid" was barreling across the southern states with torrential rain and tornadoes and would become a nor'easter if it followed the predicted trajectory. (Apparently winter storms have names now, just like hurricanes. I'm not sure this is a necessary elaboration.)

That was enough for us, on top of the furnace and animal woes. Christmas would have to be cut short this year.

Aimee's family were good enough to reprogram their entire holiday, and so we had Christmas dinner and present-opening on Christmas Eve, and by 8.30 am on Christmas Day Aimee and I were back in the Camry heading for points north, Euclid thundering along about 24 hours behind us.

We had good weather for driving ahead of the storm, and slowed only by fog in Virginia, had our own Christmas dinner in a south Indian restaurant somewhere north of Hartford, Connecticut, and bedded down comfortably in a Baymont Inn for the night. By 1pm the next day we were home.

At home things were fine. Marsha had it up to a toasty 68 F in the house, and the stove was burning brightly. She gets the official 2012 Learned to Use a Wood Stove in the Shortest Time Award. But then being cold concentrates the mind, I find. You'll do anything to get warm again.

We quickly sorted the animals and a supply of firewood for the coming storm. The tank heater had resurfaced and Martha reconnected it, so all we had to do was top off the tubs. I then repeated the immediate fault diagnosis for the furnace, resetting the programmable thermostat, then pressing the red reset button on the primary control, all to no avail.

What was wrong with the furnace? This is admittedly an older unit, circa 1987, but it sees so little use that we assume it needs little maintenance. It hasn't been run for more than a few tens of hours a year since we got (mostly) done with our giant insulation and air sealing project a few years ago. In that time we've burned only about 70 gallons of oil. The house is now so well insulated, we can keep it nicely warm with the wood stove and a small electrical heater, and so the only time we use the oil furnace is when we have a house-sitter, or when the wood stove goes out while we're away for the day, and we want to rewarm the house quickly.

The next day, as so-called Euclid was raging all around us, I went online and pulled the various manuals and perused the DIY blogs and videos to get good information to run through a deeper inspection/fault diagnosis process. I'd never worked on a furnace before, and wanted to learn as much as I could from the experience.

I removed the whole burner unit and took it upstairs to my workbench to get a better look at things. Back in the basement with a flashlight, the first thing I noticed was that the small anteroom to the combustion chamber where the burner tube sits was filthy, full of soot and debris, so I vacuumed that out with the shop vac, recovering a good two pounds of soot and burned dust. I examined the main filter and fuel pump screen and found both to be dirty. I pulled the burner nozzle and decided to change that too.

That was as much as I could get done because the heating firm with the parts store is, of course, several miles away and the storm would hit overnight. Hoping to salvage a little Christmas spirit, I made mince pies and fed the wood stove and gave the sheep extra hay. Aimee started a jigsaw puzzle and we watched TV in the warm as the storm blew up.

The next day we had a winter wonderland in the dooryard.

Only about eight inches of snow, not such a large storm really, but some blowing and drifting had piled up larger drifts here and there. The sheep were nice and warm in the barn, but to judge by the layer of snow on their backs, some had even slept outside! Sheep don't really care too much about storms.

I did experience that signature Maine moment where you try to open your front door but can't because of a snow drift, but the town plow had been up the road and so we weren't by any stretch of the imagination "snowed in." I got busy with the Kubota tractor and soon had the driveway clear and the various vehicles shoveled off.

The firewood pile is getting low, and so we'll need to get a little more in, but what we have is nice and dry, good quality ash from our own land. There's another three rows behind this one, enough to take us through February. I'll find another cord of dry somewhere on Uncle Henry's or Maine Craig's List.

I used the Land Rover to get to the parts store, but even that wasn't really necessary. The roads were fairly clear by 10 am.

I bought a new filter, screen nozzle and main gasket and came back and fitted them and put the whole thing back together and bled the system, but it still wouldn't light. Back to the parts store again with the electrode/nozzle unit, to have the electrodes checked. They were fine, so I bought home a new primary control. That didn't do the trick either. Finally, after checking for spark across the springs, I realized the igniter transformer was fried. And of course, thinking back, that should perhaps have been the first thing I checked, because, well, there was a power cut, followed by (I found out later from the parts guy) a power surge as the power came back on. More than enough to fry a 25 year-old transformer that's been kept in a damp basement.

One last quick trip to the parts store, a last flurry of parts-fitting and wiring, and the machine fired up. It burned a little wild to begin, of course, because the combustion chamber was filled with unburned fuel, but soon settled down.

I don't mind that I bought all those extra parts. If you think about it, now we have a fully-serviced oil furnace, with brand new wiring and electronics. Not a moment too soon, because it's supposed to get down to - 10 degrees F next week at night (- 24 degrees Celsius).

The furnace should now be good for several more years of use. Indeed, I think the only thing that will kill this old system is the rust. the basement is damp and the sheet metal housing is rusting.

What would be nice now would be to get a secondhand unit from a retrofit job somewhere with a dryer basement and switch out all the rusty panels.

I think we dealt with all these emergencies rather well, even if I do say so myself. Thinking ahead, we had good back-up plans for home heat, and, of course, a sturdy and clever lass for a house sitter who could rise to the occasion. We kept up with the weather forecast and so were able to dodge the storm. And we had good skills to fall back on for fixing the furnace.

All's well that ends well.

Just another winter on the farm.

Chris­ti­na Ros­set­ti, 1872, 

In the Bleak Midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

British thermal units

Americans, paradoxically, still use the BTU as the standard unit for quantity of heat energy. While Britons have shifted to the therm and the Joule and the watt, all pukka System Internationale units and much more decimal and scientific and reasoned.

Around here, I think the proper definition of a British thermal unit must be when the Englishman puts a good big log on the wood stove or the wood furnace! We use about 30 of these high value BTUs a day when it's this cold.

Actually, in terms of the real, ordinary kind of BTUs, we have a 20,000 BTU wood stove, an 80,000 BTU wood furnace, a 1,500 watt electric oil-filled space heater, and to cap it all a 175,000 BTU oil furnace, all working together right now.

And it's still cold.

OK. Admittedly, it won't stay that way for long. It's already getting better fast. I just upped the thermostat on the oil furnace to make up for the fact that the wood stove took a while to get going this morning. That furnace is a very powerful beast, and won't take long to make up the difference.

Oil. A fossil fuel. Bad man.

But it was only 59 F where I sit, and Mary, a very spoiled hound-dog, who hates the cold, was wimpering at me from the couch a few feet away, asking me to turn up the heat.

