As the hardwoods peak and shower our homestead with a bright blanket of multi-colored leaves, the resulting re-emergence of the surrounding mountains reminds me that cold weather’s coming fast and things here on the ‘stead have to be squared away for that inevitability. First on the list of things to do, of course, is woodstove maintenance.

Our woodstove is a custom job, came with the cabin when we bought the place. It needs to be blackened, as the surface does tend to become a bit pitted and rusty over a period of years. We could use a coat of gun blue, but we usually just get a can of good ol’ stove blacking from the hardware store and apply that. Once it’s on, it needs to be fired up to set, however. And that of course requires cleaning the stovepipe and making sure all the joints are sound (or get replaced, also something that has to happen every few years). And while we’re at that, cleaning out all the packed ashes leftover from springs last cold nights has to be removed, the lining bricks re-set, and all the grates through which the stovepipe passes have to be meticulously cleaned of accumulated cobwebs and possible flammables. A well-maintained woodstove provides reliable and welcome heat for decades whether it’s free-standing or a fireplace insert variety. Without said maintenance it’s a fire hazard for which you may find your insurance lacking.

So now that at least the start on the winter’s wood supply has been cut, split and stacked in a convenient location, here’s the basic overview of “How-To” do whatever else needs doing…

1. Checking the Pipe. The first place to look for needed replacement is at the connection of the pipe to the stove. This joint gets the hottest, and stovepipe is a thin sheet metal rather than a thick cast iron. It will degrade faster than anywhere else. You should of course also check the rest of the pipe joints for rust and thinning, and if anything looks weak go ahead and replace the entire thing. Along with the cap to discourage rain from getting in, and re-tar the flashing where it goes through the roof. Last time we replaced the pipe we got an extra galvanized sheet and wrapped it around the joint section, then fastened it securely with wire. This has allowed the pipe to last longer than it used to, which is cost-effective.

Our stove is in the basement, the pipe goes straight up through the center of the cabin’s living area and right up through the loft and out the roof. This arrangement is very energy efficient, as we get more “living” heat off the pipe than the stove. Being three stories tall, it also minimizes the carbon particulates in wood smoke that makes it all the way out, which is good even though I like the homey smell of wood smoke when coming home from an outing. The downside of the tall pipe is that soot and resin/creosote buildup tends to coat the inside of the pipe quite thickly. This presents a chimney fire hazard, so years that we don’t replace the pipe we have to ‘sweep’ it good.

First thing to do is get a stout stick or paddle and ‘rap’ the pipe starting at its highest point and working your way down to the stove itself. Don’t hit it hard enough to dent it, but do strike all the way around to loosen built-up carbon. You’ll hear it ‘raining’ down as you go, and yes you will have to get it out of the stove once you’re done. But once you’ve ‘banged the pipe’ down its entire length, go on up to the roof and do the interior job. You can purchase a ‘sweep’ (a circular stiff brush), or you can do it the old fashioned way. This involves tying a brick or good-sized stone into an old terrycloth towel and then attaching a rope so this can be lowered into the pipe as far as it will go. If it meets resistance pull it up and drop it down a few times to loosen the blockage. The old towel should be entirely trashed by the time this job is done, so toss it. Then check the sections and joints yet again to ensure that the metal is still entirely sound.

If your woodstove set-up has much shorter sections of pipe with elbows in it, you’ll have to dismantle those elbows and either clean thoroughly with wire brush or replace. These 90º turns pick up a whole lot of carbon and creosote, need extra attention.

If you’ve got one of those pretty fireplace insert stoves, you’ll need to not just clean the pipe but also the chimney. It can be worth it to go ahead and hire a chimney sweep for this purpose, who will also inspect your rock and/or brickwork to ensure the mortar is solid and your rain cap is functional without blocking air flow. A friend’s house very nearly burned down a couple of years ago when his brick chimney caught fire and sent flames and sparks out onto the roof shingles. Don’t let that happen to you, pay attention to your exhaust system!

