More progress down in the basement today. I managed to get the rolling lumber rack completely primered, using up the rest of the older white primer in the process. The rack therefore has some blue primer too in this picture:



The blue primer is actually exactly the same color as the workbench paint I have. A kindly hardware store clerk had offered to tint the primer a paler version but by mistake the end result was nearly identical, lol. This makes it really confusing to paint over. Luckily the blue primer is almost gone too. My Spouse says that aboard ships they use pink-tinted primer to make it absolutely different from any normal ship interior color.



The underside of the server rack shelf got its 2nd coat today as well. It's looking pretty good and I hope to paint the top tomorrow. I can't wait to put it to use!

Also in basement news today, my Spouse brought the electric wood splitter down to the basement to start tackling the huge heap of wood that was too wide to fit in the boiler this year.



This little guy is just big enough to split an 18" long log. It was bought new but insanely cheaply and it has made up for its low budgetness by being exceedingly high strung and temperamental. It tends to break and/or require rebuilding on a regular basis. Here's to hoping it behaves much more nicely here in Wisconsin where it'll mostly be indoors. In Colorado it lived outside all winter on dusty bare ground, or in a snowdrift.

I really shouldn't complain. This thing is WAY less work than chopping all the wood manually using a splitting maul, which is what I did before we bought this. LOL

I have been suspecting for a while now we've been having a lot of days of inversion layer here in Ashland WI. This is because right around Christmas the wood boiler started to get very difficult to use because smoke would rush the wrong way out the wood loading door whenever I opened it. I remembered this happening this same time last year too and, unlike problems caused by creosote buildup or whatever, that resolved itself within a couple months.

Well, today I finally had proof of my suspicions. I noticed that the NWS was predicting freezing rain for us despite a high of 17 degrees. When I went outside I could see that the smoke was clustering around the chimney top, then falling to one side instead of rising away. D'oh!

(crossposted to weathernerds).

Since the wood rack is now empty of all immediately usable wood, it is time to throw all the extra wood outside down into the basement. In procrastination of preparation for this I have swept out the wood rack completely:



The amount of sawdust, bark, and splinters that accumulated underneath was huge. I had two large dustpans full to toss into the boiler when I was done.

The wood rack has held up really well and I had been planning to touch up the paint each year before loading anymore wood but it sure doesn't need it at all this first year. The workbench paint I used is incredibly tough stuff. And incredibly bright blue!



There were some medium to large size sticks that hadn't been used yet, which I set aside so they won't get mixed with the new incoming logs. This is partially because they're used differently (only at the beginning of firing the boiler, not as much when it's in full stride) but also because I don't want to physically mix wood loads. This way any wood that goes unused this spring will be from this year's batch, not the previous year's. With any luck this will allow us to avoid a replay of the Great Beetle Disaster of 2008.



The "needs split" logs have also had to move yet again. They are probably starting to feel like the unwanted stepsisters of the wood pile. Luckily they should all be taken care of in the next month or so, when my Spouse comes back and puts the wood splitter to good use!

The good news is, after pouring a 4th gallon of water into the bucket I came downstairs the next morning and found a beautiful half gallon of brown water had accumulated in the jug under the spigot. According to the instructions I found on the web this is "lye water" and can be boiled down to get a strong base usable in soaps etc.



There's only one problem. This stuff appears to be totally incompatible with my pH test kit. I tested some and the pH test powder just kept precipitating out and sinking to the bottom no matter how many times I shook it:



Note the gray layer at the bottom.



The liquid did not change color at all either, but stayed brown. So I guess I will not make any more "lye water" (if it even is) until I obtain a better method of testing the pH. Either that or, I could use the old fashion method of trying to float an egg on it after it's been boiled down for a while. Uhhh no thanks.

I did a lot of miscellaneous stuff today such as shoveling 3" of snow off the sidewalk, paying the bills, and walking down to the post office downtown to mail my in-laws' Christmas present. But in between throwing loads of wood in the wood boiler I got this little project finished off: the holder for the spray bottle on the log spray station.



I drilled 2 holes in the leg of the spray station. The lower one needed a small standoff because the cup I am using (a recycled lamp housing) wasn't a perfect cylinder but had an indent. The standoff is a piece of thin wood with a hole matching the mounting hole and fitting over it, and then is attached using a drywall screw. I drilled and recessed the hole first so it wouldn't split the wood or stick out.



Here it is with the cup attached. I cut some carriage bolts to size and attached them with nuts on the backside of the leg. I'll touch up the nuts, and the sides of the standoff, with blue paint next time I do a project involving that color of paint. 



Here is the entire spray station with the bottle installed in its new home. I've been using the station for a while now and it works great! A small amount of sawdust appears to be stuck permanently to the trough but there has been no damage to the paint otherwise. I sweep out the loose stuff once a day when I fire the boiler, since it's generally all dry from the day before at that time.

That's all for now!

So at this point the wood rack is about half-empty, not counting the wood that was too big to burn without splitting it further first.



The back row has a lot of very small wood because we had a bunch of small trees cleared off the back lot line last spring and this is the wood left over from that. It remains to be seen if it's dry enough to be burned yet or if it needs to be cured a 2nd year. I think it probably is.



I have gotten pretty good at sorting out the leavings of the wood stove for processing. First I scoop out the ashes and sift it through a slotted cat litter scoop (not shown) into the plastic bucket. This produces a nice white or light gray ash that has few charcoal lumps in it. The lumps go into the small bucket on left.  Once finished those go back to get burned again. Meanwhile I have been pouring a gallon of water into the plastic bucket each time I add ashes. This should theoretically cause lye water to come out the spigot at the bottom.

