Preparing for Winter

After the hard rains of leftover hurricane Fay flooded the basement and caused hubby and I to have to sleep on the living room floor on a fouton (and we’re still there, since it’s just us for a few more weeks), we got our first real cold front yesterday. Nights are down into the 50s and scheduled to stay there for at least a week, reminding us that it’s now time to think about winter heat.

So in between harvesting concords and muscodines, I’ve prepared the stove pipe cleaning mechanism. No, it’s not a nice English chimney sweep brush, it’s an old holey towel tied around other old rags and a large round river rock, onto which I tie a long piece of rope. We get up on the roof and remove the chimney hood, then drop this thing into the pipe so it will scrape down any accumulated soot. Which falls into the stove in the basement. The pipe runs straight up through the main floor and loft, so there are no bends and kinks. This is good if you’re heating with wood, as bends tend to accumulate more creosote and are difficult to clean. The tall pipe is the “central” part of our central heating system, giving off a lot of heat when it’s cold and making the single wood stove very efficient.

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Filed under Activities, Biofuels, Energy, Heating, Homestead, Independence | Comment (0)

Algae Biodiesel Steals the Show

Will bee offers a very cool post today on his blog RideLust, Solazyme’s Algae-Derived BioDiesel Passes Defense Department’s Cold Weather Testing.

I particularly enjoyed the lede…

In a recent news release from Solazyme and as reported at this years Worldwide Energy and Trade Show yesterday, their algae-derived biodiesel has passed its Department of Defense cold weather testing. To demonstrate the performance and readiness of their product an unmodified Ford F-450 diesel was driven to the conference fueled by Solazyme’s biodiesel by former Director of the CIA, James Woolsey.

Hahaha!!! Man, I’d have paid real money to see that! There is a real future here, and some folks have been putting in some serious R&D to make it happen. Go on over to RideLust and read the whole thing, it’s definitely worthy!

Filed under Alternatives, Biofuels, Energy, Independence, Transportation | Comment (0)