I couldn't very well refuse, could I?

I think I shall require a good cooked breakfast today. Some grease for the wheel. Sausage, or bacon, maybe, instead of my usual oatmeal.

Wish I had some black pudding. That would get the old gut-furnace rumbling, wouldn't it?

Now that's what I call a British thermal unit. Pork fat and pig's blood sausage. Americans won't touch it, but they don't know what they're missing.

Cold

The weather earlier this holiday week may have been warm enough that I could strip down our small tractor and weld part of the sub-frame on Sunday and get it all back together on Monday, but that situation changed with a vengeance yesterday, as an arctic front swept in.

This year's winter weather in Maine is controlled by a substantial La Nina episode in the Pacific, and it's interesting to follow the jet stream pattern that results. After several weeks of being on the safe, warm side of this atmospheric phenomenon, we've slipped to the other side, and the wicked witch of the north now has us firmly in her grasp. I tried to finish up a few small tasks on the tractor yesterday, but was quickly rewarded with frozen fingers, and had to abandon the last fiddliest job of fitting a split pin (AKA cotter pin in American) to the kingpin.

Instead I came indoors for a very welcome cup of hot coffee.

This morning it's zero degrees F out there, which is minus eighteen degrees C. That isn't too cold for Maine, but it is unpleasant to be outside, and has me worried about frozen pipes.

All proper Maine husbands need to worry about pipes.

In our case, the cellar and crawl spaces where all our pipes are located are heated by the exhaust vent from our propane hot water tank, and by the wood stove which radiates directly to the floor on the underside of which the pipes are attached. I used to heat both cellar and crawl space directly with a special vent tapped from the forced air oil furnace, but I disconnected this vent this fall when I sealed the furnace system and insulated all the ducts. The furnace went unused 95 percent of the time, and the leaky ducts, and especially that cellar vent, ensured that this system became the greatest source of cold air infiltration to the house. The wood stove would suck essentially suck cold combustion air up from the basement through the duct work, making the house feel drafty and uncomfortable. By discontinuing the cellar heating, and sealing and insulating the duct work, most of the remaining cold air infiltration was cut off, but I was worried that the pipes might not get enough heat.

It seems I shouldn't have worried.

The prime result is, we were able to quit using the large outside wood furnace. All we have heating this home right now, even while it's zero degrees F outside, is about 40,000 BTUs/hour of wood heat from an 80,000 BTU/hour Norwegian wood stove running at about half capacity, and a 1.5 KW oil-filled electric heater running at two thirds capacity. I doubt we'll use even three cords of wood this year, when we have about five on hand, and usually use about four.

That's only 43,000 BTUs/hour total, when the degree days needed are something like 100, and a massive victory for energy efficiency. In earlier posts, I was worried about the outside wood furnace, and how we would be able to afford to replace a faulty chimney, but it seems like I don't need to worry. We could even sell that furnace off.

Or, more likely, save it to use for heating the new workshop building we have planned.

A cold week

Photo: Aimee helping our chickadees survive the cold. These birds are part of the infamous 47%, but they don't cost that much to maintain.

The weather in this part of Maine has been pretty cold since the beginning of the week, thanks to a big bulge of Canadian air.

Heating systems need to work and work well when it's this cold.

Our Post Office lady was complaining yesterday of frozen pipes. Not good. This is an elderly lady, probably around 65 years old or more. I don't know if she has a husband and have never asked, but I feel badly for her if she has to battle frozen pipes with or without a partner.

There have also been a lot of nasty house fires reported on the news. One family of five lost four to the flames in a town just across the Penobscot River from here. The only survivor was the mother. I have no idea what that kind of loss could do to a person, and don't wish to find out, so I've been checking smoke alarm batteries even more regularly than usual.

Another farm lost its barn and chickens to a heat lamp fire. Our chickens might like some heat, but I'm afraid they will have to suffer through without. I'm not risking a barn fire. When the lambs come, they will have to have heat lamps, but we'll check and double check them several times a day.

Another good reason to delay lambing in Maine until April -- to minimize the risk of barn fire from heat lamps.

We've been using oil heat ourselves to heat the Womerlippi farmhouse, which is a pretty good sign of a cold snap. We don't use much of it -- the sight gauge on our oil tank has barely budged since the last time we put any oil in three years ago -- but it helps to keep us sane when we know we can leave the house to go to work and the pipes won't freeze. We continue to use our wood stove and the electrical baseboard heater in our living room, to minimize the oil use and thus the greenhouse gas emissions, but the furnace will come on if the temperature in the house drops below 62 degrees F. And if we come home from work and the house is at 62 degrees F because the fire in the wood stove has died down, we can use the oil furnace to heat everything back up a little faster.

I dislike our central heating system. Not only does it burn oil, but it's also a forced air system, and in a house with two dogs and two cats and a wood stove, that makes for a lot of dust. It's also noisy. So it was with relief that, as the cold snap began to moderate yesterday, I turned it all off, and we've done without since.

In years gone by, we'd have used the large outside wood-fired furnace in the garage, also a forced air system, whenever it was this cold out, but I haven't wanted to use that since the new chimney was found damaged from corrosion two years ago -- the result of crappy work from a local contractor and crappy materials from a national-level supplier.

I never got around to repairing the garage chimney, mostly because this huge machine uses too much wood. It does a great job of heating the house even when it's cold outside, and runs for much longer than the kitchen wood stove without needing to be filled, but it doesn't really help protect the pipes very much, since the air registers are in the wrong place for that, and it doubles or triples our firewood consumption for the year.

We began instead leaving a small electrical heater on much of the time when the weather was cold last year or the year before, and realized after a while that the extra electricity bill from that, around three or four hundred dollars a year, was much less than the six or seven hundred dollars of firewood the large furnace would blow through, even if it was only used for the coldest weather. This electrical heater, which is now a higher quality 115 volt, American-construction baseboard type, since the several Chinese-made oil-filled heaters we previously tried have all failed, sits next to the living room couch where we normally sit. This couch is fully thirty feet and around a corner from the kitchen wood stove. The baseboard puts the heat exactly where we need it, for about a hundred dollars a month if left on all the time.

We'll reuse that outdoor furnace in one or the other of the new buildings we have planned.

Another difficulty has been knowing exactly how cold it is outside. I managed to break our outside thermometer somehow, and replaced it with a cheap hardware store dial thermometer. Some time afterwards I realized that the new thermometer wasn't reading the right temperature, so I went back to the hardware store for another one, and installed them side by side, just to see if I was correct.

