Glass and wood don't mix....

Given that:

---The wood is placed in such a way that it keeps the glass-fronted door of a wood-burning stove from closing entirely. But hey, it almost closed, and it would have been fixed before the wood was actually lit.....

And:

--There is an incredibly helpful and observant child in the house, who passing by said situation decided to pull the handle down on said door, causing the said wood to make contact with said glass.....

Resulting in a popping sound, which although muffled, was nevertheless ominous enough to cause immediate discovery of the fact that the glass on the door was splintered.

The good news:

---The glass stayed in the door, and there were no splinters out and about on the hearth to worry about.

--We didn't need a fire that day.

--It only took a couple of days to get it fixed, and the incident did not take place in the dead of winter or the middle of a quarantine.

Yeah, in a case like this, glass and wood don't mix. Don't try this at home. :)

Log time, do see...

As in, the back of our garage is now full of aspen wood for the winter. It's a good feeling--and thankfully, not a bad smell, because as my husband was pointing out yesterday, even the vehicle we were riding in smells like aspen wood....

We didn't get it in at the season's lowest price, although we did call earlier this summer and got no call back. However, we called back much later, and ended up getting it at $10 above that price/cord, which was still $25 less/cord than I remember us paying last year. Still an expense, but it did cut our utility bill last year, and it helps clear out dead wood wherever the gentleman acquires it, so hopefully it's a good deal for all.

We now have a bunch of canned meat and reusable canning materials sitting in our store room, thanks to my best source (Mom). And hence more peace of mind when it comes to my 3-month supply when it comes to the protein part of it. Still need more supplies/variety, but little by little the shelves fill up....

Unless, of course, you are actually using your storage, which we have been doing, and hence need to stock up on some of the supplies when/if they go on sale. That's definitely one of the advantages of having storage--the ability to wait for a better price. Hoping that happens for, oh, say, Dinty Moore Stew sometime soon.... :) We don't have shepherd's pie (the recipe for which I mentioned with some other recipes here) that often, but it's pretty popular and very very very easy.

I have had my eye on some other recipes recently that I will hopefully get to soon--usually making mention of my intention to do so provides additional motivation to do it sooner. Too bad the lip on our woodstove is disappointingly small--will have to also look at different alternative ways to actually cook our food while we keep warm to the smell of aspen.... :)

Fuel for the fire: We have our aspen firewood

Have I mentioned how great it can be to get information from other people on the internet? Well, along with recommendations from my best source (Mom) and comments and information from other people (thanks, my internet friends), I have gained the following information:

1) Pine wood is a soft wood and will not last as long as aspen wood will.

2) Pine wood creates more creosote that likes to live in your chimney. Your chimney doesn't like said arrangement as much.

3) Since we only have 2 cords (not complaining--that's two more than we had day before yesterday) we probably don't have as much as we would like to have in terms of duration. Look at other prepared people's blogs and two cords looks like a drop in the bucket, and some people I know through the internet have vast, and I really mean vast supplies of firewood, some stacked in massive and properly-maintained woodpiles, and others with excellent structures in which to house them. We have the corner of the garage closest to the back door in which to store ours, and we are happy with that--but those other people give me a lot of information and a higher goal to shoot for.... :)

Anyway, you may recall that back in October we had ordered aspen from this gentleman, but what with various scenarios, the wood was never delivered. We considered ordering pine, which looked like the only other readily visible option in our area, but we were warned in time (see above list) of certain features of pine wood that were not ideal for our situation. (Rest assured, we have nothing personal against pine wood. :) As I'm sure you know, life gets busy, and as a result, further wood-ordering was put on hold. We decided to give the aspen wood gentleman another try, and even though I was getting a little nervous when he didn't show up on time, he did call, we got our wood, he got his money, and everybody's satisfied.

Gotta love a happy ending when you're talking about emergency heating.... :)

Have you seen a 1/4 cup lately?

When we were down at my parents' for Thanksgiving, one of my children was messing around with a little plastic scoop. You probably have seen the type--it looked like it came out of a drink mix container of some kind. Not very big. As I was talking to the child about it, my mom said something to the effect of, "I have a scoop like that in the storage room with some plastic sandwich bags, and if things get bad, when someone needs food I will give them one scoop of rice and one scoop of beans and send them on their way."