Unfortunately the ashes seem to be very absorbant because no water has come out of the spigot yet and 3 gallons have now been poured in. At some point I will have to just keep adding water until it finally coughs some up.. or overflows. LOL

Definitions of potash on the Web:

• Any compound containing potassium.
  www.zulumoon.com/glossary/p-glossary.htm
• Potassium carbonate. It is an alternative to soda as a source of alkali in the manufacture of glass. Potash glass was particularly suited to cutting and engraving.
  www.steincollege.com/glassdef.htm
• Prepared by evaporating the lixivium of wood ashes in iron pots
  www.ifdn.com/teacher/glossary.htm
• This term generally refers to potassim oxide (K 2 O). Wood ashes are also a source of potassium.
  edis.ifas.ufl.edu/HS123
• Potash is used primarily as an agricultural fertilizer (plant nutrient) because it is a source of soluble potassium, one of the three primary ...
  www.energyweb.net/mining/jargon/default.asp
• Commonly used for the chemical potassium carbonate (K2C03), a component of oil emulsions.
  coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/ERIC/gdaglos.html
• A form of potassium carbonate, also known as potash or in its more refined versions, salts of tartar or pearlash. It was the precursor to baking powder. Developed in 1742, potassium carbonate is a white salt that forms a strong alkaline solution when combined with water. ...
  www.eddybles.com/culictionary/2007/1/5/a-dictionary-devoted-to-culinary-words-phrases.html
• Potassium compounds mined for fertilizer and for use in the chemical industry.
  www.intierrainvestor.com/glossaryp.asp
• Usually made from wood ashes. One of the three main minerals in fertilizer. A term used to denote potassium.
  discoverorganicgardening.com/glossary.html
• a potassium compound often used in agriculture and industry
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• Potash (or carbonate of potash) is an impure form of potassium carbonate (K2CO3).
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash
• the water-soluble part of the ash formed by burning plant material; used for making soap, glass and as a fertilizer; an impure form of potassium carbonate (K2CO3) mixed with other potassium salts; (archaic) in the names of compounds of the form "... ...
  en.wiktionary.org/wiki/potash

-----

Greetings!

The wood boiler produces a lot of ash. Not as much as I'd have expected, because it's fairly efficient at burning stuff, but every 2-3 days a small bucket is partially filled. After some consideration (about a year's worth), I have decided upon a plan to get some more use out of our wood ashes, which are currently treated a bit like hazmat. What we do now is put them in a sealed metal bucket to cool down, then after 2-3 days (when the bucket is needed for the next batch) they are dumped into a much larger sealed metal garbage can in the garage. Last year I accumulated one and a half garbage cans of ashes; I believe a full winter of burning would produce about 3 garbage cans full in total.

Well, it turns out that potassium from wood ashes (Potash) are useful for a number of interesting self-sufficiency related substances, including garden fertilizer, homemade soap, and caustic potash (which is very similar to lye). With precision craftmanship one could even use these to go on and produce say for example, homemade biodiesel. Potash production used to be a really big deal. Millions of acres of New York state used to be covered in hardwood forests, but it was cut down in the late 1700's to burn just to make potash! Now cheaper chemicals are used instead in most industries.

My original intention was to place the dead ashes in either the compost heap or on the lawn using a lawn spreader, during the summer. However I hesitated this last summer because I had read there could be problems with the large amount of salts still contained within, tending to accumulate. My original thought was to perhaps run the lawn spreader with the ashes right before a heavy rain, so that the salts would all be dissipated. So might the potassium, but at least the ashes would be gone ;-) The actual scheduling of this proved awkward however. I define awkward as, it never seemed to happen for a host of different reasons, and by the end of the summer I still had all the ashes in the garbage cans as well as no room in the compost heap anymore. D'oh!

The New Plan:
I had read extensively on the web for instructions regarding lye and potash and it is apparent that the commercial means of producing such stuff is better and cheaper. The instructions available on the web were mostly along the lines of "well I never bothered to try this, but here they are... let me know if it works". I took each one with a grain of salt as a result, and designed my system based on the broadest possible interpretation that included all caveats and instructions read on the most reliable seeming sources. Believe me, I would not do this at all if it had seemed to be a very dangerous reaction but the main thing appears to be the handling of the the more caustic versions safely afterward. Not getting it in eyes or on skin for example. Luckily the liquid seems to be much easier to handle safely than dry potash would be.

I am taking this easy, one step at a time. I am hoping to find someone who would like to buy (or hopefully, trade) my Potash off me before I have actually suceeded in making something, so there's no need to rush.

The first step is to soak the ashes and obtain the relevant liquid. I am going for the $13 solution: $10 for a bucket and $3 for a plastic spigot. The potash will attack metals, so they cannot be used. Ideally wood would be the material but I thought I'd better prove the concept and find someone to trade something fun or useful with before investing in an oak barrel!

NOTE: Until this succeeds (or doesn't) I can't recommend anybody else try it. Know what I mean? Play it safe OK.



Here are some plastic spigot parts of the standard garden hose variety, as well as a double washer. My plan was to place this at the bottom of a bucket in which the soaking would occur. The shut off valve would allow releasing the water into a container or not, as needed. The nipple would allow attaching a small hose to the output if needed to guide the liquid down into the waiting receptacle. I may just screw an elbow on there instead though.



