Thursday, December 4, 2014

Heat, Thrice Over

December 4, 2014

I've always liked space heaters. When Linda and I were first married, the parsonage in Alma, NY had two of them, back to back, sharing a single chimney. The main one heated the dining/living room and the upstairs bedrooms through ceiling grates. The smaller one handled the kitchen, bathroom, and back bedroom, although the bathroom at the far end of the kitchen could get a bit chilly, especially since the hole in the floor for the bathtub plumbing was large enough to allow a bit of a breeze from the dirt basement below. What I liked about those old heaters was that even if the rest of the house were a bit on the cool side, there was always one place you could back up against to get really warm. The hot water baseboard heat in our Cassadaga house was nice and even, and clean. No dusty ductwork there! But until we installed the gas fireplace/stove in the kitchen, we often were uniformly chilly. We loved that fireplace so much that we brought it along with us to our present home, where it warms up the front entry room in short order.

The back room which I call the Millstone Room for the huge millstone heat sink behind the wood stove, is our favorite part of the house through the winter months. This afternoon I wheelbarrowed load after load of firewood from our stacks in the spruce grove to the woodshed nearer the house. It was just the right day for that chore; cool but dry. When the snow is deep and the wind is blowing, it'll be much more convenient having only to take a few steps out the back door to the woodshed rather than halfway down and across the driveway.

They say that wood heats you three times; when you cut it, when you split and stack it, and finally when you burn it. I can testify that by the time I was done stacking, I had worked up a sweat even in the cold. But it was sitting by the fire this afternoon that really warmed me up. Our stove is an older model lacking the fancy engineering of the super efficient modern wood stoves. Our son Nathan has one that actually recycles the heated gases and reburns what otherwise would have gone up the chimney as ash and creosote. He gets a lot of mileage out of his wood, but he needs to. It's his primary heat. Ours is only supplementary. The four or five cord we have stacked will get us through the winter in fine order. But this older stove of ours, lacking the technology to make it super efficient, has only two settings: off and full bore. When we fire it up in the morning,  we have to stuff it full and really let it get roaring before we close the doors and damp it down. Once it's warmed up however, it really throws off the heat.

I was sitting in my chair next to it actually sweating. It was like being in a sauna. We even opened the window into the spare bedroom adjacent to the Millstone Room just to let the heat dissipate a bit. I last loaded it up around four o'clock. We had dinner, then went to church for a presentation on the healing oils of the Bible, and when we got back at around 9 pm, the stove and stone were still radiating considerable heat, though the fire was long gone. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Tonight I am grateful for warmth. I've been shivering cold, and can say without hesitation, I much prefer warm. I am grateful that we have reliable gas heat for most of the house. It requires hardly any attention, and that I'm sure, will be increasingly important as we grow older. But I am also thankful for the wood stove with the millstone heat sink Pappy Okerlund installed many years ago. It warms my heart as well as my body.

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