 

This confused me even more, since the replacement thermometer read a few degrees differently than the old one, but was still incorrect. It took me a while to figure this out. When the photo above was taken, the actual outside temperature was closer to zero degrees F. You really need to know what the temperature is outside, so you can know when to turn heating systems on or off to protect pipes.

Last year Aimee was sent to the hardware store for greenhouse thermometers and returned with these small electronic ones, so I went out to salvage these, and installed one in our kitchen window. It seems to be working. 

It didn't help any, in this game of Maine winter survival, that late last year I switched out our hot water tank for a tankless heater. The hot water tank, which used to live in the basement, was a supply of heat to the pipes down there. The tankless heater doesn't provide any heat unless the hot water taps are running, and so it doesn't protect the pipes at all when we're not here. I put a heat lamp down there instead, on a thermostatic socket adapter. When the heat lamp is plugged in to the switch, it comes on at 35 degrees F, and doesn't go out until 45 degrees. The socket adapter is less than ideal in this sense, because you can't control the temperature at which it turns on or off, but it adds protection. I also added a good deal of insulation and sealed up a lot of cracks in our basement, making it much warmer in the area where the pipes are.

All this, just because I changed the kind of hot water heater we were using! 

You really need to be on the game, technologically speaking, to survive a Maine winter comfortably. But even then there's an element of luck. Any of these carefully maintained and serviced systems could fail at any time, indeed, as our furnace failed earlier this winter, and cause a fire or frozen pipes.

I feel sorry for our Post Office lady with frozen pipes, and for the people that are having house fires.

But it's kind of fun to sit here in the warmth and read these old diary entries about all the effort we've put into to making this old farmhouse stay warm over the years.

Here's a selection:

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "cold."

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "furnace."

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "snow."

More experiments with air flow

Aimee has been a little perturbed the last few days as I experiment even more with my air circulation problems, causing the temperature to fluctuate wildly in the house.

First I dug out some old rugs and tried covering up more of those forced air vents temporarily. In this stage, I left the oil heater on, mostly because I was worried about the pipes in the basement. This is of course dangerous since the big blower can run and not be able to move air, making the plenum run hot. But the thermostat was set fairly low, at 60 F, and I told myself I would know soon enough if the temperature dropped so much in the house that the heat would kick in. I kicked the rugs aside every night before bed and before going to work. Then we ran the house on the kitchen wood stove and a single electric heater only.

So far so good. At about 15-20 F outside, with the kitchen stove going at about a quarter of its output, and one 1500 W heater on full, we can keep all 1,250 square feet at 65 degrees. But only just. The thermometer was rock-steady at 65 F.

I wasn't happy with this. You need a less marginal solution, and in this case, if the air outside was colder or windier, you'd need more heat. The wood stove stack was running at about 200 F, and you can get it up to 400 F and keep it there easily enough, so we can get more heat. But you need to stoke that stove every hour to keep it at 400 F of stack temp.

I felt that this wasn't good enough yet.

It was as I was kicking the first rug aside the other morning, that I felt the increased strength of the airflow through the vent. This is with all but one other vent covered up. I measured it with a hand held anemometer at 0.5 m/s, or roughly 1.5 feet/second. The vent is a bit less than a square foot, So we're getting around 60 cfm through just one vent!

That did it! That old forced air furnace is making us cold, not warm! I covered all the vents except the one next to the kitchen wood stove, where the air leakage is a source of useful combustion air. I turned the oil heat off completely, and I started up the outside wood furnace again.

Now the house is holding heat nicely. The temperature didn't drop below 60 F last night.

And we can also get the temperature in the house to climb nicely, by running the outside wood furnace in the evenings. I had been hoping to do without this beast because it eats wood, and I probably can when the outside weather warms up another 10F. But I need it for now.

But having it run just in the evening is much better than what we were doing previously before I covered all these vents, which was running it all day and also keeping the oil furnace at 60F in the background.

It's funny how long it's taken me to figure out this airflow thing. I have been concentrating on the building envelope and the insulation, not the interior airflow. But the truth seems to be that the basement acts as a giant air-conditioner, taking warm air from the inside, cooling it down, and then releasing it back to the inside in a continuous flow. There's probably also some fresh air leaking in through the plenum or ducts.

And this is cold, cold air, blasting through our house at at least 60 cfm, and probably twice or thrice that much. Some of it is still coming in, of course, but only right next to the kitchen stove where it gets sucked in for combustion air, and goes right up the chimney.

Much better. And the oil furnace can stay off, except when we want it on, when we're in a hurry to keep the house warm, or when we're not hear and it's cold enough to worry about the pipes.

This weekend I will nail this down fully, with the anemometer and possibly some joss stick smoke tests. I will also send Aimee out to buy some more rugs.

Burning season

It's going to be 10 degrees F tonight.

Time to burn s..t.

I finally gave up and fired up the furnaces. We have an oil forced air furnace, a wood stove, and a wood furnace. We'd been doing OK this fall with just the wood stove, but it lives in the kitchen and is 30 feet and around a 90 degree bend from my usual seat on the left hand side of the couch, which also happens to be right next to Aimee's cat door, visible to the left of the TV.

The freaking cat door leaks air, but herself banned its removal for the first part of the winter. The cats' excursions take priority over my comfort, it seems.

It was 55 degrees in that corner when I came home from work today. It didn't get much above 59 there last night.

Poor old duffer, freezing his ass to let the cats have their day out.

Alright then. As long as they kill the mice that would otherwise eat the roots in the cellar.

So I fired up the oil furnace for ten minutes to take off the chill, while getting a fire going in the wood furnace, and opening up the wood stove full blast.

Haggis is getting the benefit. And you can tell Aimee is toasty because she's not covered with her blankey.

I like the orange glow from the two wood burners. It makes me feel all pleistocene.

Awesome. Burn! Burn!

Snowyness and coldness

Here's a snap I took yesterday of one of our local Amish "schoolbus" adaptions. This one, a "four door" model made of plywood and two by fours and plastic over a cart chassis, was spotted in a very gloomy snowstorm, just ready to turn right on the busy highway from Knox to Unity.

Spotted just in time, I might add.