2. Applying the Blacking. We get ours in a can from the hardware store, which is cheaper and more made-to-order than gun blue. It’s a sort of paint that you apply – just like paint – to the outside wrought iron surface of your stove. You can also apply to the interior, but we’ve never found that necessary.

Once it’s dry you want to open up every window and door throughout the house (so do this on a warm day), maybe crank up those window fans, and build a fire. The blacking doesn’t become ‘one with’ the wrought iron until it’s gotten good and hot. But the process does cause some obnoxious fumes during that setting fire, which is why the house must be open. We have birds, cats and dogs, all of them should be taken to somewhere outside for as long as the setting fire burns, and not brought in again until the fumes have been thoroughly purged by fresh air.

A good blacking job can last for 3 or 4 seasons before needing to be done again, so don’t bother with this unless the metal of your stove is looking rough.

3. Setting the Bricks. This is kind of a dirty job, but well worth the effort if you rely on your woodstove to keep things above freezing on long winter nights or for many hours while you’re away from home. The basic idea is that lining the stove with bricks adds a great deal to its thermal mass, helps it to retain heat even when its vents are shut very nearly all the way off.

We use regular old building bricks. The stove itself is rectangular, so these work very well and tend to stay in place. We set them one-thick to completely cover the bottom of the stove, then 2-high around the back and sides. This means the fire is set right on top of them. On cold nights we load it up with larger pieces of wood, let it catch well, then close down the vents all the way, then a quarter-turn back. Barely enough air to keep it smoldering, not enough for flames. The stove stays warm enough to save pipes, but the house is cold enough to need comforters and quilts on the beds. Who would want to sleep in a hot house in the middle of the winter anyway?

In the morning the vents are opened up a bit and some fresh wood is added, by the time coffee’s ready the stove is cooking away and it’s warm enough for showers and such. Don’t have to actually build any fire at all, as there are enough leftover red-hot coals from the night to fire it up automatically.

If you’re heating already with wood, you probably already know about putting metal or ceramics underneath and on any walls around your unit. These things can get red-hot, and can not only ruin any drywall, wood paneling or wallcoverings in their vicinity, they can also cause them to catch fire. We covered the wall nearest our woodstove with a sheet of that aluminum looks-like-stone skirting for mobile homes, because we happened to have a sheet from a salvage job we did years ago. But just like the brick trick, if you were instead to use stoneware floor tiling or even actual mortared brick, you’d be adding to the thermal mass of your overall heating system. More efficiency the better, and when it’s really, really cold every little bit of radiant heat is welcome.

And whether or not you have small children in the house, do put a ‘fence’ around any woodstove that is taking up room in the main living area. We don’t because ours is in the basement, but where the pipe comes up through the library we have a chickenwire ring-fence around it to keep people and animals away from it. That pipe gets plenty hot enough to burn if touched. We also have a nifty little magnetic temperature gage on the pipe that allows us to tell quickly when the fire’s too hot. Managing the temperature is easy enough to do just by closing the vents a bit, but it can get ahead of you if the stove isn’t right there to be seen and felt.

At any rate, I trust we’ll all have a safe and warm winter on our homesteads. More helpful hints for winterizing the place will be upcoming as the seasons change, so do stay tuned!

I read an interesting article on the “earthlodges” of Native Americans in the Dakotas the other day. I’d learned early in my life when the family moved from New York to “Indian Territory” – Oklahoma – that not all Native Americans lived in those portable teepee tents so prevalent on the plains. I knew the ‘civilized’ tribes of the southeastern United States were able constructors of log cabins for their permanent villages, and of course knew about those spectacular adobe pueblos in the southwest. And while I learned in junior high Oklahoma history about the sod-roofed shanties built by white settlers (and for which Oklahoma was famous), I’d never heard of earthlodges.