I cut off the end of the piece that was going inside the bucket, because I will not be attaching a hose inside there so it's just extra bulk. I wanted the flow of water out to be as unimpeded as possible. After sawing the end off with a hacksaw I used a matte knife to trim away the loose plastic bits.



Here's what it looks like installed in the bucket. This is a new clean bucket purchased for the purpose.



Here's a closeup of the rubber ring I used. It's got a groove down the rim to accept the edge of the plastic bucket. This seemed to work great and I tested it afterward by filling the bucket with water and watching for leaks. All looks good!




This paper is the moral equivalent to the rocks or marbles in the bottom of a flowerpot: it is intended to prevent too much of the ashes from escaping out the spigot. Straw was the recommended substance for this purpose so if the paper does not work I'll go buy a bale to keep in the garage. 



Here's the first batch of ashes inside. I did a very coarse sift to get the charcoal bits out so I could throw those back in the boiler. I will probably wait about a week (2 more stove cleanings) so that the bucket is filled before I pour water in, for the sake of getting repeatable results in the future.



Once it's ready to go I will pour a gallon of water in the top and close it again, then place the jug underneath the spigot to catch the seepage as it comes out. The first soaking will produce the strongest base and each subsequent one will be weaker with a point at which it's not worth it to soak it any more times. The potassium carbonate water would then be stored in sealed containers until it is time to boil it to adjust the pH.

I am keeping an eye out for the appropriate lab equipment to reduce the water content more safely than just an open boiling-pot. However that stuff is really expensive so that part will take some patience!

This morning marked the first time I have ever woken up and found the wood boiler still in command of the house heating. This is a huge breakthrough!



The way it works its, the gas and wood boilers are in parallel and the gas boiler will come online any time the wood boiler is not ready. Not ready for the wood boiler generally means the boiler water isn't hot enough to be good at heating the house, as determined by some limit settings on the wood boiler itself.

The above photo shows our really scary looking and very home-made grade HVAC controller, which was apparently hodded together by some enterprising energy conservation dude two or three (or even four?) decades ago. Whoever it was, they are long gone. My dear Spouse plans to replace this with a computer version at some point, but it works well enough for now. So far the only issue has been some of the neon lamps burning out and needing replacement last year.

If you click on the photo and see the closeup, it shows lights on for WOOD CIRC, WOOD NOT OVERTEMP (ack, double negatives in control equipment, gotta love it) and WOOD READY are all on, which means wood heat! The red GAS CIRC would have been on otherwise. The four zone lights come on and off depending on whether those thermostats are requesting heat right at that moment or not.

So yeah, this was the first time I had ever woken up in the morning and found we were still on wood heat without anything having been put in overnight -- thanks to the new gaskets!



The boiler water temperature gauge on the boiler itself. It shows the water (inside the pipes that go to the radiators) is a little over 140 degrees, which is the cutoff for switching over to gas heat. I often found it hovering just under 140 in mornings in the past, but that is not very impressive because it's not that hard to retain heat once the wood boiler is cut out of the loop and the water sits inside the insulated firebox instead of passing through radiators!

When I opened the fire box I discovered a couple handfuls of orange coals and otherwise completely empty. I had only slept for 6 hours that night and I am sure it would not have lasted a full 8 on the basis of those few coals. Also with that little to work with I basically had to start the fire from scratch with tinder etc. Even so, this demonstrates that with the new gaskets a person would only have to get up and re-fill the boiler once after 4 hours to keep it running all night.

Do we want to do that? Unfortunately as age 40 approaches I am not sure I am competent to be using fire in the middle of the night as I get super groggy. I could do it just fine if I adopted a 4 hours on, 4 hours off sleep schedule like they do aboard ships, but as my Spouse points out that is probably not worth it. Even letting it burn down over 6 hours, that only leaves maybe 3 hours it'd be on gas heat and then I'd be starting it again the next morning.

Plus, I need to clean it out every 2-3 days anyway, which would require letting it run down.

I think this is great compared to having to put wood in every 1 hour or having to worry about overheating though ;-)

This morning before firing the wood boiler I installed the new smaller gasket on the air intake flap at the bottom. As I had predicted the correct size was 5/16" or 1/16" smaller than the stuff used on the bottom door. However I am sure the really small stuff (1/4") will come in handy for something else someday.



Here it is with the flap being held firmly shut while the glue dried. It's nice to see logs doing something helpful with their deadweight besides making me work harder. The idea of holding the door fully closed was so that the gasket would be formed and shaped in a way that was guaranteed to allow the flap to close fully and seal tightly just in case it ever needs to. In the course of closing it fully and tightly for the first time to accomplish that, I made an important discovery:




The nut (indicated by arrow) on the front of the air flap does not lead to a latch as I had previously thought. The bolt it is connected to actually touches a featureless strike plate that sticks up, and provides a stop for the door. I had to retract it by 2-3 full turns to get the door to close all the way. I believe the purpose of the nut is to fine-tune how much air gets through when the flap is "fully" closed.

Once the glue was dried I fired up the boiler as usual and experienced my first day of burning with all gaskets completely functional. I hadn't really experienced the full effect of the new gaskets on the top two doors before because with nothing in the air flap air was just flying through there.

I think it will take me several days to really understand the changes but today it was immediately apparent that the equipment's temperature self-regulation is way better than before. In fact every time I came downstairs today, regardless of the amount of wood left in the boiler or what stage of burn it was at, the water temperature was always at exactly the same place. Likewise I never caught it overheating and heat dumping even once, regardless of how much I stuffed in it.