After it made the turn, several modern four-wheel drive vehicles barreling through the snow on said highway were of course forced to slow to a one-horsepower pace quite abruptly. We've become used to such things in Unity, but I was glad I saw the horse prints in the snow before I saw the vehicle itself, and doubly glad I was driving the four-wheel drive truck, not one of the cars. Had I been coming down Ward Hill in a car without snow tires and not seen this contraption until the last minute, I might have been faced with a choice of the ditch or hitting the thing.

Having been around the Amish on and off for many years now, I long ago lost any propensity to romanticize their way of life. They do some very smart things, and some very silly things, for the sake of religious doctrine. Sending kids off to school in blinding snowstorms in rickety old horse carts might be admirable fortitude and independence from the military-industrial complex, if done only on quiet back roads!

It's only a matter of time on Route 137, I'm afraid to say.

There's a whole industry of romanticizing the Amish in America, with knick-knacks and "Belva Plain" novels and other tat sold by "English" businesses, although sometimes the Amish are themselves involved. I'm immune to this stuff, and so is Aimee, although we do buy Amish and Mennonite food stuffs when the prices are not inflated by tourists. Rarely do the romanticizers and profiteers mention the mounting road deaths that the Amish suffer in their attempts to live their old-fashioned lifestyle side-by-side with the "English."

In other news, we just had about 8 inches of rain Sunday and Monday and the basement flooded, but then the jet stream took a very rare meander to the northwest, and a tongue of very cold Canadian air slopped over the mid-west and licked all the way down into Maine.

It was only supposed to get to 10 F (-12 C) last night, but when I looked at the outside thermometer this morning it was 0 F (- 17 C).

I thought it was a little snappy when I stepped out to let Haggis piddle.

Actually, what was the dead giveaway was that the trees were popping. They only do that when it gets below zero.

That means it was pretty cold in the house this morning, about 58 F, because I haven't been running the oil heat. Instead, cheap bugger that I am, I'm running some trash wood though the outside wood furnace. This was almost my downfall, since when I ran the tap for my morning coffee water, it ran very slowly to begin, a good sign of icing. The kitchen pipes live in a crawl space that has it's own small hot air duct from the oil furnace, just for the sake of the pipes. They're also routed right under the wood stove, and the floor isn't insulated at all. When the wood stove is flat out, that floor is 80 - 90 F inside, and easily 50-60 F underneath, so as long as the stove is running, the pipes can't freeze.

If in doubt that the wood stove will keep running hot enough overnight, or if you leave for any length of time, you turn on the oil heat.

But I only turn the oil heat on when I'm expecting very cold weather overnight. I wasn't expecting such very cold weather last night.

I have the stove cranked now, as well as the outside furnace and the little electrical heater that sits by my armchair. We'll be fine. But I'll be more careful next time.

Last news is, we're done with the semester Friday. I got done teaching the day before yesterday and am walking around in the drifty rosy glow that comes of having had a nice nap Tuesday afternoon, ten hours' sleep Tuesday night and nine hours' sleep Wednesday night.

How much easier and pleasant it is, to work an 8am to 5pm shift, than a 5am to 3.30pm one?

(5am, or sometimes 4am is when I generally start work if I'm teaching classes at 8am. I get my correspondence out of the way before I leave the house, get to my classroom by 7am, or 7.30am, and then do an hour of prep.)

Who knew? I've got 8am classes next semester too, but only three days a week, not five.

Stayin' Warm?

Zero degrees again. the goose egg.

Stayin' warm? That's what Mainers ask each other this time of year, when they meet neighbors and friends at the post office, the hardware store, or the Brooks "general." The standard greeting.

If you are not "stayin' warm" then that's a very big problem. Something went wrong with your efforts to ensure heat for the winter. You don't have enough firewood. You can't afford oil or propane or kerosene. The furnace is "out" and you can't get a furnace guy to come look at it. To some extent, this is definitely your problem, not your neighbors. Particularly if you are a responsible adult, you're the one that must make the plans, get in the firewood, buy the heat oil, put in the insulation. This is rock-ribbed, formerly Republican New England, after all. But if you're old, or sick, or just pathetic, and not "stayin' warm," someone will like as not take pity on you, and deliver a truckload of free wood scraps, or put plastic on your leaky windows, or loan you their back-up heaters and fuel. They'll do their best to shrug off the good deed. Charity is demeaning, we understand up here, even when it absolutely genuine and comes from the heart.

So no-one will make a big deal of any such good deed. Charity is not something you wear on your sleeve, like the millionaire who gives money to the church and is celebrated loudly. That was all over Georgia when I lived down there. Up here, charity is an underground phenomenon. But surprisingly widespread, especially among older men, the most competent and silver-backed (and modest) of whom often have three or four shut-ins they very secretly keep an eye on. Even their wives may not know that for years they've been helping some old lady out. When it gets cold.

Mainers also like to have "back-up for back-up" when it comes to heat. We like wood stoves because they keep going in power cuts, which always come with ice and wind storms. Power cuts are a norm, not an exception. We like to have back up generators and inverters, to run furnaces and well pumps and light bulbs. A big old oil or coal furnace, even if you don't use it much because you heat with wood, is never a bad thing to have. It's even worth having three or four of those 110 volt electric radiators, because having one for each room you actually use will keep you from the utter misery of not "stayin' warm." We also have elaborate back-up systems of heat tape and strategically placed light bulbs to keep pumps, well, and pipes from freezing if furnaces quit.

If all else fails, one of those stand-alone kerosene heaters, where the fumes go right into the house, will be a life-saver. All your liberal ideas about health and air pollution will go out the window. You'll happily breathe those foul fumes, pull your chair right up to the heat, suck it down, just to stay warm.

If, for some reason, you are defeated in this fight, and the quiet charity of your neighbors fails you, the cold will creep into your house like an icy blight. The walls will feel cold to the touch, the floor will hurt your feet, there won't be any place to get comfy. Reading a book, watching TV, eating dinner, sleeping, all these normal activities will become hard to do because you can't concentrate enough to do them, not even sleep, because the cold will nag you. You'll feel miserable. Your hands, feet, and nose will become numb. You'll find you have to keep moving. If you're old, you won't be able to, and your body core will cool down and you might die. If no-one comes to see you. But someone will.

If you leave, and go somewhere warm, like church, or the cinema, or work, you'll suddenly feel safe, and then happy, a little giddy with comfort, and then you'll begin to fall asleep.

Or, especially if you're younger, you'll become a little frantic, like a worried beaver or squirrel, and you'll run errands to the hardware store, perusing the heating appliances, counting your pennies, trying to find something that will make you warm again that you can afford. You'll troll through "Uncle Henry's" trying to find dry firewood. If you know your forest trees, your dendrology, and have land, you'll take your chainsaw, or even a bucksaw, and you'll cut down ash, and burn that, the only life-saving tree that will burn when green.

