Gunner Quinn
(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.)
Cooking with Wood and Propane
We do not regularly use our house wood stove for cooking. We can, but since we installed the wood stove, it has not been needed. Recently, I was given an old, homemade wood stove from an old-timer’s cabin. The stove is very well made. I have it outside of the shipping container and use it to cook on. It is an extremely large stove inside and out. It stays outside and will likely never be indoors again. Whoever built it, put several feet of ¾ inch steel pipe inside along the backside. There is probably five feet of precisely fitted piping, that has a snake pattern from the upper left to the lower right. Outside, two threaded male ends supply and deliver water. Apparently, this is how the old timer provided hot water in his cabin, or perhaps he used it to prime his hot water tank so that it used less propane. I plan to run a water line from one of our orchard’s standpipes to the top fitting and install a spigot on the lower so I can have hot water when cooking outside. This will also be great to have on hand when butchering chickens.
Woodstove and Chimney Care
I am not a professional, only a homeowner who tends to his own heating system. Please talk to your local stove/chimney professional if you have any questions or concerns about your stove system.
As I stated earlier, I clean my stove pipe and flu once a month, whether it needs it or not. Is this overkill? Probably, but remember, I primarily burn fir, which produces more creosote than a hardwood. I would rather clean it too often, than not enough. When cleaning your chimney pipe, make sure to clean the spark arrestor/chimney cap too. Under the right conditions, a spark could ignite the dusty buildup that collects on the spark arrestor/chimney cap.
There are several ways to clean your chimney pipe. There are manufactured logs, advertised as creosote logs, you can burn in your stove that claim to clean the chimney pipe and flu. I have never used these, so I cannot tell you how well they work. I’ve also had multiple old – tell me they put an aluminum soda can in their stove when they have a fire going. As it breaks down, it somehow cleans the flu. In my opinion, it’s hard to beat the thoroughness of scrubbing the pipe with a brush. I clean my stove pipe with a stainless-steel chimney brush attached to an expandable painter’s pole. The brush is held on with three hose clamps. This setup will likely last beyond my lifetime.
Because we primarily use fir in our stove, which is actively burning about nineteen hours a day, we produce a lot of ash. I empty the ash at least twice a week. Once a week, if I mix in some hardwood. I put all of our ash in the garden, compost pile or around the fruit trees.
Our woodstove has a glass window in the door. Every week or so, a little ash builds up on the inside of the glass. The best, and cheapest way to clean the buildup, is to take a damp paper towel, dab it in ash and rub it right on the glass in a circular pattern. After you have finished cleaning the glass, take another damp paper towel and wipe it clean. Of course, there are very caustic chemical compounds for sale that claim to do the same thing.
Other Heating Alternatives
Pellet Stoves-They have their place, but I am not a huge fan of them. First, they need electricity to run. Second, they use pellets as fuel; meaning you are dependent on supply chains. A pellet stove is a great secondary heat source alternative, but it should not be your first option. If the power goes out, or the grid goes down, you will not be able to warm your house. Pellets require manufacturing and delivery via trucks. If manufacturing ceases for any reason, trucking routes are shut down, or the trucks stop running, there are no more pellets being delivered.
Electric Heaters/Space Heaters – Similar to pellet stoves, you are reliant on outside sources. If the power goes out, you are up a tree. Yes, you can run a whole-house generator to power your electric heater, but for how long? How much fuel can you realistically keep on hand? What happens when a cold winter storm hits your area?
Propane/Natural Gas – Again, if the grid goes down, or the supply chain is disrupted, how long will your stored fuels last, if you even have the ability to store fuels? In a crisis, when the natural gas gets shut off, or you use the last of your stored liquid fuels, how will you heat your home if you only have a standard HVAC system?
There are always alternative options for any scenario, but the best options are those that make you the least dependent on others, i.e. the grid, delivery trucks, manufacturing, etc. If you are not able to harvest/gather your own firewood, there always seems to be some for sale. I imagine in a grid-down scenario, firewood may become a highly sought-after commodity. My advice for buying, trading, or bartering firewood, is to ensure it is fully seasoned and/or has a low moisture content. Invest in a cheap moisture meter and keep it on hand. Any wood going in your wood stove should not have a moisture content no higher than twenty percent. Too high of moisture content creates more steam, which lowers the efficiency of your fire, and also adds to creosote buildup. The seasoned wood in my shipping container is currently reading two to five percent moisture.