Another obvious change is that it now has noticeably better fuel efficiency. I think what it is doing is quickly converting the wood to charcoal, then slowly consuming the charcoal to heat the boiler water. More than once I came downstairs and peeked in to find the blackened bulk of the wood still there, with the undersides all glowing orange. This actually makes a certain amount of sense considering the boiler was designed to also burn coal. According to the troubleshooting chart in the boiler manual, something is wrong if a coal fire burns out after only 3 hours, and since I was accustomed to reloading wood every 1.5 to 2 hours, it makes sense that I would be getting longer burns if it's using it like coal now.

If what I just said is complete BS, sorry ;-)

One potential issue is that along with less open flame and slower fuel consumption, the output air is unfortunately not getting as hot as I'd want to see in the stack.



(That pipe is actually horizontal but I've rotated the photo to make it easier to read the dial).

Both the guy who installed our new fangled wood stove in Colorado, and also Mr. Chimney Sweep, Ashland Wisconsin's best-loved chimney cleaning fellow, emphasized keeping the dial in the middle (white band) range to avoid a dangerous creosote buildup. I got to experience first hand what a drag it is when it does build up in Colorado, where our chimney was of much narrower diameter and it was actually possible to get arterial blockage up there. :-X

As can be seen here, our output air temperature was not that hot today, below 300F. This also means the Anti Creo Soot, which activates at 300 degrees, was not in force either. Not good!

So one of my tasks in the next few days will be learning to trick the new, improved version of our boiler into emitting a judicious amount more waste heat. 1 or 2 hundred more degrees would be perfect since we're using the ACS. If we hadn't been (as we didn't in Colorado) we'd have to push 550 as much as possible. Luckily that's necessary now.

Since it is basically done (and was very in the way) I moved the log spray station over by the wood room, where it will be living from now on.



In this picture it is wearing a lawn bag "hat" to protect it from the spraying until the paint has fully cured, which takes about a week. For the same reason I won't be putting the stuff in the bottom shelf right away. It'll just stick to it after a couple days of the weight bearing down. The handle has been added in this picture, but not the spray bottle cupholder yet.



As a note the plastic bag was doing a great job as a temporary spray station for the past couple weeks. I draped it between two boxes of wood which formed a little trough under it and it worked just fine. Aside from having to bend over all the time and having a plastic bag strewn about the place.



Here's the lamp housing cupholder for the new spray station getting painted. I got the additional mounting hole it needed drilled also. You can't tell in this picture but the cup is standing up on top of a small block of wood I taped to the underside so that I could paint the entire thing in one go.

I cut some small carriage bolts the right length to fasten this cup to the leg of the spray station. I should be able to do that tomorrow provided I can get the threads fixed up OK. At that time the project will be complete!

Today I painted the log spray station bright blue!  The background of this picture has a great view of the drill press table and the unfinished rolling workbench. The log spray station is almost completely finished now. I might add a few coats of clear coat on the trough to protect it a little bit. It is also going to have a handle for lifting the non-rolling end and a cup to hold the sprayer.



Here's the handle being painted black. 



Here's the cup that the spray bottle will live in. It hasn't been painted yet because it needs a few holes drilled in it first. This is the housing from a disused desk lamp. I placed the innards in the lamp parts tub for later re-use. It's actually going to be mounted on the end opposite to the handle, not on the same end as shown in the drawing below.



All of my projects have drawings. This one is fairly typical, done in pencil on lined paper with a title, measurements, and a date of initial conception. If there are a lot of repetitious parts (as for shelving) and particularly if I need to buy wood, there'll be lists of parts too. Sometimes if it's a pretty complicated project I use a ruler for straight lines. I don't bother to try making these drawings to scale as I personally don't need that to visualize the project properly, and the numbers are all I look at when it comes to measuring for cuts.

Notice the start date on this one was nearly 2 months ago. If you ask my Spouse, you'll probably hear that makes this a blazing fast project for me. I prefer to think of it as uh... going well! :D

Since moving to my "forever home" and becoming more organized than I have ever been before in my life, the project drawings have an actual 3-ring binder they live in, in chronological order and divided by "pending" and "completed". At some point when I clean out my oldest files still in the storage locker, I'll get to organize 20 years of papers like this into that binder. That will be genuinely fun!

Today I sanded, re-filled, re-sanded, then primered the log spray station:



Tomorrow I will paint it bright blue! I was thinking of painting the trough part a different color just to somewhat disguise the fact that wood chips will be accumulating in there. Tan maybe. Luckily that part will be getting the most beat up so I'll have plenty of excuses to repaint it in the future if I pick badly.

The weather has been below 40 degrees the past couple days and should be for the next several so I've been getting lots of wood burning days in. I believe the new gaskets make a big difference in how much extra air gets in there because you can now hear the air hissing in when the fire is really burning well. Of course, the bottom flap with no gasket in at all cannot be closed tightly. I did go ahead and order smaller gasket from McMaster Carr. Their website is really neat. Try putting part number 8818K46 in the search box to the left hand side of their website. It immediately pops up a nice catalog page with BRAIDED FIBERGLASS ROPE SEAL, 3/8" DIAMETER highlighted and a little box to enter how many feet you want. It turns out the wide and narrow rope I had was only 1/16" different in width, so I ordered the next 2 sizes down. One or the other should be the right size for that bottom flap's gasket.

