Sunday, April 03, 2011

Preparing for Next Winter (Already)

Last summer I decided to do away with trudging through the snow and wet to access our stash of wood pellets. I cut a new hole in the screen and wall at one end of our porch, then closed in the other sides of that end to make a pellet shed. Later we filled it with two and a half tons of pellets, stacked to the ceiling. I discovered the following syllogism by experience: A: Two and a half tons is a lot of weight. B: When you cut out a third of the length of a wall which is half screen already, it can't bear much weight. A + B = a buckled wall in my pellet shed. In this shot you can see the interior wall (with pale ends where I sawed through it), pushed out toward the porch from a winter of serious pressure: Now the shed is empty (we'll use the last bag of pellets tomorrow), so I've thrown up some 2x4s for vertical support. (By the way, these are still home-cut boards from the summer of 2009. Those hemlocks went a long way!)
With the added support, I hope that next autumn I won't have three tons of pellets come crashing into the porch (which at times I feared last year).



I need to paint the boards to match the brown and green motif of the house before we get next year's three tons. The pressure is on: in order to get the best price on pellets ($199 per ton again this year) we need to order them this month.


~emrys

2 comments:

Wes and Anna Kendall said...

What is this "pellet fuel," exactly??

Emrys said...

"Pellet fuel" is a substance used to fuel "pellet stoves," specialized heating units which burn these pellets. The pellets are composed of hardwood sawdust (presumably swept up from the floor of the lumber mill) which has been placed under massive pressure and extruded through a 1/4" diameter pipe. The resultant strand of pressed wood fractures into "pellets," cylindrical chunks of wood 1/4" in diameter and between 1/2" and 1" long. The pellets come in 40lb bags which one dumps into the stove about daily in the cold winter season. The pellets burn almost completely (40lb bag --> 1 cup of dry ash) and produce very little soot.