All of the sudden the scoop was worth looking at more closely. I use 1/4 cup measuring cups when I cook/bake, but when I thought about how many beans would fit in that scoop, it didn't seem like much. You may recall that in earlier posts I have talked/quoted about survival amounts of food--the absolutely bare basics, which are 3/4 cup of rice and 3/4 cup of beans daily. Thing is---the 3/4 cup serving results from cooking 1/4 cup rice, and the 3/4 cup of beans results from cooking 1/4 cup of beans. What you start out with looks like a lot more after you cook it--always a good thing when you're hungry.

This little reminder could be looked at two ways. I was thinking how I would feel if I needed food and someone handed me those scoops worth of food. I'm thinking off the top of my head that it wouldn't look like very much, and frankly, I'm not sure I would be that happy about it. But what if you looked at it like this, especially if you have little to no food storage in place: I could get a survival amount of food by buying an amount of rice and beans that would give everyone that I would be responsible for 1/4 cup of rice and 1/4 cup of beans daily, and move on from there. Repeating some statistics found in previous posts--here, and then here-- this is basically how to figure out how much you would need:

Well, using my best source (aka Mom), if you have no food storage in your house today, and decide to get a 25 lb. bag of beans and a 25 lb. bag of rice tomorrow, you will have approximately:

Beans 325 3/4 cup servings of beans (13 servings per pound)

Rice 300 3/4 cup servings of rice (12 servings per pound)


If you want to buy in even larger proportions, the results would be thus:

50 lbs of rice will give you will give you a 3/4 cup serving for 600 days.

50 lbs of beans give you a 3/4 cup serving for 650 days. (Cost today is less than $30.)

Is this the most fun menu ever? No. But it is something, and having a few bags of rice and beans on the shelf might help motivate you to put other stuff up there with it. Over at Johnson Family Farm, there is a list of sale items that are a lot easier to prepare than rice and beans, and which also are low-priced. The list is useful not because those particular prices and items are available to everyone, but because it is a good example of easy things to store, and shows that many times things go on sale that are inexpensive, easy to store and to prepare, and then all you have to do is get them and walk away until you need them. Maybe you just need the supply of rice and beans to remind you that if you have nothing else, rice and beans will be all that you are eating in small quantities. Of course, in the end, you could alternate the easier items with the rice and beans, or if you run out of the easier items, you would still have a survival amount of food. Whether you get the rice and beans as a survival back-up, or get them to motivate yourself to buy other items, it is a win-win situation--either way, you'll have more food in storage.

In my last post I mentioned having mentally put aside some of my storage to share. There are some excellent points made in the comments that I hope you will read, about how to urge other people to prepare, and about how we can share only so far. My purpose in starting this blog was in large part to help/encourage other people to prepare, because I don't want them or their children to go hungry, whatever the emergency scenario might be--economic, weather-related, personal, etc. I hope that everyone who has the means will get more in storage, and that the situation improves quickly for those who don't have the means. And I hope that anyone who goes looking for food and receives a sandwich bag with 1/4 cup of rice and 1/4 cup of beans per person realizes that it is actually a lot of food when there is nothing/little else to be had--enough to survive another day, for either the giver or the receiver...

Wood Stove: The details

The installers came on Thursday morning. My understanding was that it would only take 2-3 hours to install. They were actually here for about 7 hours.

First, a little background. The original owners had a wood stove insert that was here when we considered buying the house from them. You may remember, however, that we did not do so, and the second owners had a gas stove insert installed during the time that they lived here. We never used it.

Because we are averse to spending a lot of money, we looked at our options, one of which was to locate the original wood stove insert. My husband contacted the second owners, and learned that the original wood stove insert was in a barn about an hour and a half away from where we live. My husband went in search of it, but it was nowhere to be found. That ceased to be an option.

