When I was thinking about buying “Two Plows” I was a little apprehensive about the maintenance issues. I had been spoiled living in civilization where there were neighborhoods, very good services, and where I was co-habitating with women. My broker looked at me oddly and reminded me that I would be purchasing this from an eighty two year old lady who hobbled on a cane.
With some luck I might be able to manage.
Still, the owner had only lived in the house during the summer months for at least a decade. Presumably her son spent a year living here a couple of years ago, so I suspect everything is in order for dealing with a long New Hampshire winter, but I am still a little nervous.
Because “Two Plows” is high on a hill-top we already had an infrastructure failure. The downstairs toilet had a “jiggle the handle” problem which was unattended for an afternoon, and the excess discharge of water dried up the well. It recovered in about a couple of hours, but it drove home the fact that living so high off the valley creates special challenges. Often when wells go dry, the pump at the bottom of the well can burn out. When the well is very deep, as this one obviously has to be, fixing a pump can cost thousands of dollars.
So a new rule for “Two Plows” is that showers are limited to five minutes. The other issue will be the high winds and cold that it is exposed to during the winter. When I lived with B1 in our small starter home, we had an ugly but very practical wood stove in the living room. B1 hated it because of aesthetics. I loved it because it kept us warm on brutally cold nights when the central heating either gave out or couldn't produce enough BTUs to warm the upstairs.
The art of loading up a wood stove on a cold winter night required learning how to properly adjust the intake of air. With air vents open, there would be a period of a few hours of slow burn as the wood would heat up and dry. Then there would be a burst of heat for one or two hours where the dried wood would incinerate all at once. I used to have visions of spontaneous combustion and would often go downstairs and sleep on the couch.
When I bought the house, the liner in the existing fireplace needed to be replaced. It would set me back at least two or three thousand dollars. I've always harbored survivalist instincts, so I started making phone calls to inquire about putting a wood stove in the existing fireplace, hoping that this alternative would give me a much better secondary supply of heat for about the same price that would have been spent fixing the fireplace.
I discovered a great local store that offered alternative heating energy solutions for the home. It included state of the art wood stoves, but lots of other choices: propane, wood pellets, and anthracite coal. I talked to the owner of the store for what I expected would be a five minute conversation. Instead the discussion went on for the better part of an hour as he enthusiastically talked about the variety of options and the pros and cons of each in terms of ease of use, price of stoves, and price and availability of fuel.
According to him pellet technology has a long way to go. Wood pellets are manufactured from sawdust collected at wood mills. The dust is compressed with some sort of binder into pellet form. The advantage of this system is price and convenience. It is cheaper than firewood and because the pellets are manufactured in small standardized pellets, the stoves can behave more like a conventional burner, with automated feeding of fuel that is controlled by a thermostat. According to the store owner, the problem with pellets is that the technology is new and the burn characteristics of the pellets problematic. He claimed that pellet stoves were forever having problems and were constantly in need of service.
Propane is becoming popular because of its simplicity and instant gratification. You just flick a switch and you have the aesthetics of a wood fire without the hassle of hauling in wood from a wood pile buried in snow and trying to get a fire started. Propane is good for easy local heat, but still not the solution for augmenting or replacing the oil system for the entire house.
When the heat store owner started talking about coal, the pace and enthusiasm in his voice quickened. Then he launched off for the better part of the hour explaining the nuances of modern automated coal burning stoves. He had one installed against the protests of his wife, who had nineteenth century visions of coal and steam technology churning in their living room, but after the installation, she was beyond pleased.
While his fervor was infectious, I was more entranced by the mix of both retro and contemporary technologies: intelligent sensors and motors to feed small uniform pellet size anthracite into a stove controlled by a state of the art thermostat. The stove itself looks like a throwback to the Victorian era, with a classic black finish with a window that looked like the coal hatch one would see in the engine room of an old locomotive. The brass fittings only enhanced this imagery.
What clinched it for me was the vision of having my Massachusetts Al Gore loving friends over on a cold winter night for beer and conversation, and excusing myself for a moment only to bring in a bag of anthracite to fill the coal hopper.
I trembled at the thought of watching their horrified faces.
“Two Plows” is going to be a lot of fun.