When I did the math and found out I could heat with gas cheaper than any other fuel, including wood and pellets, I must admit I was blown away. I’m not talking about some expensive high-efficiency gas wall furnace either. Those are great but not much to look at. What if we could surpass even those efficiencies but have a visible, decorative firebox with logs and a flame? Would that get your attention? It has my attention and that’s exactly what I’m writing about now.
Introducing the Mantis. This Chameleon is amazing in so many ways. Very futuristic, but it is available today! Check out this short list of features;
- 93% AFUE Efficiency! WOW
- 28,000 BTU and you get 26,000 of those as heat in the house!
- So efficient, it vents with PVC pipe!
- It is vented so you can use it around the clock without pollution.
- This is the world’s first vaporization fireplace. It extracts water vapor from the exhaust, pumps it to a vapor tray and puts the moisture back into the home. Finally, a gas stove that does not dry out the house.
- Available as a STOVE, RAISED PEDESTAL STOVE, FIREPLACE, INSERT.
- Is power vented. Can even vent down!
The Mantis currently holds the title on technology. This stove is absolutely the cheapest heat you can buy. Even cheaper than pellets or firewood!
One thing I miss about heating with wood are the awesome one-pot meals I used to make on the top of the stove.
I would not dare wait on a power-outage to enjoy some fine dining on those cold winter days in Ridgecrest.
Here is one of my favorite recipes. Don’t even let the word blandenter your mind. This is a Southern delicacy. A big bowl of this beats caviar or escargot any day of the week.
Remember to give yourself a day-ahead preparation on the beans.
Great Norther Beans & Ham
Get yourself a great big pot. You’re gonna need it. Next gather up some very inexpensive ingredients. This huge mess of food will have you smacking your lips for days and will only cost a few dollars.
One or two large bags of raw Great Northern Beans. Personally, I like to mix one bag of Northerns and one bag of Limas. They work very well together.
one or two ham hocks. Choose the meaty ones. Also ask your butcher for the smoked ham scraps. Those meaty chunks are the best! Be aware this is going to be the meat portion of the meal. Add all you want. No matter how much you put you will swear to do more next time. I guarantee that!
Salt & Pepper.
Start the night before. Put all your beans in the big pot and wash them thoroughly.
Once clean, add a generous amount of salt – about a 1/4 cup and then fill the pot again with water a little more than double the volume of the raw beans.
you can leave the beans to soak in the salt water overnight. In the morning you will see the beans have tenderized and plumped up.
Drain off this water and rinse.
Add water and salt again. Add some crushed black pepper. Drop in your ham hocks and make sure you have plenty of water to cover everything. Not too full though, you don’t want to get messy on the stove.
Cover the pot and place it on the wood stove. If your stove is burning very hot, move your pot around or elevate it so it cooks slowly. If this stews all day, it will be that much better as the hocks and bean flavors mingle. There are few meats I enjoy better than smoked ham stewed with beans for 8 hours! It is amazing.
Keep a check on your stew. Make sure it does not stick or go dry. Just add water as needed and keep it stirred. When you start seeing meatless bones in there, it’s about done. throw those hock bones to the dog and he’ll fight bears to protect you.
Once it’s done, dip you up a big bowl. You can top it if you like. Diced wild onions are great. I like to chop bread and butter pickles and onions on top of mine. A dab of shredded cheddar is ok sometimes.
Make yourself a big fat cake of cornbread to go with it and you have yourself a one-pot meal that will warm your bones on the coldest of days. I like a big wedge of cornbread with the stew poured over it. mmm. Lord I’m getting hungry! Oh, a big glass of milk is nice too.
Got a favorite wood stove recipe? Leave it as a comment to this post and share it!
We sure have our abundance of old homes around here. Some of these older homes were built for millworkers, servants quarters, summer homes and retreats. While charming, these homes are almost always cold and drafty in the winter. Here are a few tips to help you survive the winter;
make those windows more air tight. An economical way to do this is to run out to the local hardware or builder supply and pick up the plastic SHRINKABLE window film. The shrink type is the best. You put it on and heat it with a hair dryer to shrink tight. Once shrunk you can’t even tell its there except you will notice the lack of draft.
If you’re burning a wood stove, it will consume a lot of oxygen from the room. That has to be made up so it sucks in through the cracks, doors and windows in the house. I remember when I fired up my wood stove I could sit on the couch and it felt like someone breathing on my ears from the air sucking in the windows behind me! If your stove is outside air adaptable and you can install it, ABSOLUTELY start there. All combustion air is outside air anyway so you should try to control how it comes into the house to get to the stove.
If you’re choosing a gas stove this winter, go with a direct-vent model. They have outside air built into the system so they will be burning outside air and not creating a negative pressure inside the home.
If you have some extra buck-a-roos laying around (does anyone have that these days?) you can lay in some more insulation wherever you can – especially the attic.
Of course if you want to save some money heating even after you have done the obvious, you can dress a little warmer indoors then cut back a couple degrees on the thermostat. Once you acclimatize, you’ll be shedding that sweater. You’ll be amazed at the energy savings heating to 65 instead of 72 for a whole month. Give it a try.
If you’re heating with oil, OH MY! You want to do all you can. To heat with oil and have less environmental impact, you can get bio-heat from our friends at Blue Ridge Biofuels. Bio-Heat is to your furnace what Bio Diesel is to your car; ECO-FRIENDLY.
Hey, if you have some good winterizing tips add your comments to this article and share. Thanks! -Jack
If you’re a fireplace lover you probably have a secret place where you dump your fireplace ashes when you clean out the fireplace.
Since a cord of firewood produces about 50 pounds of ash, it can add up rather quickly.