I have been experimenting with loading the boiler in front as well as in the back. This allows it to burn longer and more evenly. It does require raking coals from the back over to the front from time to time. I was not able to do this last year because it was guaranteed to make it overheat, but between the new gaskets and a number of adjustments made to the automated controls at the end of the heating season last year (mostly widening the window between "wood boiler ready" and "wood boiler overtemp") that appears to be much less of a problem this year. Also occasional overheating is less of a pain than it used to be because the 2nd floor zone has been taken off the heat dump. That means my office doesn't turn into a raging sweatbox. Always a plus!

In other wood burning related news, I had to resort to labelling the logs that are too big to fit in the boiler opening so I wouldn't keep grabbing those ones and trying them. My Spouse has a special relationship with the wood splitter that I would really rather not get in the middle of. For one thing I'd probably break it, and also it is likely to get oil all over the basement floor, and I'd really rather not have been responsible for that happening ;-)



Don't laugh! I printed a bunch of these on a sheet and cut them up, and put them in an envelope nearby so I can staple them to each wide load log as I run across them. They then go in the wood room where they will be out of the way until February when my Spouse can come back and tickle the wood splitter just the way it likes.



There are also a few that will likely need chainsawing but they are way down at the bottom of the heap and I won't likely have gotten to those by then.

I worked on the log spraying station some more today. First I took the rotary disc sander and took off some bits of the underside of the trough that were sticking out too far. Then I was able to screw on the trough bottom cover pieces that I had cut the previous time I worked on this. The other thing I did today on it was cut the plywood bottom for the shelf that is below the trough. I did all this while the unit was upside down for ease of access and drilling.



Here it is, essentially done but still upside down. In the background you can see two previous finished projects, the drill press table and the household supplies shelving (with water jugs on the bottom shelf). To the right at rear is one end of the rolling workbench, which is still very much a work in progress. That little green and black guy on the floor is my planer, which needs its own little blue table built as well. Things to do, things to do!



I did all of the filling and such and should be able to sand and primer the log spray station tomorrow. As a note I wrote to Saver Systems, the makers of Anti-Creo-Soot, and described my project, asking if I could get away with using regular Latex paint on the trough or if the ACS would eat it. A fellow wrote back very promptly the next day saying it should be just fine, as the ACS isn't activated until it reaches 300 degrees. What great service!

A far cry from when I wrote to Green Giant with some questions about one of their products. I got a brain dead form letter back from Betty Crocker (apparently the owners of Green Giant now) that was notionally regarding the topic I wrote about, but did not answer my questions whatsoever. It was clear someone just cast their eye randomly over the page and punched the "send form letter" button for whichever topic caught their eye first.

As a result of my adventures in Dentristry (receiving end) earlier, I was too tired to accomplish much but I did get all the wood cut for the underside of the trough and it is partially installed. Here's what it looks like with most of the pieces in place and some of them screwed in:



Before I can go further I need to trim a little off some of the underside pieces of the trough where they stick out a little. I'll do that with this really huge powerful disk sander we have. This thing is insane. In Colorado I used it to shave full size 2x8's down to match dimensional 2x8's on our deck post-installation. One thing that is a little odd about this monster sander is it has a dual position toggle switch for power. The first time it got used in this house (about 2 years after it got moved from Colorado) it was sitting face down on the floor when the cord was plugged in and it took off at a gallop, the switch having been in the "on" position. Good thing I don't like vinyl flooring anyway. Cough.

The log spray station will, of course, be painted bright blue.

Later tonight I worked on the log spray station some more. I realized I'll probably need that if I am going to be using firewood now. :-p

When I last left it, the basic frame had been built, with the four legs having diagonal cuts on top to accomodate the trough shape where the log would be held:



Unfortunately what I discovered was that these leg-tops had to be somewhat lower than the inner edge of the horizontal 2x4's if I wanted the top of the trough itself to be flush. So my first task today was to take a hacksaw and chisel and cut down the 4 legs to be the right height:



The above picture shows one of them in progress. It really wasn't that bad to do but it sure took me several days to work up the heart to dive into the task.

Once that had been accomplished, I was able to put in the 4 sides of the trough:







I was ecstatic when I reached this point because it meant I could return the table saw blade to the 0 degree position and put the guard back on. That thing is scary when it is not covered.

Also I had time to do part of the filling and such:



I will need to do a bit more construction on the underside, to provide the trough with some personal privacy and to add a shelf about 6" off the ground for the spare bottles of Anti Creo Soot. But the most difficult part has been accomplished!

It's not supposed to get above 36F in the next week or so, so I decided it was time to fire the wood boiler. It can get really difficult to run when the temperatures are above 40. The boiler is totally foolproof to start. Either that, or I have gotten better at starting fires with a few years of practice. Since it was extremely difficult to get the hang of it when I first started learning on our old wood stove in Colorado, I figured I'd post my tried and true procedure here in visual form in the hopes of helping someone else out.

Here's the maw of the beast. The "teeth" are the underside of the heat exchanger where the water travels through the boiler to get er... "boiled" by the fire before heading out to the radiators in the rest of the house.



Old black coals from previous fires are OK in any amount. Some white ash is OK but there can't be a thick bed of that as it is no longer flammable and will suffocate the fire. This boiler has a grate through which white ash can be pressed and it collects in a removable tray underneath. That's what the other, bottommost door is for, to remove the ashes once every 2-3 days. I find two is better than three. I think having sufficient airspace underneath the fire helps. 