Earthlodges are large round structures from 20 to 50 feet in diameter which are built to be much more permanent than the yurts that basically amount to a Mongolian version of teepee for migratory people. Lots of people these days have deck-mounted yurts that are popular as camp cabins or gazebos, but they’re not really something stable or well-insulated enough to live in full time.

In contrast, the earthlodge is dug into the ground and framed with logs, covered with woven willow mats and then covered completely (except for a smoke hole in the middle of the roof) with mud and sod. Your basic hobbit house, but as its own hill rather than dug into a pre-existing hill. Of course, there are some modern earthlodge designs that combine aspects of natural landscaping and lodge building, which are actually quite nice if you don’t care much about windows. It would be quite easy to engineer one of these with skylights, so interior darkness can be alleviated.

Dakota State Historical Society

The original earthlodges were built communally, often housing between 15 and 25 people. They provided solid, very well-insulated shelter for harsh Dakota winters, and stayed naturally cool in hot Dakota summers. They lasted only as long as the palisade poles and main support logs lasted in the ground, about 7 to 10 years before they’d rotted enough to need replacing. Since it took only about a week for a group to construct an earthlodge from scratch, the old one would simply be torn down and a new one erected in its place. The old logs recycled into firewood made this village system quite efficient given that the Dakotas do not enjoy the thick, lush forests of the American southeast.

For a new homesteader looking for cheap, eco-friendly housing on a tract of raw land, it’s not difficult to see how the problem of ground-rot could be simply eliminated by seating the anchor and palisade logs in concrete. The thermal mass of palisade logs plus dirt/sod can be nearly warm in winter and cool in summer as 3-foot thick adobe walls. More modern – and fully waterproof – coverings take the place of those woven willow mats, and fewer palisade poles would allow for regular insulated walls or an opportunity to place windows and/or exits to porticos, or to build storage rooms or closets off the main structure. For a truly permanent structure, some research on new under-sod waterproof roofing material would probably be a good idea.

The niftiest thing about this kind of permanent shelter is that if your land is raw enough to need some clearing, the logs and poles can be taken as part of your clearing plans. These will have to be de-barked and dried above the ground, there are many good Do It Yourself books and plans out there for site-built log homes that have clear instructions on how to do this. If you’re planning to grow crops, the sod shouldn’t be hard to come by. Rather than a big central fire pit and large hole in the roof, a central wood stove with just a pipe running up through the roof will protect from the elements much better than the wicker baskets the Mandan people used to cover their smoke holes when it rained.

It also strikes me that the side walls could be constructed of straw bales and covered with mesh and stucco or adobe instead of mud and sod and still be as easy to heat and cool. Some may consider rock as well, if the land has an overabundance of those that need removing before crops can be grown. Any of these alternatives for some or all of the side walls would make for a very handsome home. The sod roof does have great appeal, I’ve always envisioned a hobbit house with wildflowers instead of just more grass to have to mow.

The interior, once you’ve got the central roof supports and planned your walls, can of course be framed and subdivided as you please for cooking sleeping and living areas, bathrooms and utility as you wish. The Dream Green link above also offers a plan for a ‘multi-lodge’ made up of several octagonal earthlodges connected to a front portico area. This idea offers the possibility for future expansion as the family grows.

So chalk this up as yet another eco-friendly green construction to think about if you’re new to homesteading or are planning to build more structures on your homestead than you’ve already got. A far less modern (more true to origin) version of earthlodge would make a very serviceable combo barn, root/wine cellar and tool/vehicle storage shed. For as long as you can keep the livestock from eating the walls and roof, that is.

Links:

Indians 101: The Earthlodge
Dream Green Homes Earth Lodge
Blue Ridge Yurts

As plans for the new water system move forward, we find ourselves in sudden possession of quite a lot of high-end good-sized PVC piping of various lengths, assorted odd couplings, some strips and scraps of new carpeting (good for insulation of trenches), and a surprising amount of aluminum ductwork. Salvaged from various places. Not being content to leave what look to be perfectly good but not immediately needed lengths of such pipe and ducting behind, we’ve been rescuing as much as we can get from the dumpster-side repository at the contracting facility next door to hubby’s day job.

