Finding free firewood can save thousands of dollars every year! Filling the woodroom - it's one of our Top 5 "W" chores every spring. And we have been hard at it for the last several weeks. And we love finding free firewood! Once winter temperatures hit -20C, we turn on two basement baseboard heaters, just so water lines don't freeze. The house stays … [Read more...]
How to Clean Out a Woodstove
Fall and winter afternoons can be beautiful in the Cariboo. The mornings are often cold though. And it's time this morning to get that weekly chore done - clean out the wood stove. Why You Need to Clean out the Wood Stove Our wood stove is going here probably 5 months out of the year. Maybe not every day but at least once a day. Overnight temperatures here get … [Read more...]
Wood Stove Fan – Ecofan 812AMXBX AirMax Product Review
We heat almost totally with wood here - although we have electric back up, we don't turn on any electric heat unless winter temperatures go down to -20 Celsius. We use our woodstove a lot - but we still needed a little something to push that woodstove heat into our living room. And that's why I bought a wood stove fan. It's an Ecofan 812AMXBX AirMax and I LOVE it so much I want to write … [Read more...]
How Much Wood Can Annie Chuck?
How Much Wood Can Annie Chuck, if Annie Could Chuck Wood? Well, I can and I did. When we moved here in 2006, there was a small wood room already here on the far side of the driveway, used by the previous owners. We enlarged it to about double the size. We have found that in a very cold winter here, we use just over half of the total wood stored … [Read more...]
Bacon & Eggs on the Woodstove
Not long ago, I wrote about some of the virtues of a woodstove. Not only is a woodstove a great way to heat your home, it can also be used for cooking. Since our woodstove has a flat top, we use it for cooking fairly often, especially when it is Really Cold outside. There's something very satisfying about cooking on a woodstove - I'm not sure what it is. Maybe it's the warmth from the … [Read more...]
Cooking on the Wood Stove
Having a wood stove for heat is an wonderful thing - being able to cook on it is even better. We love cooking on the wood stove. But, our wood stove is NOT a cook stove, it is just a wood stove for heating our home. Doesn't matter! We are able to cook on it because our stove has a flat top. We have electric heat as well, although we don't even turn on the baseboard heaters unless it is -20C … [Read more...]
Filling the Wood Shed
Things have been so busy around the homestead that I haven't been able to keep up with posting new articles about what we have been up to. Now, as I sit in Vancouver, I finally have time to get caught up, at least a bit. We use our woodstove almost exclusively for heating our house and it is not a small house. It's almost 3000 square feet and we have the woodstove situated in the centre of the … [Read more...]
Cleaning up the Wood Shed
I've got the garden all in, finally. It dragged on this year, mostly due to all the rain we have had. I try to stay out of the garden when it's raining, because I just end up carrying mud on my boots and walking around on wet soil isn't good for it. Besides, there are roughly a million other things to get done here. We have no problem at all keeping busy on the homestead, it seems that the jobs … [Read more...]