Tractors and wood! Show your pics

[Sawyer Rob]

Does milling frozen logs create any faster wear on the bandsaw teeth?

Milling frozen logs is no big deal, it's the partially frozen ones that are a problem, as you hit frozen and non frozen spots in the logs.

SR

 

[John_Mc]

Okey Doke. . . So, I know we are not as cold as you folks in the Frigid North, but. . . We are not expected to get above 28 degrees till next Friday. A few of those days will not make it out of the teens. We will have lows for two days in the single digits. Expecting about 3 full days of snow in that time period. Nothing of note for you folks up north, but for East Texas, that is something we do not see too often. So all this to say, I have stopped using my home heat system, and started using my wood stove. Bad thing is, with the forecast being colder than it was when I cut two loader buckets of wood, I do not know if I have enough. My wood pile that I cut from is now covered in ice from the freezing rain we had two days ago. Arrrrrgh! ! !

But I am having fun with the fire so far.

View attachment 686335

A word of warning for those whose homes are not built for the cold: Turning your heating system off and going with wood heat can be a big mistake. Depending on what type of heating system you have, you may want to keep it running, or at least fire it up every couple hours or so.

My friends in what they thought was a well insulated Vermont house (which had been there for decades) decided one winter they were going to heat entirely with wood. Things worked fairly well for them, especially since most of the time they hung out in the room with the wood stove. However, after a string of -15 to -20˚F temperatures with strong winds, they were awakened at about 4 AM one night by a sound like a shotgun going off. The father got up and could not find anything wrong, so went back to bed. The next morning, the kids went off to school, the dad to work, and the mother who had just had foot surgery and was supposed to stay off her feet stoked up the wood stove and settle in for a good read.

Eventually, the heat from the wood stove warmed up the far corners of the house a bit. She heard running water, and thought maybe it was snow melting off the roof (not likely at -15˚). Finally, she hobbled around the house to look and found that the pipe in the far corner of their house had frozen and burst in the middle of the night. It was so cold that the ice plugged it, preventing the water from leaking. Things had finally warmed up and melted things enough that it was now flooding the new hardwood floors in their dining room, and running into the kitchen and study area. I came over to help her shut down the water.

Plumbers around here are no strangers to these sorts of calls. Their recommendation: even if most of your house seems warm, unknown cold spots can wreak havoc. USE your heating system in every room of your house during a cold snap (or at least every room that has ANY kind of plumbing in it). Running a woodstove is OK, but the middle of a history-making cold snap is not the time to decide to see if you can get by JUST on that.

Tips from a plumber in our area. He usually posts this on community facebook pages at least once a year to remind people.

• Keep things circulating in your heating system, even if you are using alternative forms of heat
• Open cupboard doors under your sinks, especially if they are on outside walls. You want heat to be able to circulate into these areas
• Consider leaving sinks on outside walls on a slow drip. This brings fresh (warmer) water into the pipes in areas where they may be prone to freezing
• aim space heaters or fans into areas that don't get enough heat to prevent pipes from freezing. If you don't have enough to cover all of the areas, then rotate them around the house from time to time.
• make regular checks in all corners of your house. If an area is getting cold enough to freeze pipes, do something about it

The temperatures that are supposed to hit as far south as the Gulf of Mexico this week are not such a big deal up here, where buildings are deigned for it (and if they weren't, they discovered the problems long ago). However, if you are in an area that doesn't see this sort of thing very often, you don't want to make some unpleasant discoveries.

 

[Oldpath05]

("A word of warning for those whose homes are not built for the cold: Turning your heating system off and going with wood heat can be a big mistake.")

Just put your mittens back on you'll be ok. I'm at 63 years old and counting all on wood heat ONLY......

 

[Oldpath05]

Milling frozen logs is no big deal, it's the partially frozen ones that are a problem, as you hit frozen and non frozen spots in the logs.

SR

True but me being froze is, therefore I dont do any milling below 25*..........

 

[hunt4570]

True but me being froze is, therefore I dont do any milling below 25*..........