Some of these lengths of thick-walled new pipe are 3 or 4 inches in diameter, so I’ve been considering how we could use them as we head into this major project, other than as the ‘head’ flow from the new spring to the ram jet in the pumphouse. Given as it’s nearly July, I have also been scouting around for some form of air conditioning that doesn’t require an air-tight home and way more not-cheap electricity than we care to use. We only need it occasionally during the hottest hot-spells of summer and only at times when it’s inconvenient to spend the afternoon in the basement, out under the shade trees, or down at the swimming hole. As part of that research, I’ve been looking at geothermal engineering concepts and technology as well as at modern iterations of good old evaporative cooler (a.k.a. “Swamp Cooler”). Which looks great and works well in places like Arizona, but is not so great here in the southern Appalachians where it’s around 85-90% humidity all the time. Geothermal still looks good, so…

A Do-It-Yourself heat pump! But without the compressor/heat element assist. This could work.

This old cabin is built right into the side of the mountain, thus the ground (basement) level stays almost AC cool all summer. I’ve previously considered installing an in-floor fan basically where the wood stove pipe rises through to the main floor and simply sucking that cool air upstairs, but in my experiments with portable fans to blow the cool air up, warm exterior air simply gets pulled in from the side of the basement that isn’t earth-shielded and then the basement level is as hot as the rest of the cabin. The installed in-floor fan is still a good idea, but needed to find cool air to replenish what’s blown up to the main floor.

This 100-year old chestnut cabin is anything but air-tight, and I must admit I like the fact that it “breathes.” We live on a beautiful mountain and love the fresh, green (and often pollen-laden) air, the constant breeze and such. Want to be able to refresh the air summer and winter to a certain extent, and this is where those pipes may come in handy to supply both cool air in summer and warm air in winter.

We’ll have to do quite a lot of excavation to get the water from the new spring and ram jet up to a new cistern above the house, which will also require a new supply pipe to the house from the hill-side rather than the bottomland-side. So I’m thinking we could hook these pipes together with ‘u’ joints (with an above-ground intake at the back end) as a geothermal collector about 2 feet deep out in the side yard. The ground doesn’t really freeze here in winter (just not that cold here), so the air that runs through this underground collector would pick up heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Then we could hook that to a small in-wall exhaust fan into the basement level to provide cool air in summer for the in-floor fan to blow upstairs. Thereby keeping the basement level cool while circulating to the rest of the house. Working just the opposite in winter.

In the dead of winter the air from this collection system is likely to be only around 50º F. But during the day when the leaves are bare and the sun is in the south, we get a hefty amount of passive solar heating when the sun shines. And the wood stove in the basement (our “central” heat) has always worked great to make the place toasty on the coldest of nights. The geothermal should help even things out quite a lot, and likely even save wood. If we can pipe in 50º air to where the wood stove is cooking and it’s 25º outside, the whole system should be more efficient. And the house would still ‘breathe’ in a healthy manner.

So once we get from the creek and springs up here to the house (on our way up the ridge where the new cistern will be), we’ll be doing work on two projects at once. As it takes shape I will be sure to take lots of pictures and report regularly on the progress. Again, stay tuned!

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.

We’ll also have to paint the stove this year again. That’s always a yucky job, but necessary or it will rust. Painting it with stove paint isn’t that hard, but you have to then ‘cure’ the paint job by getting the stove really hot. That sends out some nasty fumes, so when the curing hours are ‘on’ don’t forget to get all the people and critters out of the house, open the windows wide, and turn on the exhaust fans.

