Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Winter in the New (Old) House

It snowed a lot today. We bought a snowblower the day after Thanksgiving, but they were out of stock, and we have to wait until next Saturday to pick it up. So in the meantime, shoveling.

We get awesomely spiky icicles along the roofline over the deck. I hope the dogs do not get impaled.

Since we have exterior doors now, we picked up some wreaths over the weekend.

We have room for a full-sized Christmas tree. It's in the front room with the teal trim.

It's snowing outside, but the pellet stoves are keeping us warm and toasty.

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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

we own stoves

We bought pellet stoves: one for the front of the house, including the second floor bedrooms, and one for the back living room off the kitchen. Rodney and his father installed them, which took about a day per stove.

Here is the Harman Accentra in the back of the house.

It's a pretty good lookin' stove, if I do say so myself.

The exhaust pipe exits the side of the house facing the garage. It smells nice, like a fireplace. The light next to it is also new. It helps me see when I take the dogs out at night.

In the front living room with the aqua trim, we installed the Harman XXV. We'll be painting this room soon, so the black spray paint on the wall doesn't matter. Rodney and his dad had to drive to Augusta to find a special corner pad for this beast.

They had to zig zag the pipe a bit to avoid a wall stud.

Rod says this:

"When we drilled the first pilot hole through the interior wall for the venting, we hit a stud. Since we didn't want to move the stove, we added a second elbow, placed horizontally, to move the venting's exit point away from the stud.

Within a few days we realized this front stove was emitting a smokey smell that the other stove did not. By inspecting the connection points between the venting's sections with a flashlight in the dark, we were able to determine that many of the joints did not seal properly when originally assembled—smoke was pouring out of them on startup. Our venting—ICC's 4" Excel pellet venting—has rubber gaskets on each section that are supposed to simplify installation and obviate the need for high-heat silicone or tape between each venting section. Evidently these gaskets did not seat properly when we first assembled the venting (although we had no similar problem with the other stove, which we installed first). After disassembling and reassembling the venting several times, we finally(!) managed to get everything sealed properly. No more smoke in the house."

The exhaust pipe exits the side of the house, about 15 feet from our next-door neighbor's porch. I brought them cupcakes to make up for the smoke. Until we plant some tall bushes next summer, the pipe is visible from the street.

It's pretty stupid-looking.

But we are warm.

We fill the stoves up with 40 lbs. of pellets about once a day. We use big buckets to carry the pellets from the basement (you can see one in the picture of the XXV). We've already gone through almost a ton of pellets, but there's more where that came from.

We are very toasty.

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