To start the fire first I take a large scoop of shredded paper. The picture above shows the huge garbage can that holds the paper. It has a tight fitting lid to keep all the flammables contained between uses. I stockpile lawn bags of shredded paper during the year for refills so I don't run out over the winter. Prime harvest time for paper shreds is between the new year and tax time! The "scoop" is a medium sized saucepan. Having a scoop is ideal because moving the paper manually results in tiny bits of paper all over everything. I try to avoid spreading flammables all over in an uncontrollable fashion :-p



Next  I place a few pieces of the smallest tinder wood on top. This can be anything from sticks or big splinters to the smallest pieces of scrap lumber. Firewood of all kinds needs to be very, very dry. We store ours indoors with a dehumidifier running.



Light the paper underneath the low ends of the wood in 3-4 different spots, as shown. Leave the door open until the small pieces of wood are "fully engaged" in the fire which means they are each individually lit on fire. This should be a matter of less than a minute.

At this point, quickly add 2-3 pieces of each increasing size of wood, closing the door between each addition and adding more when each new size is fully engaged. Again this should be a fairly quick process.

Once enough medium sized stuff has turned to red coals, they can be crunched up and the smaller full size logs put in on top. You want 2-3 inches of coals.



Here's a picture of the fire running well with smaller full-size logs on. Unfortunately the flash somewhat overpowers the coals but the entire mass underneath is all glowing bright orange like an electric range burner on the 12 setting. At this point, every time the existing wood has burnt enough to be shrunken somewhat in bulk, I push them to the back and add 1-2 more big ones in front leaning on the back pile. The above picture shows the old logs pushed back but before the new ones have been added.

As a note one would ordinarily peek at the fire through the little window provided to see how it's doing. I show the door wide open because it's easier to take a picture that way ;-)



Unfortunately the bottom air flap was not closing fully with the new gasket in place. If you remember from my entry on the subject of gasket replacement, I did think the gasket I had was too big for this door and it turns out that was the case. In the picture above it can be seen that even with the chain fully relaxed, something was preventing the door from falling all the way closed.



This is another angle that better shows the relaxation of the control chain that the boiler uses to open and close its door as needed. 

Because the door wouldn't close all the way, that meant it was impossible to choke the fire down when it was getting too hot. This resulted in the boiler being unable to maintain the requested water temperature without the heat running away. So on the advice of my dear (much more boiler-proficient) Spouse I took my trusty monster needlenose and ripped the too-thick gasket out until such a time as I can obtain the smaller size. Once able to close properly the boiler maintained the correct heat quite nicely.

In other, only somewhat related news, I had to replace the light bulb in the wood room today. With this replacement this means there are only 2 non-fluorescent lights left in the basement. This basement is an ideal spot for compact fluorescents because when I am here alone they get turned on once in the morning and off once at night. Very low impact for the little guys. What will not be low impact will be if I slam a piece of firewood into that one in the wood room.



Reaffirm note to self: get light bulb cage for wood room.

Reaffirm other note to self: repair wood room ceiling.

Now, in our family I am famously the person who supposedly starts stuff and doesn't finish it. I don't personally agree with this assessment; I think that what I do is retain a long memory of what needs to be done, and attack whichever project I feel I'll work hardest at on a given day. But whichever the explanation, my supposed monopoly on this behavior is totally fictitious. LOL. I seem to remember that I was the one who did the bulk of (and finished) the most heinous jobs of moving us from Minneapolis to Glencoe, from Glencoe to Colorado, and from Colorado to Wisconsin, while my dear Spouse was conveniently on the other side of the country or if possible, the planet.

Recently this phenomenon has taken on a hair raisingly local turn as well. Imagine my surprise when, shortly after my Spouse took the initiative and placed 4 of our lighted ceiling fans on eBay for auction, the call came from the Union for an assignment on a ship at sea. Hmm.. someone will have to take down, disassemble and ship all these devices, who would that be? :-p

And so, along those same lines, we come to today's project: replacing the gaskets on the wood boiler. This is something it never would have occurred to me to do on my own, probably due to a lack of boilers in my early life. But when presented with the information that they were worn out, and the previously-purchased supplies sitting on top of the kindling stack in full view, OK.



Here's the old gasket on top. You can't really see it because it is dirty, but it basically sits in a channel corresponding to the lip of the boiler opening. When the door closes, that lip pushes into the channel and sits in a nest made by the gasket. The gasket itself is some kind of white ropy material that I hope wasn't asbestos. This is the top half of the boiler into which the wood is shoved and all poking and arranging activities occur. The little arched opening in the lower middle is where you can open a little door to see how the fire is doing. This works way better than I had expected.

The boiler is the only bright blue object in the basement that is not my fault!



There was a gasket on the bottom half as well. This half is where the wood ash gets cleaned out every couple of days. There is also an air flap that is automatically opened and closed to allow more or less air in depending on how much heat (fire) is needed to keep the water temperature right.

This is a really cool boiler but it is no longer sold in the United States. My Spouse contacted the manufacturer in Europe and they were very nice and even sent literature.



The first step was to remove the old gaskets. I did this with a flat head screw driver and some very stout needlenose pliers. Much of it peeled out easily but the part over on the left hand side of the bottom (corresponding to the hinge side of the door, plus where there was clearly some rust action) was tough. There were two different sizes of rope, wide on the top door and narrower on the lower.



Some of the channel was left in much better shape. This part has nice shiny iron showing and little to no "gasket hair" left behind.



Hairy gasket channel, yuck. As you can see it is rusty too.



Holy gasket hair, Batman!

The next step was definitely the most labor intensive part of the project, and took the bulk of the time. This was cleaning all those channels with a wire brush.