And our students say dendrology is silly, not useful. They've never been cold.

Don't worry about us. We're keepin' warm.

Stayin' warm?

(This post mirrored from the Sustainability Blog)

It's the depths of a Maine winter, and despite continued climate change and what was initially expected to be an El Niño year, we're having proper Maine winter weather. The warming trend expected in the southern Pacific in the early fall never quite panned out and SST temperatures there are right about average now.

As a partial result, we've had a solid week of cold Canadian air. It's warmed up quite a bit out there just now, a brief slug of warmer air having penetrated north as a Rossby wave passes, and the outside temperature is just below freezing. But the Canadian or more correctly polar air will return today and we'll be back in the teens and below for another week.

Minus ten to plus ten degrees F is, to say the least, pretty cold for an Englishman, even a fat one. But I long ago learned to deal with it, and even thrive.

How do we stay warm and well in such cold weather without contributing greatly to climate emissions?

Two important factors: Dogs and logs.

The science of logs is very interesting to me, especially this time of year when we depend on it a good deal. The Womerlippis heat primarily with wood, much of which we cut off our own land. This year we began the winter with about three cords on hand, most of which was ash and bird cherry, cut from the southerly end of our smallholding, that had been seasoned for two years. About a cord of ash was only one-year old, the remains of a single large ash tree tree that overlooked this year's garden expansion and had to go.

This would have been enough firewood, had we had a La Niña winter more like last year's. But the cold weather meant we burned more than we planned, and so I shopped around for an extra cord of dry firewood. A young lad in the town came by on New Year's Eve with a truck and a buddy and dropped a cord of mixed hardwood right into my firewood crib. (The very prompt delivery was, I surmised, due to a need for cash for some New year's carousing.) This was wood that had been cut and stored in tree length for two years, and so it is seasoned, but not nearly as bone dry as the Womerlippi logs that were cut and split and covered for one to two years.

Accordingly, some judicial mixing and matching of logs is called for. The off-farm logs can be burned whenever the house is too warm, or when the outside temperatures are moderate. The Womerlippi logs are saved for when the house needs to be warmed up, or when it's very cold outside. So far the coldest it's been at the farm was -5 F. It can get a lot colder than that around here. When it does, we have a back-up, a forced air oil furnace that can be fired up at the touch of a tiny button. This furnace, at 175,000 BTU/hr, dates back to the original pre-retrofit farmhouse, and is about double the capacity required for the house at its current level of air-sealing and insulation, so it heats everything up very quickly indeed. But we try not to use it, preferring to live on BTUs that are part of the contemporary carbon cycle, not the Cretacean one. 

This is a life trick that a lot of people are going to need to learn, one way or another, if we're to avoid a climate that is more like that of the Cretaceous. You don't need a wood stove. You could build a passive house like Unity College's own Terra Haus, or the Unity House. Or you could use a pellet boiler like the ones in our college library or Thomashow labs. Even a moderate retrofit of a regular oil-burning home can reduce your oil consumption enough to help meet emissions reduction targets.

But the wood stove is my favorite approach because of the nice radiant quality of the heat.

It helps in this emissions reduction project that our particular wood stove is a well-designed Norski model with the modern afterburner or secondary combustion set-up. Not only does the presence of a secondary combustion chamber reduce particulate and other emissions, it also saves firewood. The detailed retrofit work that we've invested in year after year also pays off. The house is literally cocooned in insulation. We haven't used more than a few gallons of heat oil a year for many years. Our last delivery was three years ago, and then only a hundred gallons. 

We do use the oil furnace when we leave the house and animals in the hands of a sitter, and most recently managed to fry an igniter during a power outage, requiring a diagnosis-and-repair process. Following that, I ran the unit for a few days, partly because I wanted to make sure it was working safely again, partly because we were having a cold snap and Aimee wanted me to do so. But I could only put up with the noisy thing for a few days and was glad of the excuse to turn it off yesterday when the temperatures warmed up a bit.

So, we're back to the logs. We used less than fifty gallons of oil this winter. I don't intend to use any more if I can help it.

As for the dogs, well, it's our winter break, and they get a lot of attention. In particular, they get nice long walks in the snow in the deep empty woods behind our house. There's about two thousand acres of empty Maine woodlands and wetlands back there, and in the winter, when the wetlands are frozen, it's all very much more accessible than in the summer when the bugs deter. I enjoy these walks, and appreciate the recovery of fitness and a regular sleep pattern that accompanies the exercise. If I didn't have as much work to do as I do, I'd take a good long walk with my dogs every day.

Here's some pictures that Aimee took that capture the mood of these winter hikes with the dogs.

Flame, a rescued Australian shepherd from Louisiana, has taken to the snow like a duck to water.

Ernie, an English Shepherd, and the official Womerlippi farm sheepdog, is her constant companion.

Sometimes we need to use snowshoes. 

Here's what happened to my second-best set of snowshoes just the other day! But because the snow was set up well, I was able to finish the hike easily with the fragment of snow shoe that remained attached. 

And yes, duct-tape does make a good repair material for snowshoes. If you're cheap, like I am.

So that, dear readers, is how we stay warm in the depths of a Maine winter, without adding too much to climate emissions, or to consumerism.

Canada retreats

Well, we seem to be over the hump. The daytime is getting noticeably longer each day, which I always find heartening. And even though we're in the grip of another Canadian high, the large amount of sun that the clear northern air brings, now the days are longer, is enough for us to get some real warmth in the afternoons.

(Readers should understand that in this context "real warmth" might be 25 F.)

I notice that all nearly my posts for a month have been cold- and weather-related. The reason for the obsession should be obvious -- the weather is the most important thing. And it prevents pretty much anything else new or interesting around the farm from happening.

Until things get sufficiently better I can't do very much outside or workshop work. My workshop is only partly heated by virtue of being the home for our massive wood-fired furnace. The furnace has a forced air jacket, so it really doesn't put out a lot of waste heat, and the garage door and board-and-batten siding leak massive amounts of air, so if you're working on the bench and it's 10 F outside, it might be 25 F inside. That's too cold to work comfortably. Your hands get stiff in a few minutes.

But if it's 25 F outside, it can get up to 35 or more in the shop and we can start to get some stuff done. I'm thinking that this afternoon I'll be able to tidy the place up up in some comfort, and possibly do some prep for classes at school that involve shop work. I'm looking forward to it.

