Reflecting on small victories on a warm day

Monday, 8:18 pm

By Kate

Feb

18

2008

We reached a high, today, of 59.3°. Never mind spring, that’s almost summer! Just a teaser, but welcomed, anyway. For once I wasn’t dressed 3 layers deep nor will I need a fire in the stove. And what is more natural than wanting to go outside on a nearly 60 degree day in February and do stuff?

I did go outside and stood in my backyard. In snow up to my mid-calves. That was kind of a surreal moment.

It was a good day to do some basic tidying, though. I cleaned out the wood stove and spread the ash in one of the raised beds. Then I turned my attention to the woodpile. That glorious mess. Finally. FINALLY, the ice melted enough so that I could pull the tarp all the way back and off the woodpile. I spent the next hour or so restacking. The dry wood on one side and the wet on the other. The wet wood needed to be raised off the ground and consolidated so that it will receive some air circulation and sunshine (should we ever get any). And I brought a two week supply of dry wood inside. By the time I was finished slinging wood around, I was quite toasty. And happy. I have a lot of wood left. It should easily get me through March. Maybe even a few days in April if spring dilly-dallies.

On days like today, there is no need for a fire. Even with the back door open, the kitchen and dining room rose to around 65° and the rest of the house was about 68°. One day of wood saved. Tomorrow will be much cooler, but I’ll still probably only need to burn one small fire in the evening. On a mid-40s day, sometimes just burning some tightly bound newspaper and a few sticks of kindling are enough to heat the stove so that it’ll give off a gentle warmth for a few hours—enough to maintain temps in my comfort zone.

It was sometime in early January that I devised an emergency plan to start saving wood. With the lad home and needing heat upstairs, I was burning through wood at a scary rate. Since I am not, not, NOT going to turn the furnace on this year, when I run out of wood, I am out of heat. Period. So, it seemed prudent to figure out how to conserve my wood without freezing.

The quilt solution, preventing all my heat from flying upstairs, has worked very well. I got to thinking that heating rooms that no one is using is really silly. It just makes the stove work harder and burns more wood. So, I installed a sheer curtain in the doorway between the living room and the dining room and kitchen. That blocks off about 200 square feet.

You wouldn’t think a sheer curtain would stop that much heat or air, but it does. Now that the lad isn’t home, the only room in the house that truly benefits from the stove is the living room. When I have the stove running, gently, the living room temp can easily reach 74 degrees. I usually only run the stove three or four hours in the evening. It’s enough to keep the living room between 64-68 degrees until the next evening, while the kitchen and dining room will remain a fairly constant 56-58 degrees. And, of course, when I cook, that provides quite a lot of heat in the kitchen, too.  Just enough heat manages to pass through the sheer curtain to maintain enough heat to prevent problems. That’s really all that’s needed. The upstairs, similarly, has rarely gone above 60 degrees most of the winter (except for when the lad was home).

I’ve gotten used to this large variance in house temps. I don’t mind being in colder parts of the house as long as there is one room where I can return to be warm. In fact, I have grown used to much colder temps in the house all the way around. I certainly sleep better with my bedroom on the cold side. And, really, the living room is where I spend most of my time at home. It’s where my desk, television, and comfy reading chair reside. If I spend most of my time in that room, why waste heat on the rest of the house? That seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom (or habit), but really...why heat infrequently used or unused rooms?

Consequently, I still have a lot of wood left. From 3 cords of wood, I will have kept myself comfortable and kept the rest of the house warm enough for six months. Possibly seven. That’s pretty good, I think. My entire winter heating has cost me $795 in wood. My neighbors have spent twice or three times that with natural gas heat (and complain bitterly about it). Though, there are at least two homeowners, that I’m aware of, who thought my quilt idea was worth a shot and have installed quilts/curtains blocking their upstairs with significant (and happy) savings. In the process, they’ve also reduced their carbon emissions substantially, though I don’t think that was quite on their radar. Makes me happy, though.

It’s kind of funny, or maybe a little bit sad, that people really aren’t all that tuned in to reducing carbon emissions, but saving money makes eyes gleam. Climate change and pollution are something to think about and (maybe, to some) something to worry about, but not something that most people think they can do anything about, if indeed they want to. It’s apparently not enough of a perceived threat to hit home.

High utility bills, on the other hand, hit home hard. I could probably talk until I’m blue in the face about conserving energy and climate change and all the rest. But when I mentioned my $20 electric bills, my neighbors got wide eyed and wondered how in the world I did that because, BOY, would they like to have a $20 electric bill instead of their $300+ one. They were very open to suggestions because, standing before them was living proof that it could be done. And I do seem to be living a normal lifestyle. Which just confirms my longstanding belief...people are much more motivated to change their behavior when their wallets are being drained.

The thing is, saving dollars on utility bills has the exact same effect as consciously conserving energy to reduce emissions. Exactly the same. Yet the approach is different. Rather than thinking about using only their fair share to help preserve the global environment, they’re thinking about the dollars they can peel off their utility bills. One neighbor who has quite vociferously claimed that conservation is for liberal loonies, nevertheless doesn’t seem to see the irony when toiling away at cutting energy use to save money. That’s not conservation. That’s saving money. I wisely kept my mouth shut. Small victories where you can find ‘em.

Anyway. It was a lovely day in spite of the on-again-off-again drizzle and I’m kind of pleased with the results of my labor today. I got a lot accomplished. And it’s a heat-free day, too. Gotta love one of those.