As for the fuel, my hubby says wood’s the only fuel that heats you three times. Once when you cut the tree and section it (and toss it to where you can load it), again when you split it up, and finally when it burns toasty warm on a very cold night. We have already marked with bright orange ribbon some standing dead locust on the ridge and down by the road. These four or five will give us about a cord split, since locusts here generally die before they’re a foot in diameter. Locust is extremely hard wood that burns very hot. I like to mix it with poplar or oak, which makes the fire not too hot and makes the oaks burn better.

We go through about 6 cords of wood between October and April, with enough left over to get us through the slight chill of Blackberry winter in early May. Best advice is to make sure your chainsaw’s chain is sharp (you should sharpen every two tankfuls), as well as your axes, maul and wedges for splitting. Just fix the butt-end of the tools in your workshop vise and use a good steel file to sharpen. It’ll make splitting the logs something even I can do!

We like to stack our wood into cones according to species. That usually ends up with 2 or 3 cones of locust, a cone of poplar mixed with any maple or hickory we happen upon, and separate cones for red and white oak. I keep those separate because red oak is the stinkiest stuff you can imagine, and I don’t like to store it in the wood-bin because it’ll stink up the house. You’ll want a wood-bin near the stove that holds enough for an entire 12-hour period before replenishing. Stack greener wood farther from the door so it will be used last after it’s had a chance to dry well.

One last note on heating with wood… Notice that all the species I’ve named are hardwoods. In the case of home heating, the harder the better. It should also NOT be green unless you’re cutting for heat 6-8 months down the line. And unless you’re really desperate for heat and prepared to deal with the creosote and possible chimney fires right now, DO NOT BURN CONIFERS. Save your dead pine, spruce, fir and other conifer wood for the campfire. These soft woods are full of resin even if they’ve been dead for a pretty long time, and will choke your system with soot in no time at all.

Okay, back to the grapes now… §;o)

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.” [1794]

It was the #1 cash crop in the 13 new states just as it is the #1 cash crop in 50 states today. As a fast-growing “weed” that requires no pesticides or herbicides and very little fertilizers or irrigation, the close-packed stands of 8-9 foot tall plants provided more biomass per acre than any other crop ever discovered, bred or engineered. Its fiber content is 2 to 3 times as great as cotton per acre, and is both softer and stronger than cotton. Hemp paper lasts hundreds of years and can be recycled more often than tree pulp papers.

Hemp’s high cellulose content is a fine base for plastics – composites made with hemp are now used by Mercedes Benz to produce auto bodies and dashboards. Hempseed oil is both more nutritious and more economical than soybean, peanut, sunflower or canola oil. It burns brighter than any other plant oil, and can be used to produce non-toxic diesel fuel, paint, varnish, detergent, ink, home heating oil and lubricating oil. It is as easily converted into ethanol as corn, but can be grown in a much wider range of climates and conditions.

News organizations warn that we are facing a worldwide food shortage in part brought about by the diversion of staple food crops to ethanol and biodiesel fuel production, worsened by reliance on unsustainable agricultural practices and chemical pollution of once-rich “breadbasket” farmland. Our reliance on foreign oil has caused 2 wars in this first decade of the 21st century and killed more than a million people with violence. America alone has sacrificed more than 3,000 soldiers and left some 30,000 returning veterans with life-crippling injuries. Pollution from fossil fuel burning contributes to another few hundred thousand premature deaths worldwide every year. Global warming, if unchecked, will eventually kill tens or hundreds of millions more.

The answers we seek for the future may require a re-examination of our past. Perhaps George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were right. What might be accomplished if we did NOT spend 4 billion dollars a year trying to prevent farmers from growing industrial hemp?

Links:

Fossil Fuel Cuts Would Reduce Early Deaths, Illness, Study Says
1997: Canada Repeals Hemp Prohibition
Energy Farming in America
Hemphasis: Hemp as a Fuel/Energy Source
Vermont House Approves Hemp Bill
Hemp-based biodiesel, NOT ethanol

We’ve looked a bit at on-site electrical generation, transportation fuels and building technologies. In this installment we’ll look at some ways of putting things together into overall strategies for homestead independence.


Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems

In a previous post a short video was offered about as small, 1Kw hybrid energy system using solar and wind offered by a company in Canada. Whether you’re planning to go off-grid with storage batteries or negotiate a price for your excess production with the local utility (and get a “backwards meter”), the same thing is true of energy supplies as is true of general homestead success – diversify. So Here are five hybrid systems, some good links and some cool ideas for planning your alternatives…

16. Solar-Wind

In addition to the previously linked hybrid system from Canada’s SEMA Technology, there are many other solar-wind hybrid systems out there at varying power ratings and costs. Best place to get an overview is from DOE’s Consumer’s Guide to small hybrids. Most homesteaders in areas where the wind isn’t a constant gale will find smaller, steadier units that work well in low wind situations best for their use, while avoiding the bird kill problems of the big 2 and 3-bladed powerhouses.

Some of these (and other hybrid systems) can also be supplemented with generators that operate on biomass, waste cooking oil or methane. The handy homesteader can also make their own waste oil burners to supplement household heat, make an outdoor oven/stove, or even supply the heat for a homestead ethanol fuel still.


17. Hydro-Solar

A micro-hydro system powered either by diverted head flow or sited directly in a flowing creek can supply steady power 24 hours a day. When supplemented by solar during the day, all it takes is proper timing of your consumption habits to live on your home-generated energy budget.

Again, if the homesteader avoids using electricity for thermal energy – home/greenhouse heat, cooking, etc. – a steady power supply from micro-hydro supplemented with wind or solar (or both!) should supply enough electricity for normal homestead uses. An alternative fuel generator can supply occasional heavy loads.

18. Solar-Geoexchange

This is a hybrid “space conditioning” system that doesn’t generate electricity separately, but makes use of clever design engineering to diminish a home’s energy usage year round by using a double wall envelope and below-ground heat sink. This keeps the space at a temperature that doesn’t require air conditioning or much heat in the winter. Since these are among any home’s greatest energy uses, these ideas can be put to work in various ways by the handy homesteader. There are construction companies in many states who specialize in this system, so look around if you’re building! And for an overview, see SolarGeo.

Homesteaders lucky enough to have property over sizeable cave systems, or in geothermal hot spots, have options the rest of us don’t. But eventually thermal gradient technology such as that currently used in today’s heat pump units may be refined to work on very little electrical input, making them a good choice for homesteaders who generate their own juice.

19. Combined Heat and Power Systems

Solar Air Conditioning:

Abbreviated CHP (Combined Heat and Power), systems that make use of the waste heat generated by fuel-powered systems (boilers, furnaces, wood stoves, etc.) to increase efficiency. Depending on where you live and how you’d plan to put the heat to use, a CHP mini-system might be a worthy option. If you live north, the heat can warm your toes and cook your bread. If you live south, consider engineering a version of the thermal energy conversion technology in solar air conditioning to keep your home cool! Solar could help on hot, sunny days, but heat is heat – your CHP system can provide it.

There are CHP home systems available and in development, or again a handy homesteader could rig one up with either an internal combustion or a Stirling engine.

20. Multi-Tech Systems

Most clever homesteaders will have recognized already that diversification of energy sources provides all sorts of hybrids they could hook together to ensure an ample, steady supply of energy to their buildings and property. But for a good overview of what’s being done out there on this level, check out the Hybrid Micro Energy Project [HMEP] home energy multi-tech system.

Making use of integrated photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind and biomass, it’s easy enough to add hydro to the mix. The technology is out there to hook things together, charge batteries or go straight AC to the house or grid. It won’t totally solve America’s energy crisis, but it will solve our homestead energy needs. Big changes always start out with small steps. We can do this.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Electrical Generation
Part 2: Transportation and Motorized Equipment
Part 3: Building Technologies & Direct Alternatives
Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems
Part 5: Collective Strategies for Communities