HEAT

Heat

There is a reason they call us mountain folks.
You have probably herd the jokes about living so far back in the sticks that it takes a week for the sunlight to get there.
Well those things are made up by people that just wish that they were living the mountain dream life that we enjoy.
We live at the end of the electric line and are often out of power for days at a time. During the ice storm of 02′ we were out of electricity for well over three weeks.
It changed our ways very little. The difference was that we would start up the generator each evening so we could keep things in the freezer, frozen. Catch the evening news and check email, via sattellite link.
Because power is a “iffy” thing , we have several ways to heat the house. It will depend on the particular emergency that has came up.
We can heat with wood, wood pellets, propane, water source heat pump, or electricity.
Most winters we will use all of the methods at some point. However the two main ways we heat the house are firewood and wood pellets.
Early in the winter and late in the winter when it is not as cold, we heat with firewood.
If the power is off, we have emergency propane lighting that also will heat the house to some extent.
In the dead of winter we heat with wood pellets. The wood pellets are stored in a storage room, so it is possible to refill the pellet stove without going out in the weather. This is especially nice when you have slept late on the weekend and you can go get a bag of pellets in your house shoes !
We normally keep four tons of wood pellets on hand, but we burn about two tons each winter.
We usually put up three or four ricks of split firewood for each winter, and we try not to carry any over untill the next year.
Earlier this year, a large red oak that had died out in the yard had to be sawed down for obvious safety concerns.
While running the chainsaw, I thought to myself, “now, this here firewood that we got, must be really be high quality firewood, I ain’t even struck a single match and it has already warmed me up once !”
“Come November, along about deer season, when it warms me up again, I bet i’ll appreciate it a whole lot more !”