Agreed!!:thumbsup:

 

[Oldpath05]

Agreed!!:thumbsup:

Hows the webber down there today?

 

[jezreel]

A word of warning for those whose homes are not built for the cold: Turning your heating system off and going with wood heat can be a big mistake. Depending on what type of heating system you have, you may want to keep it running, or at least fire it up every couple hours or so.

Yeah, we are going with fire during the day. Keeping the entire house around 70*. The living room around 75*. At 9pm we turn the heat back on keeping the house around 66*. We should be good.

 

[dasranger]

Why do you stack rounds? My experience is it’s best to cut and split right away. The rounds are much harder to spilt once they’re dry and they dry slower unsplit.

I’m 61 and a 20x22 inch Red Oak round is too heavy to maneuver even when splitting vertically with the splitter. These will sit for two years before I get to them them. Night and day difference in effort. Yes, they won’t pop apart in a couple of years but my splitter is pretty quick down the rail when need be.
I am going to rethink how high I stack these rounds. (Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should)
Thanks for the comments.

 

[TMGT]

A word of warning for those whose homes are not built for the cold: Turning your heating system off and going with wood heat can be a big mistake. Depending on what type of heating system you have, you may want to keep it running, or at least fire it up every couple hours or so.

My friends in what they thought was a well insulated Vermont house (which had been there for decades) decided one winter they were going to heat entirely with wood. Things worked fairly well for them, especially since most of the time they hung out in the room with the wood stove. However, after a string of -15 to -20˚F temperatures with strong winds, they were awakened at about 4 AM one night by a sound like a shotgun going off. The father got up and could not find anything wrong, so went back to bed. The next morning, the kids went off to school, the dad to work, and the mother who had just had foot surgery and was supposed to stay off her feet stoked up the wood stove and settle in for a good read.

Eventually, the heat from the wood stove warmed up the far corners of the house a bit. She heard running water, and thought maybe it was snow melting off the roof (not likely at -15˚). Finally, she hobbled around the house to look and found that the pipe in the far corner of their house had frozen and burst in the middle of the night. It was so cold that the ice plugged it, preventing the water from leaking. Things had finally warmed up and melted things enough that it was now flooding the new hardwood floors in their dining room, and running into the kitchen and study area. I came over to help her shut down the water.

Plumbers around here are no strangers to these sorts of calls. Their recommendation: even if most of your house seems warm, unknown cold spots can wreak havoc. USE your heating system in every room of your house during a cold snap (or at least every room that has ANY kind of plumbing in it). Running a woodstove is OK, but the middle of a history-making cold snap is not the time to decide to see if you can get by JUST on that.

Tips from a plumber in our area. He usually posts this on community facebook pages at least once a year to remind people.

• Keep things circulating in your heating system, even if you are using alternative forms of heat
• Open cupboard doors under your sinks, especially if they are on outside walls. You want heat to be able to circulate into these areas
• Consider leaving sinks on outside walls on a slow drip. This brings fresh (warmer) water into the pipes in areas where they may be prone to freezing
• aim space heaters or fans into areas that don't get enough heat to prevent pipes from freezing. If you don't have enough to cover all of the areas, then rotate them around the house from time to time.
• make regular checks in all corners of your house. If an area is getting cold enough to freeze pipes, do something about it

The temperatures that are supposed to hit as far south as the Gulf of Mexico this week are not such a big deal up here, where buildings are deigned for it (and if they weren't, they discovered the problems long ago). However, if you are in an area that doesn't see this sort of thing very often, you don't want to make some unpleasant discoveries.

My wood stove is in a smaller room in the basement, it has a duct with a small booster fan that feeds the return for the HVAC stack.
I run the HVAC fan and it feeds the whole house pretty evenly, only spot that is a little warmer is the room directly above the wood stove, works pretty well for me. My heat pump hasn't run in about 3months, other then the fan.

 

[hunt4570]

Hows the webber down there today?

Cold (35) and rainy, got about 3 inches of rain in the last 4 days, but NO SNOW.. so I'm happy! You?