That Wonderful November Weather!
November is usually the month when it gets cold, cloudy, and snowy. It is the time of year when Minnesotans get the distinct cosmic message that winter is really coming.
Not this year.
We've had an amazing run of consistently clear, temperate weather. Even though the temperatures have been right around the long-term average, the season so far as a whole has been very mild. No big cold snaps, no huge storms, no gales of wind howling out of the north.
That has been helping the campaign to minimize our heating bill this winter. As you may recall, until the wood-burning stove arrives, we're keeping the house at 55 degrees during the work week when we're only home and awake a few hours each day. On the weekends, we warm the house to 68. Last night was the first time the house actually required the furnace to stay at 55 degrees.
That means that we've been able to keep the furnace off entirely during the work week (normally it would run for an hour or two each day). I'll have an exact number when we get the next gas bill, but this could be saving us as much as $2-$3 each day.
But the real savings will come when we get the stove insert for the fireplace installed. Then we should be able to keep the house at a reasonable temperature without running the furnace at all until it starts getting really cold in December, January, and February. Right now, we don't have an installation date, but we're guessing around the first week of December.
I've also got 4-5 cords of firewood stockpiled, with at least another cord I can cut and haul from my parents' yard. Firewood storage is beginning to become a real issue: it is crowding the van out of the garage, and I've taken up part of our back patio too.
About 1.5 cords of the firewood is very green, since it had just been cut. I scored a cord from someone who had just cut down a couple of big trees, and half a cord from my parents was cut from downed-but-still-living trees. The green firewood isn't going to burn well until it has a chance to dry out, which will be only a few weeks for the small pieces, or a year for the big logs. Where I can, I'm trying to split the big logs so they'll dry faster, but it is hard to split green firewood. I may bring some of it indoors, too, if I can figure out where to store it.
I have 2-3 cords of very old and partly rotted firewood from our backyard. This is stuff from a neighbor's tree which was cut down five or six years ago. This is what I'll burn first, since it will burn easily, though it won't burn for long because of its rotten condition. Some of that wood has carpenter ants living in it, so those logs will be kept outside until I'm actually ready to stuff them in the stove.
That leaves only about 1/2 cord of dry-but-not-rotted firewood, the stuff which burns the best. Most of that is from my parents' yard, and had been cut and stacked 2-3 years ago, though there is a small amount from my own yard which I cut this past spring. The good stuff will be burned after the rotten wood is used up, and I'll probably mix it in with some of the green firewood, since it will help the still-moist wood burn better.
So the bottom line is that I've got 4-5 cords of wood stored, but of that only 1/2 cord is really good wood ready to be burned now. 1.5 cords may be ready to burn well before the end of the season, but 2-3 cords (over half!) probably won't provide much heat value at all. Those 2-3 cords of partly rotten wood will probably provide about as much heat as 1/2 or one cord of the good stuff. So in effect, I only have 2.5-3 cords of usable wood.
Which means that my poor suffering wife will probably have to watch as even more of our storage space becomes consumed with piles of firewood.