Future Fuel Projects
The shipping container woodshed has been a complete game changer for my family. Not only does it keep all of our firewood safe, secure, seasoned, and away from all elements, but it also houses all of our canning equipment, our summertime outdoor kitchen, and all our spare propane tanks. We keep several of the common twenty-five-pound propane tanks standardly used in a BBQ on hand. In addition to the small tanks, I recently purchased two, one-hundred-pound propane tanks, from the same friend we got our five-hundred-gallon tank from, for an exceptionally cheap price. $25 each. The idea behind the one-hundred-pound tanks is I can move them with a furniture dolly, filled or empty. I can hook them up to my BBQ, my outside kitchen where we can food in the summer, or even to my house if needed. Also, I can legally drive with these propane tanks in the back of my truck to have them filled without any special license or certification. Unlike gasoline and diesel, propane does not go bad. Our whole house generator runs on propane, so why not store as much as possible?
Recently, I started refilling all the green, one-pound propane bottles I have used and/or collected over the years of camping, hunting, and buying at yard sales. It takes a little time to refill a bottle correctly, but it is worth it in my opinion. Those little bottles have become quite expensive, and I use them on a regular basis. Whenever I see them at a yard sale, I buy them if they are reasonably priced. Most of the time, the bottles are used, which makes dickering the price down a little easier.
I am doing some research, and will gladly take any advice from SurvivalBlog readers, who have installed a refill system on a larger propane tank; something similar to what you see when you take your BBQ tanks to a gas station to be refilled. What systems have you used? Would you install it again? Cautionary advice? I want to get another larger propane tank that is only used to refill the five, to twenty-five-pound propane tanks around the property. I refill our BBQ tank once a year, so essentially, I would have several years worth of “fill-ups” on my property. Also, if I needed to run the whole house generator for an extended period of time, that is more fuel to have on hand.
Where the shipping container now sits, is where my wood splitting area used to be. This summer, I am developing another area, nearby. The layout of my woodsplitting area is simple. I keep a wide area free of any tripping hazards. There is nothing worse than carrying firewood, an axe, or chainsaw and tripping. I will store my log splitter in the open area when I am ready to process and split a large amount of wood. On the outside edge of this area, I have a couple wood rounds, varying between twenty-four to thirty-six inches tall. These are used for splitting wood with a maul or hatchet. The taller rounds are used for splitting kindling, when I don’t want to, or need to, hunch over. (Inside the shipping container, I have a metal kindling splitter mounted to a wood round. This stays inside to avoid rusting, getting nicks on the sharp edge and to prevent moving it multiple times a year. This past fall, when the weather was bad, I spent many hours inside the shipping container making kindling.) Nearby, I have several wood pallets on the ground.
When I cut fir, I generally bring it home in eight-foot sections. The pieces are not overly heavy for me, and it takes less time to fill the trailer this way. When I get home with a load of large, sectioned wood, I unload it and store the wood on top of the pallets. The fir sections can stay there for several years. Being elevated off the ground ensures the wood doesn’t rot as quickly, and does not have bugs burrowing in from the dirt. I have several sections of fir that have been downed for two years, and are still free of rot, bugs or dirt. Another advantage of elevating the wood with pallets, is the difficulty it creates for rodents to move in. Without fail, rodents will always find a way to make a house, or store food in an outside wood pile. Being elevated makes it easier to deter and/or trap them.
In Closing
Cutting wood is part of my soul and heritage. My great-grandfather immigrated from Sweden and became a logger. My grandfather owned a lumber yard and heated his home with an old cast iron wood stove and firewood he cut on his property. Not only is it part of my heritage, it is how I want to take care of my family. Cutting and gathering is clean, honest, and renewable. Heating my house and cooking with wood gives my family and me an alternative sense of purpose. My children are learning, at a young age, the benefits of hard work when accompanying me on woodcutting trips, splitting, stacking, hauling, and burning the firewood. They are learning how extensive and intensive physical effort in the summer leads to a slower-paced winter season. Harvesting, splitting, stacking, hauling, and burning wood for our warmth and comfort is great, but knowing I am providing for my family is the biggest reward. As long as I am physically able, I will cut my own wood to heat my house. Henry Ford once said, “Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.”
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