Some things you can't avoid, of course. The car work needed to be done. I used the shop lights for that, to keep my hands from getting too stiff. And I come in to warm up and thaw out every so often. And emergencies always happen around any farm, I guess, so you have to work outside if there's a problem.

The other night after a late meeting at college I came home in about 8 F weather, expecting a nice hot shepherd's pie for dinner, only to realize the well pipes had begun to freeze.

Like many old Maine houses we have a relatively shallow well and an above-ground jet pump. This sits in a well house inconveniently located in the center of my shop. The well predates the shop. When they first built the shop, they built it around the well. Probably the well head space, a rectangular cavity about 3' deep by 4' by 5', used to be below ground. When they decided to add the shop, they excavated a little and then poured a very crude concrete wall around the well head space, creating an above-ground concrete well house. This was insulated and provided with a 60 W light bulb for heat, as being newly above ground it would now freeze. I've added a proper hinged lid and better insulation, as well as replaced the pump and refitted all the fittings and wiring. I also keep all my paints and fuels and shop fluids in secondary containment, extra plastic tubs for everything, as even half a gallon of spilled diesel would ruin the well for months.

The well itself is a 56 foot deep, 8 inch borehole, and very reliable. One of the reasons we bought this house was that I could see it had a good water source.

But if the light bulb goes in the dead of a Canadian freeze, watch out! Mainers who let their pipes freeze may never get them thawed until spring. I check this bulb every night. There's a slight light leak from the lid, and I look for this slice of light every night before bed. I had done so the night before it went out, but it was a cold day, and the bulb happened to fail, and so when I came home the frost had begun to creep in. I found this out when I couldn't draw water for the sheep.

First thing I did was curse the late meeting. It had already gotten dark, there was no light to work with, the meeting was somewhat unnecessary and ill-conceived, and I had been up since 3 am, and working since 5am. I do my day-job work early in order to have time later to farm. These are my normal work habits, but they work well for the students too. I had an 8am class to prep for, and at 5am I have peace and quiet to do this kind of thing. Other faculty of course tend to keep "banker's hours," and so a late meeting seems perfectly pleasant to them.

To me, having to stay late is often a harbinger of some farm problem.

On a normal day I'd have been home by 4pm, and not quite so tired. There would have been daylight to work with.

Thirsty sheep and frosty wells wait for no man, though. I played around with changing the light bulb first, but realized I needed to take more active counter measures, so I dropped a 1,500W electric heater in and waited for everything to thaw. Luckily the frost had not crept in as far as the well pump itself. That would have been expensive.

Pipes thawed, I had a little difficulty then getting hoses to run. The technique for preventing a water hose from freezing in the winter is simply to drain it after use so there is no water to freeze. I lay it out on the driveway which has a steady slope and so the water runs out. But the last day I had used this it had been very cold indeed and so the water in the hose had frozen before it could drain. The technique for thawing a frozen hose is to put it someplace warm. In this case it went to the kitchen where the 75 F air warmed by the wood stove did the trick in twenty minutes. While waiting, I popped my dinner in the oven and stoked the furnace to full blast.

The electrical water heater that goes in the tub had clicked off automatically because the water level was low, so it too had to be changed. We keep two of these items for this purpose, although they click back on automatically if you give them time.

But the sheep got their water in their tub changed by 6.30 pm and were happy. And disaster was averted. I got my shepherds pie only a little late. After a nice warm shower. Very tingly. All in all a nice demonstration of the difficulties of Maine winters, and the need for preparation and techniques to deal with them. Imagine what it's like to be an older person in this environment. Not easy at all. I admire our elderly neighbor Jean who still chops her own wood.

I left the heater in the well head, ready to be turned on if needed again. This unit had been in the greenhouse last spring to keep the late frost off the starts and had gotten a little moldy, preventing it from being used in the house. It can stay in the well head until we begin to use the greenhouse again.

So the weather is looking better, for us at least. Maple sap will start running very soon. We have at least three fat pregnant sheep and possibly a fourth from the day when Snorri got out. I'm watching the fattest, Molly, just in case she comes early. She's huge and may be carrying triplets.

The weather is not better for Americans further south, including Aimee's folks, who are in the path of a major snowstorm. This will cause problems down there, because of the lack of snow infrastructure.

But don't worry. We'll get our share. The final stage of a Maine winter is yet to come, when the Canadian air, and the jet stream that brought it, both retreat north. Then the storm track will come our way again, and we can get another few feet before it's all said and done, especially in March and even early April.

Uplifting thoughts and other Sunday photos

 

Here, waiting to be serviced and painted on saw horses in the dooryard, is my latest home enhancement project -- an automotive lift. 

When they see it, everyone will want one. It's the latest home decor accessory!

Our friends are all on FaceBook posting about their vacations and road trips and other expensive distractions. One friend in particular is pretty happy about her new secondhand sailboat, which I admit, is getting just a teensy weensy bit annoying. 

But I'm not jealous. No, not at all. I have my lift that I've always wanted!

(I expect I'm also considered a little weird, but never mind. You can take the man out of the servicing hangers and workshops, but you can't take the servicing hangers and workshops out of the man.)

This is the kind of lift they have in the regular workshops and dealerships. In fact it used to be in one of the "recon" bays at the main Toyota dealership in southern Maine.

We got it for me to work on vehicles more conveniently and safely.

It took a little matrimonial convincing, but Aimee went along with the notion after a while, mostly because she worries when I work on cars and trucks and farm equipment on jack stands in the yard, which is made of relatively soft gravel, and therefore not well suited to lifting equipment. I have to lay down plywood boards to make it safe, and even then it isn't great. I pay close attention to balancing the vehicles just right on the jack stands, and often add blocks or the spare wheel or leave the floor jack (AKA "trolley jack" in English-English) under the vehicle to give me some back-up or a minute of extra time while I exit the danger zone. But guys are killed or injured every year in Maine in this kind of operation. 

Aimee even came with me, seven month's pregnant, on the "Downeast Dickering"-style road trip all the way to southern Maine to pick it up. We made a day of it and had Thai food and shopped for secondhand baby stuff too. She did say that she wouldn't have come if it hadn't been for the baby stuff, but I was glad to have her there. 

A man needs his wife around when he is about to meets some huge lifetime goal, like owning his own automotive lift.

Seriously, this lift is a serious investment for us. It's also a lot easier to work on a vehicle when it's several feet up in the air. There are some jobs that can only safely be done with that kind of height and control. 