We did our research on the wood stove inserts available in our area, some of which has been documented here. One salesman came by but never came back with an estimate. Needless to say, he did not get our business. The gentleman who did get our business came by and was very professional, and told us our options. His company had a used wood stove that we could purchase at a discount--it had been used for only a few months by someone who was waiting for the product she had ordered to come in. Used is not a big deal to us--if we had still had the original insert, it would have been used when we bought the house, and we liked the discount. Our main problem was the cooking space on the lip of the stove--the salesman told us about another stove that had more room, but which was more expensive.

While the salesman was here, he talked about whether we wanted a liner or not when we had the wood stove installed. He looked at the chimney, and said that he didn't think that a liner would make that big a difference because of the chimney's size. It is not required where we live to have a liner in the chimney, so that was one of the options that we had to consider.

Well, as we did our research, someone else purchased the used stove, so that was no longer an option. We needed to buy something that had a cooking surface, and yet left us enough money to feed the stove, (yes, we think it looks smart, but we want it to be useful as well :) so we decided to buy the new version of the used model, and do without the liner, which would have added $600 to the overall price. It was a relief to have decided and to have an installment date in place.
So, Thursday arrived. They took out the gas insert. And the fun began.

Apparently, an inspector from the city comes by and checks the work of the installers. When he did, we found out that our chimney needed to be extended by about 5 inches. This was completed, but as you can imagine, it took some time.

My husband found out that the installers had put in a liner. I have to admit that I was glad about this, and now that it was done, I did not want them to remove it. I was not excited about the additional cost ($600) that we would have to come up with (you may recall that we paid for it in full up front) as a result of the error. However, you do what you have to do, and my husband said he would make sure that everything was paid for correctly.

So the installation was completed close to 6:00 that evening, and we took off for one of the children's activities. Thanks to information left in my comments (thanks Carl from Wisconsin!) and at least one question from my best source, (Mom) I was able to come up with a lot of inquiries for the stove salesman before my husband got a chance to call him. One of the things he said was that we should run the stove on hot for 60 hours to burn off paint residue. The other thing he said, (and we know that this is a blessing) was that there was no charge for the liner, because it was his fault, and he should have known that it was necessary in the first place. My husband offered three times to make it right, but there was no extra charge. Wow.

So, as you saw from the photo, we did not hesitate to fire the thing up. It does burn hot--it melted a candy bar in the next room. It makes excellent s'mores. Now we just have to find cookware that fits on the lip...

Now, taking a tip from our friends over at Johnson Family Farm, who wrote an informative and helpful post about their woodstove, I present a picture of the lip:






Not quite the 5 inches of flat surface that we were expecting, but there is room to warm up a can of soup, and we will figure out the rest.
Thanks to all for your information and advice that you have left in the comments. We are expecting to have at least 2 cords of aspen wood delivered next week, so the work has just begun... :)

Wood Stove: Check

Our wood stove was installed today (well, Thursday). Couldn't wait to post a picture--more details to come.

Wood Stove Insert: Ordered

It would have been nice to have been able to put "Wood Stove Insert: Check" as the title for this post, but it would have been inaccurate. We are now, however, the proud owners of a wood stove insert that we ordered today, but which will be officially ordered by the salesman on Monday. We, however, have done our part of the ordering: we saved up the money and chose the one we felt that we could best afford and still be able to feed the thing, (we already checked out the prices for cords of wood) and we paid for it in full. Currently, we have a gas stove insert. A free-standing stove would have been nice, but impossible without a lot more expense.

As necessary as we felt that this purchase was, it was still a difficult decision to make because of the expense involved. Then, when I looked at the brochure that the wood stove salesman left behind, I started wondering if the wood stove that we were considering really had any cooking surface at all, because in the picture, the top of the stove looked curved. The salesman had assured us that there was a five-inch lip on the model that we were considering, but I wanted to see it and be sure. We loaded up the children and took off to the store. He showed me on a different model of stove how the top really is, and it turns out that the stove has a flat ledge that didn't show up (at least I couldn't see it) that would work nicely to heat things up in a small pan in an emergency. It would be nice to have more room on the lip of the stove to cook, but we will just have to make sure that we have multiple pans that will fit on the surface, so that we can make the most of the heat if necessary.

