A winters wood

[system]

“Actually he is pretty open to it. The inspector said that we are paying him to teach him about cordwood building. Nice, huh?”

Wow, you don’t get inspectors like that everywhere.
We can do pretty much what we want here, simply because there’s only one inspector that has a huge area to look after, not because it’s OK to do it. If it’s not out where it’s easily visible and nobody turns you in, you can build how you want.

Back to firewood, I cut about ten cords a year to heat my house and my workshop. I’d like to cut half that much. Doug. fir and larch (aka tamarack)mostly. Some birch when we can find some that’s been cut by the loggers and left. It’s not a commercial species here so when they build new roads through birch stands it’s just left laying for firewood cutters. We still cook some with wood but we do most of it on propane.

We used to do all of our cooking and heating with wood, now mostly just the heat.

When we lived in the tipi I cut 10 cords for heat and cooking for a N. Idaho winter for a family of five.

[starfish]

I don’t have any advice on this topic, since we still live in the suburbs with no fireplace.

But does anyone remember a reality show that they had on PBS a couple of years ago? I can’t remember the name of it, but it involved several families going out into the woods and living like the pioneers. They had to build their own houses, grow their own food, etc, etc using only 19th century technology. They began in the spring and at the end of autumn the producers looked at all they had done and determined whether they would have survived the winter. They found that out of all the families that participated, only the young couple with no children would have survived. It turned out that all the families had enough stored food, but most hadn’t prepared enough firewood. The couple only won because they had the smallest number of people.

[system]

Yeah it’s definitely a big consideration if you live where there’s winter. Sort of why I started this thread.
I know a guy who doesn’t use a chainsaw to get his wood in N. Idaho. But he does use a truck. Without an internal combustion engine or knowlege and possesion of a good horse, gathering a winters supply of heating and cooking wood is a major undertaking in places that have serious winter. Especially if you are in farm country or northern desert where there aren’t a lot of trees. Also if there is more than one family to keep warm.
Even with a horse you can’t go real far to gather wood. So the supply would be severely depleted after a couple of years even in most forested areas.

[Willem]

“Frontier House”. Good show!

[jhereg]

any ideas on how much a rocket stove would help to cut down req’d wood?

Rocket stove

[yarrow_dreamer]

ah, jhereg, you mean reduce the amount needed? at first i thought you meant using the rocket stove to chop

what about aging/drying/seasoning? do you use the wood you cut this year for this year’s fuel? i ask this as i leave to pick up a load of free firewood off craigslist from 2 trees someone just cut down.

What else can you burn to keep warm in winter? I know some peoples have used the grassy, flammable dung from ruminants. . . somehow people kept warm for centuries without chopping down the whole forests–how? my first thoughts: fewer people, more spread out, probably burning a lot of deadfall? smaller dwellings to heat? lower expectations for feeling warm all the time? migrating south to warmer climes for much of the colder months?

[jhereg]

ah, jhereg, you mean reduce the amount needed? at first i thought you meant using the rocket stove to chop

ha! yeah, sorry about the ambiguity…

[BlueHeron]

I think part of the trick is to build structures that work with the climate. One obvious example is an igloo - the building material is its own insulation.

My dad has a fish house with an aluminum frame and styrofoam insulation. It’s roughly 6’ X 6’ X 6’. He has a little propane stove that gives off about as much heat as a small fire. It’s enough to keep the house very warm, even when it’s out on a frozen lake in the cold wind. Sometimes we’ll turn the stove off when it gets too warm and it stays warm in there for almost an hour. If it’s a warmer day (like late February) it’s possible to adequately heat the fish house with a propane-fueled lantern (it’s a Coleman lantern with two ash mantles).

I think that a small, well-insulated winter shelter would significantly cut down on the amount of fuel needed. Packing snow around the sides would really help trap in warmth.

[jhereg]

good point. i think structure style is worth paying attn to as well.

here’s a structure that’s has my interest. in no small part due to it’s close (1/2 hour drive) proximity to where we’re planning on heading in a few years (we’ve already got the land, but we’re still working on establishing a good relationship; and then there’s debt sigh). i haven’t seen how much wood they used to maintain those temps, and in this area, the coldest months tend to actually be Dec, Jan & Feb instead of Nov, Dec & Jan, but…

60+ degrees inside during the winter? actually seems kind of warm to me!

downsides? not mobile, labor intensive to build, and reliance on “repurposed” material. but that last one prolly isn’t really all that important.

[mountain_refugee]

If you want to be warm without burning any firewoods,
If you are outdoors and it’s freezing and you want to sleep warm!
If you care about the vanishing woods,
Then come and buy my idea!
You don’t need to heat the whole room, you don’t even need a room. Use Kotatsu (Korsi we call it), enough twigs to burn for half an hour will keep you WARM for the whole night or even longer. I have reached 120F after 2 hours and 90F after 12 hours and I was breathing 30F the last time I set one and in the middle of the night I was sweating! (By the way I was naked!)
But remember it can be lethal indoors if set unproperly.