Proper rust protection is one such job. We now have four useful working vehicles that are currently not at all rusty. Three of them are even modern enough and safe enough for a kid to ride in. 

This is a Womerlippi family first, and largely due to the small inheritance I got this spring. In years gone by, we could only afford to have one really nice vehicle, which Aimee always drove, while I had a series of junkers going all the way back to my trusty 1975 VW van, the one with half a million miles on it that I drove from 1992 through about 2004 or 2005. Now we have nice vehicles, I want to protect that investment, without spending money at the dealership if I can possibly help it.

(The fourth vehicle is the Land Rover, which is in a special class of it's own, my survival truck. That vehicle will still be in functional condition when all the others are long gone to the scrapyard.)

Here are the lift arms that will extend under the vehicles.

And here, still under wraps and being kept wet so as to more properly cure the concrete, is the nineteen by twelve foot concrete pad I poured Wednesday, on which I'll place the lift later this week. Concrete takes a full week to achieve the kind of cure needed for drilling the solid anchor bolts that will secure the lift, and should be kept as wet as possible during that time. The small cement mixer standing there is a red herring. Not willing to compromise on safety, I ordered "proper" three-quarters stone, 3,500 PSI-rated concrete from a regular truck. I used five yards, which is a lot of carbon emissions, concrete being a major source of carbon, but expect to earn that back easily in lifecycle vehicle emissions through better rust protection. (The average vehicle requires twenty percent of lifecycle carbon emissions in manufacture.)

You can also see the new back door to the workshop that I put in Monday, preparatory for making a functional workspace out of the rear area. I didn't want to be always walking around the side of the shop, especially with heavy tools and parts.

The whole project, when all is said and done, will have cost about $1,500, including $500 in concrete and $750 for the lift. I think this is easily affordable compared to the cost of service at ships that have lifts and at dealerships, and also taking into account the loss of value we see in vehicles around here due to rust.

This will be an open-air workspace, at least for now. Any building large enough to cover the new lift will have to be at least eleven feet tall at the eaves, and would be pretty ugly in this spot, I think, making a crowded kind of compound. Aimee suggested we might build one one day, perhaps next summer, but I didn't much like the idea. I may change my mind one day, but I figured that three seasons of lift-use availability was fine by me, at least for now. I can plan out service schedules to avoid winter jobs. If we do get a need for an emergency repair, there's always my regular workshop, which has more space in any case now I tore out the wood furnace.

Talking of which, here is said furnace, now up for sale on Maine Craigslist and waiting in the dooryard for some lucky buyer to come get it. This is not the time of year to sell a furnace, so I expect we'll keep it there until fall. Always aware of appearances (not!), to make it prettier, I made it into Maine "yahd ahrt" by temporarily adding Aimee's house plant collection, also up for grabs since she is spring-cleaning our house, ready for house guests and the baby, and these no longer fit with her pans for decor. Call or email if you want them.

 

In other news, I finally found time yesterday morning to set out the tomato cages. Not a moment too soon, since some of the tomato plants are already two feet high. With so many projects ongoing, we haven't made much time for gardening, and in fact were forced to undertake a major weed eradication exercise the other day, to bring everything back under some semblance of horticultural control.

I weeded the tomato rows as I fitted the cages, listening to Weekend Edition on the radio. It went well enough, and I'm sure the plants liked listening to Scott Simon as much as I do.

Finally, Ginnie Guinea, who we now realize may be a male, is still hanging out, and still called Ginnie, despite her/his sex change.

He/she seems to be a fairly reliable soul, as birds go. He/she comes by the barn each morning to get a handout of layer pellets, then buggers off happily to peck for ticks and other bugs all around the dooryard. The dogs haven't had a tick on them since she arrived, but since they are covered in Top Spot chemical anyway, and since we no longer take them on walks in the woods because it's now too hot and buggy and because we are so busy, we really don't know if all Ginnie's work has actually made a difference.

 

Still it's good to know he/she is on the job. Fine by us if he/she stays, as long as she keeps pecking up ticks! Especially with a kid on the way, ticks are particularly unwelcome. Lyme disease is a killer.

Brass monkey just lost 'em

According to our porch thermometer, it's 25 degrees Fahrenheit below zero out there right now at 4.10 am. That seems correct, too, not a broken thermometer because Bangor Airport, 350 feet lower in altitude, has 22 below.

About minus 33 degrees Celsius here, minus 30 in Bangor.

If our brass monkey was equipped, they just cracked off.

All through the woods, trees are popping and even exploding. The pops are sort of friendly-sounding, not too scary, but one big explosive crack sent Haggis the dog running for his mum this morning during our regular constitutional.

One of our older hens foolishly began to molt a couple weeks ago, and we'll see later if she made it through the night. The ducks and sheep will be fine; although the ewes are beginning to be uncomfortably pregnant, they're not due for several more weeks, thank heavens. Keeping newborn lambs alive when the weather is this cold can be very hard. They are born wet from amniotic fluid, which prevents their coats from working, and have to dry off before they can regulate their heat. They can go into hypothermia so every easily and just sort of drift off mildly, if you don't get them in the house and under the wood stove.

Poor little buggers. There's probably green fields in Yorkshire or Wales right now, places where lambs belong. (Although I hear it's been cold in Britain too.).

We won't see green until late April.

The oil furnace thermometer base temperature was reset a little higher last night to keep the frost off the two water pipes that run very close to the sill under the east side of the kitchen. There's a hot air duct in that space, just a four-inch one, but it does the job if you let the furnace do its job by keeping the thermostat at a sensible setting. Keep it set too low and the wood stoves will do the job instead. They don't have ducts pointing at the pipes. I also have a four-inch duct pointed right at my hot water heater and all the rest of the pipes. And my basement is sealed tight.

The one pipe I can't reach is the main supply pipe from the well. Maybe it's time to run the tap a little. It wouldn't hurt to do that for the sake of the well pump too.

The pressure tank and well pump are in a concrete space in the garage, heated with a 60 watt rough-duty incandescent bulb. I just re-covered that whole space with a new hinged, insulated lid and frame.

We ought to get through this with pipes intact. We'd better. Once they freeze, they'll stay that way for the winter unless we dig them up.

I expect some of our friends and neighbors will see their pipes freeze tonight.