I used the brush shown plus another that was smaller and had brass bristles. With its smaller head that one was better for getting the last bits out and getting the sides of the channels. But the long one was excellent for doing long stroke initial cleaning and it took care of the bottoms of the channels really well too.



Here's what the hairiest part of the channel looked like once cleaned. Hurray! Needless to say I was blackened head to toe like a coal miner by the time this project was finished. Once the channels were clean on the first two doors I realized oh yeah, there is a 3rd gasket as well, on the air flap. It can be seen pretty well in the photo above.



The gasket in this 3rd channel was way different than the others, being woven of some kind of silvery metal and a tiny bit smaller in diameter than the narrower sized rope. In retrospect I don't think I needed to change this one because even though it was as worn and compressed as the other two, this door flap never actually closes. It has a locking mechanism in case it is ever needed, but practically speaking it is open all the time. I suspect the reason why this had a different gasket material is because the last person to do this didn't bother to change it. Well, it's changed now.

Once the channels were thoroughly wirebrushed I wiped them out with water as instructed on the back of the gasket glue packaging, and squeezed some of the black glue down each channel. The rope got pressed in manually, wide on top and narrow on the other two. I think maybe the heat flap could have used yet a smaller size but none of that was on hand. It pretty much worked out however.



Here's the finished project: 3 new gaskets. They look nice and clean because the stove has not yet been operational. According to the glue instructions the stove will have to be run at least once for the glue to be fully cured but other than that, it's done. I was not entirely sure what to do about the ends of the new fiberglass gasket as it was extremely prone to fraying and the frayed ends bushed out like Afros, not staying in the channels whatsoever. I ended up opting to paint the ends down with the black gasket glue... we will see if that works out. So far so good; when I closed the doors to make sure everything was seated right, the glued ends conformed to seat the lip just like the rest of the gasket.

We are having a beautiful warm spell right now so it will be a few days yet before the boiler gets fired for the first time this year. When I got done with this project I walked around the corner and found the whole other end of the basement lit up with sunlight, which I had never seen before. With leaves off the trees, sun was able to sneak in from the kitchen through the open basement door. Crazy and cool!

The wires running overhead in the photo are our extensive low-voltage wiring system including video, ethernet and 2 phone lines running throughout the house. This is one of the first things I do when moving into any house. Mwahaha, nerd heaven.



Today I also replaced the old Anti-Creo-Soot spray bottle with a new generic one from the grocery store. The old bottle's spray head had started leaking, and it was a drag to have vinegar-smelling gack running down your hand every time you went to spray a log. We had inherited that bottle from the previous owner so it was probably very old. The wood boiler had not been in use for 8 years at the time we bought the house.



The old bottle is in the foreground, getting ready to take a flying header into the trash can. (They actually say the bottles are recyclable on the website, but since I can't find a # symbol on this bottle it's probably an old one that isn't). We have lots of gallon refills we use to reload the sprayers.

If I haven't mentioned it already, the purpose of Anti-Creo-Soot is to weaken creosote deposits so that they fall off easily. This both makes the chimney easier to clean, and prevents the creosote (hopefully) from ever succeeding in building up a glazed impermeable coat. Apparently it works because we got an A+ and keep-up-the-good-work from our chimney cleaning fellow this year, something that never happened at our old house!

The anti-creo-soot is supposedly non toxic. As I mentioned before it smells a lot like vinegar. According to their website the active ingredient is manganese. I spray each log with 10 squirts once the fire is good and hot. The instructions actually say to spray the interior of the boiler before starting it up, and to spray every log not just the big ones. But what I discovered is using it while starting the fire interferes with the firestarting process as the steam from the Anti-Creo-Soot actually fights a small fire. So what I do is hold off on the Anti-Creo-Soot until the fire is basically lit and I've passed through the small-and-medium stick insertion stages. Then all the regular sized logs get their 10 squirts.



This is a project I started today but didn't have time to finish. It will be an insulative plug for the coal door in the wood room. This is where wood is tossed in from the outside and it is just a stamped metal door on hinges, set into a window-like cutout in the foundation. When we first moved in some insulation was just stuffed in there, but this was impractical when the coal hatch is in actual regular use.

My intention is to staple insulation into this frame, then stick regular door weatherstripping foam around the outside edge.



Here it is with a thin plywood cover on one side. My idea was to add a couple handles (such as those found on homemade screen doors) on this side to be able to place and retrieve the plug in the opening.

Unfortunately once I had reached this stage I took time to test it in the opening and there was too much interference with other stuff in the area (pipes, the wall, etc.) for it to get all the way to where it needed to sit. Therefore I need to do some modifications before I go any farther. This will probably involve making the Z-dimension of the bottom less than at the top (so the plug can be inserted top-first then angled in) and also reducing the overall width by about 1/2" to make it easier to maneuver to the coal hole initially.



Looking at the coal hole it is really non-intuitive that this plug absolutely will not fit as-is. The problem is those pipes on top overlap the opening by a lot more than they look like... about 2 inches.

When we re-do the ceiling I fully intend to move that silly electrical conduit that is entwined through everything so that it is properly parallel to everything else. I have never understood people who don't value neat wiring, especially on permanent install.

Yesterday I spent much of the day working on server stuff again. I phoned various clients warning them about the impending changes and I got the two P1's set up with 2.4.x kernel Linux and locally-accessible-only SSHD. I wrote up master plans for 2 phases of server operation, phase one being from now until a week from now, and phase 2 being the weeks after that.

I didn't figure you all wanted to see more pictures of the same servers again so here's a fake panoramic of the server room/office instead:



With all of these images, you should be able to click on them to see a bigger version.

