STAYING WARM

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PhotobucketBrrrr… It has been SO COLD here the last week or more. Some days we haven’t even made it above zero! So, we’ve been keeping our fire going for quite a few days in a row this year.

I think it was about a week ago that it snowed and I took some time to try to figure out how to capture the falling snow. I didn’t do a very good job, but at least you can kind of see the size of the snowflakes in these two pictures.
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Photobucket And the wind was HOWLING and blowing the snow around. I tried to capture the blowing snow, but again, didn’t do a very good job. I’ll post the pics anyway because at least you can kind of tell how dark and perhaps cold it was in the middle of the morning!

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PhotobucketThere weren’t any birds out eating bird seed today! I’m pretty sure they’ve all gone south by now (LOL).

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And here’s the tree that seems to make it into a lot of my photos since it is right out our big bay window.
PhotobucketI have to say BRRRRRR again because it’s SO COLD! At least it’s nice and warm inside as you can see by the first picture with the fire blazing. I think I’ll post about how we heat our home. we have a couple of different systems in place.

First if it’s near 30 degrees outside, our air to air exchange unit uses warmth in the air to keep the house warm without using any fuel. I still don’t quite get how all that works because I sure wouldn’t think there’s any “warmth” in 30 degree air, but that’s what the air to air exchanger does (LOL) and I’ve gotten over trying to figure out exactly how it works (LOL).

If the temperature drops below 30 degrees then it uses a propane fueled heater to warm the air going into the house. Propane is very expensive right now so we try to not use too much of it. So, if it looks like it’s going to be cold for days on end or even just during the daytime then we use the woodstove fireplace insert which has catalytic converter of some sort that makes it super efficient.

We set the air from the central heating system to “circulate” which allows it to move the warm air (make that hot air.. upwards of 90 degrees in the living room) all around the house without using the propane. Some parts of the house don’t stay as warm as might like it, but it’s comfortable and much cheaper than using the propane heater.

Even though we stoke the fire pretty good before we go to bed, the system does usually kick into the propane mode during night keeping the house pretty warm. I have to remember to set the system to “automatic” for night time so that the propane heater will only come on when it gets down to whatever temp I set the thermostat to otherwise it tries to keep it at the temperature set for circulation which is set REALLY WARM so that the fan continues to circulate the wood heat.

I just realized when I typed this blog entry that I really do have a tendency to complicate things. Honestly. I don’t intentionally try to make things complicated. Really. I don’t. It just happens when I’m trying to save money, make things more efficient, etc. Well. You’ve been reading the blog and you already know all of that so I won’t elaborate further (LOL).

Ok.. so how do you keep your house warm in the winter?

Wow, that is cold, Cindy! It is snowing again here today. They are predicting 6-12 inches. It will make for a very pretty Christmas, but I am not sure when I am going to get the last few things done.

Brrr…. your photos DO capture the cold. Seems like this December is really hitting us with the cold winter weather HARD, isn’t it?

We use a ground source heat pump to heat and cool our house. Basically, we have a mile or so of pipe filled with water that is buried at a certain depth under ground (it is looped and looped and looped so it doesn’t actually cover a whole mile area). What that is supposed to do is keep the water at the ground temp year round (about 54 degrees or something like that) so when you heat, you are heating from that temp and when you cool, you are cooling from that temp. (as opposed to heating from 0 degrees and cooling from 95 degrees). I don’t honestly know enough about it to really tell you much except that we can heat and cool our house here in MO for the same amount of money that we used to spend heating and cooling our much smaller house in much more moderate climate Tennessee. The one BIG downside is that it is all electric, so if power goes out, well, there you are. But when we have power it is a pretty efficient, effective way to heat and cool. 🙂
More than you really wanted to know, huh? 🙂

LOL!

I remember that sort of cold from when we lived in Ontario, though our temps were moderated by the supposed ‘lake effect’ of being near Lake Ontario.

Here in the UK, we have heat from radiators, filled with water which is heated by a gas boiler or furnace. It’s pretty efficient and low cost compared to other methods, but still costs way too much!

We would love to have a wood burning stove at some point but it’s out of our reach financially. That would allow us to only heat the living room when we are all in there in the evening.

Heat goes off at 11.00pm and comes on again at 6.00am. This can make for very chilly mornings when it’s below freezing outside, but we stay warm enough at night.

I think your photos do a great job of capturing the cold…..I love the snow swirling around the tree trunks in the first couple. I miss wood heat.

We don’t worry about heat much down here…it’s cooling the house off that is the more consistent problem. LOL

Your woodstove sure looks cozy. And your heating system sounds extremely efficient.

Unfortunately, we were forced to eliminate the fireplace/woodstove option in our house plans (due to lack of funds) when we built. So we rely on propane and a traditional forced-air furnace:( I imagine we would have spent less money overall if we would have had the $ to install the woodstove from the beginning. Oh well. Someday.

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