[Sandwalker]

That Kotatsu or Korsi is a cool idea! I just read an article about it and it sounds somewhat familiar to this one method I heard of where you sleep sitting up against a tree with a small fire in front of you using a blanket over your body and the fire as a sort of tipi to keep in the warmth on cold nights. However this Kotatsu sounds more practical and comfortable. Could you expand on what methods and set-up you used for this mountain refugee?

Here’s some info regarding that other method I read about:
"The post by Garry on minimalist camping reminded me of a trick I saw in a video by Mark Baker, the Primitive Editor of Muzzleloader magazine. He got it from writings of a man in the 1700’s, that spent many nights in hostile territory and couldn’t have an open fire. He claims this works and keeps you comfortably warm, you just have to remember you will be sleeping setting up and know that part won’t be comfortable.

You set down with your back against a large tree, bring your feet up so the bottoms touch and your knees are bent outward to the sides, not up towards your chin. You then dig a hole about the size of your head in the ground in front of you, but behind your feet where they are touching each other. When you have the hole dug you build a small fire with sticks and then add hardwood bark, keep doing this until you get a good bed of hot coals. Then you take hardwood bark and lay it on edge the entire way across the bed of coals and then pack the dirt you dug out of the hole to cover the bark, at the front and back of the hole leave a small hole for air. Take your blanket and wrap it around you and bring together over your legs
making a small enclosed tent, this will hold in the heat from your pit fire and there will be no smoke if it is done right.

According to the writings the man that wrote this originally stated he spent comfortable nights in the winter this way and never gave away his position to Indians. In an emergency without any way to make an appropriate shelter this will keep you warm and comfortable. Seeing it in the video makes it easier to understand than my description, but I think you get the idea of how it works."

[jhereg]

hmm, that does look very cool! or, er, warm, actually, but…

anyway, thanks!

[mountain_refugee]

I prepare a korsi (I will never learn the japanese word!) this way.
I gather enough wood but nothing thicker than lets say 2inches, because I want it all to burn at once to have the maximum coal possible. I already have the bottom of the pit covered by clean ashes as insulator. So when the flames are gone I fan it like crazy and wait for the blue flames to fly away too. I fan it again to make sure the coals are frozen as I call it, that means they don’t emmit gaz anymore. Then I cover the coals with clean ashes, this will keep them glowing for a long time without being reduced to ashes. You can ut a table or just three sticks like atipi over the pit and cover it with something thick and LARGE enough that you can sit and sleep under it without lifting the cover from the ground and loosing heat. And if you could smell anything its CO. OK?
By the way I like to put my kettle on the ashes to have instant warm water in the morning. You know how much it worths!

[yarrow_dreamer]

korsi–awesome!! thanks MR & sandwalker.

MR, where do you get all the ash to insulate with? does that work better than dirt?

also, the skill of sleeping sitting up. . . without falling into the fire. i wonder how you learn that?

[mountain_refugee]

[quote=“yarrow dreamer, post:21, topic:620”]korsi–awesome!! thanks MR & sandwalker.

MR, where do you get all the ash to insulate with? does that work better than dirt?

also, the skill of sleeping sitting up. . . without falling into the fire. i wonder how you learn that?[/quote]

Where do people normally get ashes? from past fires! pack the ashes. covering fire is not the only use. Ash keeps the fire alive for a very long time. I say it freezes the fire! Also dirt is dirt, but ash is dead fire. I don’t want to make my neat frozen fire “dirty”. Ash is what it will be. OK?

In sandwalkers method one sits, but under a korsi you can take any position you like, well except standing.

[BlueHeron]

also, the skill of sleeping sitting up. . . without falling into the fire. i wonder how you learn that?

Survival instinct? Maybe if you get too close you wake up?

[system]

Here’s what I started the winter with for heating my house. That’s about six cords. Right now I have about two rows left in that shed.
We still get a fire going sometimes in the morning to take the chill off.

[starfish]

How many trees does that come out to?

[system]

Geez, I don’t know. Depends on how big the trees are that I happen to find standing dead, within easy distance from the side of the road. Sometimes there’s a whole bunch of little ones and sometimes there’s a big one.

30 trees? 50 trees? I make 20 trips in my pickup each year. Sometimes one tree will be enough for a couple of loads. Sometimes it’ll take three or four to make a load. I only cut trees that are already dead. There’s no shortage of them. It would be dumb to cut green ones when there’s so many that are dead, dry and ready to burn. Sometimes I cut wood out of the slash piles the loggers leave behind. Really hard to say how many trees.
It’s a fair bit of work.

[system]

Last year a big ponderosa pine near my house got hit by lightning. It was a healthy vigorous tree before that. The next morning after the storm I noticed a crack running from the top, around the trunk all the way to the ground. other than that it appeared to have survived. This spring when the other trees were showing their new growth I noticed this tree had no new growth at all and I could see where bark beetles had attacked it pretty hard. By June the needles were all going orange and the tree was definitely dead.
So yesterday I cut it down and made firewood out of it.
Here’s a picture showing the crack that the lightning strike made.

This is a pretty good sized tree. It was about 80 ft. tall and over two feet thick on the stump. I was able to buck up a lot of wood just out of the limbs. It will be three loads in my pick up so that will be a big chunk of what I need to heat my shop for the winter.