steveq

yes, we used to roast first years.

sir_eccles

Yup, if your apartment is near the boiler you are roasting but if you're right at the end of the line you are complaining to the management.

Karrie72

Pretty sure we don't, that's a great idea though...

scrubbedexpat099

Makes you wonder how many people have a moisture meter?

That is very expensive, I burn wood, a lot of wood but at that price I would seriously reconsider.

Propane is about $1 for 50,000btus and a bit, averaging out that works out at 70,000btus for wood but my LPG Boiler is 98% efficient. My stoves are not vented with plastic.

bevinva

We moved into a house with baseboard heating last year and were worried it would be expensive. We found we didn't even turn it on upstairs in the bedrooms and only in the bathrooms when someone was taking a shower. Don't have a fireplace here but wood is about $175 a cord. When we did have a fireplace we would just pick up wood here and there people where giving away when they had a tree taken down, having our own log splitter helped. Still haven't used the heat yet this year.

Lord PercyPercy

Every year I have a battle with the missus, come December/January (Florida native) she's wanting to put the heating on during the day. It's rarely below 55° out and I don't think I've ever seen it below 60° on the thermostat.

At night sure, stick the heating on, we get a fair few frosty nights where we are, but I wont have it during the day. Stick a jumper on and get active.

However, I always find it amusing to see Floridians wearing ear-muffs with temperatures in the 50's. The Canadians who come down in the winter are still on the beaches.

Pulaski

I work with a Florida transplant who starts wearing a wool overcoat around this time of year, and he will keep wearing until late April. Meanwhile I am still wearing a short sleeved shirt. .... When it gets colder I will eventually switch to a long sleeved shirt, and a fleece jacket liner. On the coldest days (maybe 10-20 days over the winter) I wear a quilted jacket liner, and gloves. I have not worn a "coat" to go to work in at least three or four years!

Pulaski

My parents moved the family down south. They're soft as shïte down there!

Bob

Well you can get rubbish wood, or stuff only seasoned a year or less for peanuts, but that stuff is crap and doesn't put out any real heat and burns quickly.

The decent hard wood stuff that has been seasoned for 3 or so years is what costs the premium.

Pulaski

If someone is being charged a premium for firewood seasoned for more than one year (summer), they're being ripped off. One summer and wood will be about as dry as it is going to get. Second paragraph on seasoned firewood

Bob

For cut and split wood.

Most of it isn't split though, it's stump off cuts which do take longer to dry and most let it season naturally, uncovered, or minimally covered under a tarp.

Getting it split, delivered and stacked is a big part of the premium cost around here, where I am, as most people don't have the room to do it themselves. Less of a issue for folks up in Maine though, generally.

kodokan

Another one smiling at the notion of heating here. The aircon is set to 80, and runs a little in the late afternoon/ early evening, as it gets a little muggy. Still sleeping under an empty duvet cover, although there've been a couple nights when I've added a second empty duvet cover at the foot of the bed, ready to pull up at 4am. I'll probably put the duvets back in by the end of Oct.

I find October to be the 'cognitive dissonance' month here - on the one hand, I spent today cleaning the patio furniture and outdoor kitchen, ready for the outdoor living season. On the other, I ordered all the dried fruits I need for the Christmas cake and mincemeat... so it should be cold *confused*

We never run any heating or cooling at night, just adjust sleeping covers from none (here in summer when it's 90+ degrees at night) to 13 tog duvet and blanket (winter in Switzerland at well below freezing). Although my ideal bedroom is cooler, at the 9 tog duvet 'turn the light off and briskly jump back under the covers' range, I can sleep in anything in a 40 degree range, if needed. Keeps the costs down, and stops the machinery booming away all night.

WEBlue

I have a question. We've been told that household pipes will freeze over the winter if we don't keep the house thermostats set to around 55F .... or some say 50F is the absolute lowest we can risk. Is this true? (We have a wood stove and hot-water baseboards, if that makes any difference.)

Jerseygirl

If we are away in winter I usually set the thermostat to 55f and have never had a problem...we have forced air heating.

Pulaski

That sounds unduly conservative, though it depends on whether the pipes are insulated, how much water you use, and where the pipes are located. Certainly in Canada, pipes should not be located embedded in exterior walls, but down here it is common. For water to actually freeze the temperature inside the house where the pipes are located actually has to get down to freezing, but if the pipes are in an exterior wall, and not well insulated maybe you really do need to keep the temperatures at 50°F or more, though even in my opinion, that is pretty dämned cold for indoors! If you have pipes in a crawl space or unheated basement you could hang a 100w (or 2x60w) light bulb in the area as it will generate enough heat to make a difference without spending a fortune on extra heating for the whole house, especially if you're going away for a while and want to turn the heat down.

A neighboring house to me has had occasional problems with water freezing in the well head, in the middle of the front yard, so sometimes it is just a bad installation situation, and that house now has the well cover filled with attic insulation wrapped in plastic! In seriously cold weather they run a power cord out to feed an incandescent light which generates enough heat to keep the pipe from freezing, as I described above.