We got our exercise today

We ordered a skid of wood pellets for the stove. They delivered them this morning. 70 bags of wood pellets – each bag is 40lbs each.

Nothing like some good ol’ manual labour to make you feel alive. (not to mention reverting your tail bone healing back 6 days or so 88|)

We took the first half through the side door. I carried them from the driveway up the steps to the house and down the hallway to the basement door and Jeff carried them there to the basement. That was a lot of steps so I got the wheelbarrow out and wheeled them around to the basement walkout and met Jeff there.

I realized something during that process. Heating your house with wood might be cheaper… on your wallet only… it’s a lot of work and that skid of pellets might only last a month or so.

We’re still fiddling with the pellet stove. The trick is to get a really efficient burn so there are no ashes. I subscribed to a pellet stove mailing list and some people clean out one scoop of ashes a week. We are no where close to that. Maybe it is because we have an older stove. It’s a tricky thing to get the damper just right for the speed of pellet flow into the burner pot. Too much air and not enough pellets will cause it to go out, and if there is too many pellets going in then they build up in the pot and don’t burn well. We’ll keep fiddling. When it is burning well it heats up the bottom two floors of the house – maybe 18ish on the main floor – we’re not talking a sweat shop, but comfortable.

Here are some photos:

Jeff found this when he was driving around a week ago so he took me to see it today. Was it some sort of mine? It looks like it used to have power, but it was cut off. He heard there were lead mines in the area. It was neat looking, whatever it was.

Here is the first snow fall that is lingering. It’s really pretty on the spruce trees across the lake, eh? By the way, that is a blueberry field at the bottom of the photo. Most of the big clearings across the lake are blueberry fields.