Today was also a big day for telephone calls. I spoke to my father-in-law and my grandmother. I also had brief calls with my mother and brother about my impending trip to Minneapolis and my brother's impending birthday. I agreed to help my brother with a screen door on his house that got damaged. I was glad to hear it was not the same door I helped him install new only a couple years ago. Whew!

It finally wasn't raining today so I was able to finish stacking the woodpile outside. I started pretty late and was talking to my Spouse for most of the time so by the time I was finished it was pitch black. Pardon the quality of these photos; I had to PhotoShop them quite a bit to make them look like something besides big black rectangles. The light is red in this picture because the overhead source was some yellow bug lights the previous owners had mounted over the rear deck. How attractive!



Full Pallets... no more wood stacking for me until 2009! I did go ahead and cover them again afterward:



While doing this labor, and while not on the phone, I listened to some podcasts and one was about eating bugs. Apparently the US, Europe and Canada are the only places in the world where people do not eat insects. Bugs are actually quite nutritious. They listed some of the dietary benefits of various ones. The insect "power food" is apparently caterpillars, which are on a par with salmon for food value. Crickets are quite nutritious also. Although most of the bugs we find in town in the US are probably rife with pesticides and not good to eat for that reason. Hmm, I wonder, I could raise crickets at the house... they're 25% protein!

Speaking of Podcasts I had been listening to some about Buddhism just to see what it was all about. They reminded me that I had meant to find some about meditation. I found one from the Meditation Society of Australia (or something like that) the purpose of which was simply to give straightforward instruction on how to do it, something I have tried to find throughout my life with no luck. So I gave it a try and have been practicing diligently once a night. I learned how to zero out my mind pretty quick because I had already gotten some of those techniques over the years in my theatre and self defense classes, so I just had to learn to do it their way. The biggest difference in their method is in addition to releasing tension, you also take in happiness and satisfaction at the same time. This causes a warm happy feeling in your chest as your mind goes blank. No complaints here!

Well, they say the real value of having a clear mind is being able to do it while actually thinking about stuff too, not while just being blank. I had not known this before (see, they just need to tell people these things straight up). In the meditation instructions they said you are supposed to have something lined up to think about once you get into that clear-minded state, so I gave it a try and... LO AND BEHOLD...!! I made the important discovery that I could "psych myself up" to do some horrible task with enthusiasm by thinking about it for about 2 minutes after getting into that zeroed-out happiness mind state. Wow! It could sometimes take hours or even days using my previous brute force technique. Now it takes only about 5 minutes and does not make my brain hurt. Granted I have to sit somewhere quietly with my eyes closed for those 5 minutes, but I think I can live with that.

I learn something new every day. :)

Last night at around 4:30AM I was awakened by what sounded like a tiny phone ringing. I perplexedly picked up first the Skype phone, then the landline phone, verifying they were not the culprits. Then I started walking through the house trying to find what was making the noise. I was a bit creeped out because I was completely mystified as to how a phone could get in that was not brought there by me, and not liking many of the possibilities.

Well, it turns out that the culprit was our Davis weather station's indoor terminal, which is mounted in the living room. My Spouse had thoughtfully set it up to make an alarm if the outdoors temperature dropped below 32°F, and sure enough it had for the first time this year. The reason I hadn't recognized the sound is because though we've had the station for several years now, that is the first time the alarm ever worked properly! So the next problem was, how do I turn off the alarm? It was dark. It was 4:30AM. My brain was in it's-dark-and-it's-4:30-AM-and-I-never-used-this-feature-before mode. Thoughts of trying to sleep with the thing going off for hours and hours spurred me to experiment recklessly and I discovered quite by accident that the same 2-key combination that will turn off the backlight will also turn off the alarm. Who knew? Note to self: Look up correct way to turn off alarm before bed tonight.



It's been getting dark much sooner lately. Right now it's pitch black outside and I was surprised to find it was only 7:30PM. In the deep of winter it'll be pitch black at 4:30 or even 4... crazy hehe. When I first moved to Ashland I never saw stuff like the the grocery store and hardware store in daylight. Then when the first summer came I'd be perplexed when I'd go to the hardware store during broad daylight and it'd already be closed. Doh! Speaking of that, I need to go see if it's closed for good now or if they just had an emergency closing the other day.

I got half the remaining wood stacked on pallets today. Here's how I laid it out to begin with. The pallets are parallel to the house, leaving a corridor between them and the rear of the house itself. The pallets were ones that had been lying around in the far back of our lot since we bought the house nearly 2 years ago. They had been in close contact with the ground and were therefore covered in slugs when I pulled them up. After placing them in the new location I had to spend about 5 minutes rescuing slugs before I could start stacking wood. LOL



Here's the same scene from the other angle, looking back toward the house. You can see what the wood (coal) hole looks like with its metal cover closed. Actually now that I look at it, it's very much camouflaged by a tree shadow that's right there. But it's right next to the edge of the deck, at ground level. The shiny copper color of the electric meter to the right of it is how I hope to paint the wood door and all the pipes there too. Unfortunately my outdoor painting projects got a very late start this year. Fall kind of jumped up and bit me this time around. Oops!



Here's as far as I got today. I only made it halfway through the wood so I will likely need to add a 3rd pallet tomorrow.



I covered both heaps carefully with tarps even though the forecast says no rain at all for the next week. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! ;-)



I plan on working on the servers from now until bedtime. If I can think of anything interesting to say about that I will be sure to post again. Snicker.