The other thing that doesn't like to work in this kind of cold is a car battery. The electrochemical reaction that causes the power to flow slows right down in the cold. We keep 12 V battery packs for starting recalcitrant cars. And then engines themselves. Oil is the consistency of slow honey or even jelly, and despite what the manufacturers say about not needing to warm up the engine, I always give it at least ten minutes.

Outdoor plastic, in this cold, becomes brittle like glass, and will shatter. We've been using some plastic rope handle tubs for firewood lately, but they're not up to it, and an even slightly thrown or dropped log goes clear through.

Finally, this is a great time to weatherize your house from the inside, because with a 40-dollar laser thermometer you can find every tiny seep of cold air coming in, and every cold patch on a wall where the insulation has failed inside the wall. This time of year my wife thinks it's funny how obsessed with that thermometer I am, trying to find and fix the leaks that have so far eluded me.

So those are the sports we engage in and the sights and sounds of a Maine cold snap around the Womerlippi place.

Eight below and all's well

The weatherman forecast a cold day with a strong wind, and we're not disappointed. More of that Canadian air from up around Hudson's Bay.

I went out with Haggis-dog at 5 am so he could piddle, and discovered a full moon so bright I could see color. Moonlight was reflecting all around in the recent snow, which, although it wasn't actually snowing, was making little mini-blizzards in the wind. Tiny whirlwinds of snow in our dooryard. The thermometer read only - 8 F (about -22 C) which is not so terribly cold -- it gets a lot colder around here. But the wind made it feel much worse.

Beautiful, but distinctly unwelcoming.

We hurried back indoors. My morning chore #1 around here is stoking fires. A few logs on each, and we quickly began to warm the house up.

We weren't so cold inside. The oil furnace had come on overnight -- a sign of cold temperatures outside. We set the oil-burner's thermostat to 60 F so that whenever the wood heat slacks off for any reason, the oil burner comes on. This prevents the house from getting that bone-achy kind of cold, and protects the water pipes, without using more than 50 or so gallons of oil a year. If you let a house drop below 55 F in Maine when it's below zero outside, then your basement and crawl spaces will of course be even colder and pipes may freeze. The house will also take a good while to heat back up, during which time you will be miserably uncomfortable.

Our kitchen wood stove, pictured here going full blast after being tended first thing this morning, soon got the kitchen up to 75 F, and a small fan we keep in the door between the kitchen and the rest of the house began to circulate the warm air around. The forced air wood furnace in the garage also soon picked up to full speed, blowing warm air into the upstairs where Aimee is still sleeping.

As far as she's concerned, the heat never dropped below 65F.

But I expect that is my job, to keep the wifie and the indoor critters warm, without them having to think about it.

Today is going to be a bad day for outdoor work. I will have to feed, of course, but I'm glad I changed the livestocks' water earlier in the week, because that means I don't have to do it today. I will have to bring in the wheelbarrow load of firewood we will easily burn through today. The shop is a mess and I have some car work to do, but that optional kind of chore will have to wait until it's a little more sensible kind of weather for that kind of thing.

Kind of.

Even going for a walk with the dogs is probably not such a smart thing to do either, unless you want a dog to lose an ear, or you wish to lose the end of your nose.

So that leaves cooking, cleaning, and knitting. I want to knit. Here's a shot of our knitting machine set-up, with two sweaters in process, one on the machine, another over the chair. Not exactly exercise, but I hope to finish the one on the machine this weekend, preferably by Sunday morning so Aimee can pop it in the wash to shrink a bit. (I made it oversize to allow for this shrinkage.)

I have to confess it took me a long while to get used to cold winters. Mostly, the relative inactivity is hard to get used to. As a fairly ordinary kind of Englishman with regard to my preferred outdoor activity, walking, I sort of naturally expect to be able to take a pleasant walk outside most days of the year, with the only weather inconvenience conspiring to prevent this being rain or mist, or at worst a few inches of temporary snow. And if it is a bit cold on your walk, well, the countryside should sort of naturally be arranged so that there's a nice warm pub with a nice crackling fireplace at the end of it.

But for twenty-two years this generally hasn't been possible for at least a third of each year. The walking part, I mean. The pub part is pretty much out of the question whatever the weather. American has not yet progressed to the level of civilisation (with an "s") where family-friendly pubs are strategically placed at the ends of countryside walking paths.

Now that's what I mean by rural planning.

But of course if you live where we do, you can always take a walk. We have thousands of acres of forest right up to our backyard. It's just that for quite a bit of the year you might not enjoy it very much.

Back in the day, when I was frequently an instructor on the RAF Mountain Rescue Service's famous winter mountaineering course, we would go each year, of course, to Coire an t'Shneachda and the other northern corries on the Cairngorm plateau, to access the easy, beginner's-level snow and ice climbs, to train our latest batch of young droogs in the lore of snow and ice climbing and associated rescue practices.

I swear, it was nearly always warmer there than it is in my dooryard today, and most of each winter.

Just how cold does it get in Maine?

Well, today was mild, historically speaking. The outside temp probably got up to 10 F. Last night it might have been -5, enough for me to check my pipes when I woke. But the winds of about 15mph sustained, gusts to 20, made it feel like about -18 F all day.

A thin wind, we say in Yorkshire, because it can go right through you.

How cold is -5 F? That would be -21 C. While minus 20 F is -28 C.

The sheep didn't go outside much. They, whoever they "they" are, say sheep can do without shelter in Maine, but I don't believe it. Whenever I did go out, to feed and water the beasts, walk dogz or bring in firewood, it took just a few moments for gobs of frozen breath to form on my beard.

But the wood stoves are drawing very well indeed.

In Britain, if I ever experienced this frosty face thing, it would be at the top of Cairngorm or the Ben. We get weather here at 500 feet that only occurs at 4,000 feet back home in the yUKe. I can well remember the coldest temperature I ever experienced at an inhabited altitude in Britain, during an arctic blast experienced while camped in a byre close to Braemar with the RAF Mountain Rescue. It was -33 C, and set a record for the town, getting on BBC Scotland, which is why I remember it.

We get that kind of cold almost every year in Maine.

A real cold night around here, which we usually get once or twice a winter, would be -20 or -25 F, or -28 to -31 C. Those kinds of nights we use the oil hot air furnace to keep the pipes from freezing. I have hot air outlets set up to blast air wherever there are pipes.

That's the only use, really, we put that furnace to, except for when we get house-sitters inexperienced with wood stoves.

When it's this cold, though, those woodstoves will go through a cord of wood in a week. It's a good job it usually doesn't stay this cold for very long. We'd go through a lot of trees.