We could have ordered a more expensive model that puts out more heat, and is a little more efficient, but there would have been little advantage to it because of the way that our house is configured. Fortunately, the gentleman we were dealing with had originally come out to our house, and pointed out that both models would basically heat the same amount of area. So, while we plan to start using the stove as soon as necessary once we get it, in an emergency, when it would be our only source of heat, we would probably limit ourselves to that space and do all right. It's a large space, but definitely not the entire house. It could, if necessary, be blocked off with blankets in the doorways to keep the heat confined more efficiently. This is all new to me, so we'll have to see how it works out. Of course, you always hope that you won't find yourself in an emergency in the first place...

So we soon will be the owners of an alternative energy source. This is good, because winter was particularly brutal in our area last year, and hopefully this will also decrease our energy costs in the long run if we have a repeat of that kind of weather. We saw an ad in the paper about aspen firewood, and we saw a lot where they were selling firewood today, at the same price/cord as in the paper, although I don't know what kind of wood that it was. If anyone has any advice/ knowledge about the best kind of firewood, feel free to share--it would be appreciated. One of the best things about the wood stove insert? We now have more options. You gotta love choices... :)

Searching for a wood stove

The house we live in now, as mentioned in the last post, has had two previous owners. The original owners had a wood stove. In the years that the second owners were living here, they put in a gas stove. We would much rather have a wood stove, so my husband asked the second owners about the wood stove that they had replaced, and tried to locate it. Long story short, we find ourselves looking for a new wood stove. After a few years of saving up for it, of course.

Last week a gentleman from a local firm came to our house and took measurements. He could not leave a bid or estimate at the time, so my husband told him to drop a final cost off in the mailbox. The economy must be really going well for that particular firm--we haven't received a written estimate nor a phone call from him. I guess our business isn't that important to him...

So last week, an appointment was made for another gentleman from a competing firm to come and do the necessary measurements, etc., to see if he had a product that would meet our needs. (It did not hurt that my husband saw a sale sign outside the gentleman's place of business. :) He was able to sit down and give us a cost estimate for three different products.

There were a couple of things I found interesting about what he said when he was preparing to make his calculations. I asked him if we could still use the wood stove if the electricity went out and the fan wasn't working. He said yes, but indicated that the gas stove we have now would still work even if the electricity went out--that it required electricity, but would still work during a power outage. I was aware that the gas stove required electricity, (one of the main reasons I want a woodstove) and that it would work in a power outage, but I had no idea how long it would work during a power outage. So I asked him. He said that after about eight days there would probably be a problem, and something like where he is, there had only been power outages for about 16-20 hours. I was like, "Oh, that's good," because that's not anywhere near eight days. Inside, however, I was thinking that we weren't even on the same page. I want a stove that will work for me indefinitely, as long as I can supply the fuel, of course. There's no way to tell an emergency situation that it can only last as long as eight days.

Another issue that's important to us is that the stove have some kind of cooking surface. The gentleman who was here yesterday told us that the model we are considering has a 5-inch "lip" that juts out--we need a wood stove insert. That is not very large...maybe enough to set a soup can on or something. That is better than what we have now, but it would be nice to have a larger surface for emergency situations--we would need it for food preparation as well as heat, after all.
So, (did you see this coming?) I called my best source (Mom). For some reason, I was under the impression that my parents bought a pellet stove, but not so. They purchased a wood stove. So one of the first questions she asked me was about the "efficiency rating." Since it had not come up in the conversation with the stove company gentleman, I did not know. She suggested that I check the Internet, since she was unfamiliar with brand that we were discussing. I found next to nothing, except for the claim that they tested their products themselves--so not that informative in terms of the rating. My husband, however, found the efficiency rating--not stellar, but worth considering. Problem is, when he called the gentleman today to ask more questions, turns out the efficiency rating is 6% less than what was stated on the Internet, so it changes how we look at it somewhat.

My mom also called up someone at a number listed on a website about wood stoves and asked about the model we are looking at, and according to that person, there is no "lip" on the stove that would stick out from the insert and provide a cooking surface. We'll have to figure out who is right on that issue. No cooking surface = a deal-breaker for me.

So, still looking for an emergency (and economical anytime--hopefully, it could help with utility bills this winter) heat source for both heating and cooking. Have to have something to cook my rice and beans on. Or at least a can of soup....