Since ashe came from trees, it is carbon neutral to the environment so why not use this free by-product of keeping warm to eliminate some of the other things that may not be so environmentally friendly? Here is a list of uses for fireplace ash;
When it snows, keep a box in the trunk of the car. Fireplace ask is great for giving you enough traction to get out of the snow when you’re stuck.
Did your pet come out on the stinking end of a skuink encounter? Rub a nice handful into scruffy’s coat to neutralize the smell.
Mix with water into a paste to make a fabulous metal polish. No more masks and harsh chemicals!
Use ash on a damp towel to clean your stove or fireplace doors.
You can make your own organic soaps! Soak ashes in warm water to make lye. Mix with lard and boil to make soap. Salt makes it harden as it cools. niiiice.
lay a perrimeter of ash around your garden to keep out slugs and snails.
Ash makes a great deicer that will not harm your lawn.
Mix ash with your compost to make it super-enriched.
1 tbsp of ash per 1,000 galons of water in your pond will control algae.
ROSES LOVE FIREPLACE ASHE! I hope I am not giving away a secret but my old friend Alice Parks in Montreat had the most beautiful roses. I would tend her fireplaces annually and she would show me her roses and tell me about how the fireplace ashes did wonders for them.
Sprinkle ashes on your lawn as a natural fertilizer for your soil.
Have some other great uses for ashes? Registered users can leave new ideas as a comment.
I often get calls on how to build a fire. The most common complaint is that the fire gets going but the kindling burns out and the logs don’t catch. Here are some tips (my picture shows a fire that will not start – no kindling);
-Start with several loosly balled up newspaper sheets. 8 or 10 will do it.
-Next, put on some finely split dry kindling or fatwood.
-Next, some larger dry kindling. Kinld dried lumber scraps are great. Cut up pallets are awesome. Do not use treated lumber as this gives off a poisonous smoke and is bad for the environment. Use PLENTY of kindling.
-Next put on a couple of small splits of firewood. Rounds take a long time to catch on fire and will only burn in a hot fire. Save rounds for later when the fire is roaring.
-Light your newspaper and the rest will catch up. If you used enough kindling, your small splits will catch fire before it burns out. If it fails, add more kindling and tryn it again. You can also use firelogs as a firestarter, They burn for about 30 minutes; long enough to catch the small splits.
If you’ve ever been to the local gas company to check out gas heaters you have undoubtedly met Bubba. Bubba is a sales guy that walks you around showing you all the gas stoves, logs and fireplaces he has that will heat your 2,000 square foot home with 99.9% efficiency. He’ll tell you how great his products are and that they are so clean burning that they don’t even need a chimney! The flames are pretty on those logs and as soon as he fires them up you feel the nice warm heat pouring out of the firebox surrounding you with cozy heat. Ahhhhh, doesn’t that feel nice? The problem is that Bubba is not telling you the whole story.
You see, Bubba likes to sell vent-free stuff becasue he does not have to have a professional installer on staff. Anyone, including his truck driver can hook gas up to a vent-free heater with very minimal knowledge and experience. Bubba or one of his crew can be in and out of your house with a check in a couple of hours.
Now, with that kind of turnaround, who wouldn’t love vent-free? If he schedules jobs within close proximity to each other, Bubba can do several installations in one day and never go back until you have a complaint. Chances are, that will be sooner than you think. Click the tab above for what Bubba left out. You deserve to know.
THE TRUTH
The truth is, most people are extremely dissatisfied with vent-free appliances in the home. The reason is simple, THEY ARE TOXIC!
Yes, ALL vent-free appliances emit toxic by-products of combustion – no matter what Bubba says. They are just tuned to the point that the emissions, when PROPERLY USED are not considered a significant health risk.
It is perfectly legal and acceptable for a vent-free appliance to leave the factory with carbon monoxide (CO) emission levels at 5 parts per million (ppm) or below! WOW, that is leaving a cleanroom environment with those emissions of a colorless, odorless, toxic poison! 9PPM will cause brain damage or death if you remain inside with the source for extended periods of time! Here’s a thought to ponder; what happens with those carbon monoxide levels after being in your house for 60 days? Dust settling on the burner from the fireplace damper, Pet dander being pulled into the firebox, etc.? I don’t know about your house, but my house is not a lab cleanroom environment. As the environment of the combustion process changes, so does the efficiency of the combustion process and emission levels.
“BUT BUBBA TOLD ME ABOUT THE ODS DEVICE AND HOW SAFE IT WAS”. Think back to what Bubba said that device was. It is called an OXYGEN DEPLETION SENSOR. That device ONLY senses when OXYGEN levels in the room have dropped below a safe level. It does not monitor sooting or carbon monoxide AT ALL.
Last year I had a couple of very upset customers who had vent-free products in their homes. One had vent free logs in their fireplace. They were working just fine. They were a thermostatic model that turned themselves on and off as the room cooled and warmed up. Sometime in the night the logs malfunctioned. When the owner got up the next morning and came out of their bedroom, the whole house was covered in black soot. Soot was hanging from the curtain rods and ceiling fans. The logs were still working in the fireplace! The painting bill was over $25,000 to paint the house.
The most sad story was similar. I don’t know who would sell vent free fireplaces for a 7,500 square foot dream home but they did. THE VERY DAY the owners moved in they fired up the fireplaces to heat up the house. They warmed up so quickly, they decided that would be the way to go. 2 days later, BAM! the house is black and it cost almost $50,000 to clean and paint!
I had a contractor hire me to remove all the vent-free fireplaces form a remodel job of his and replace them with direct vent units. I noticed the fireplaces and home were pretty new so I asked about the remodel. Turns out the owner had used the vent-free fireplaces as the heat for the house and as a result, essentially dumped about 6 to 8 gallons of water in the house every day in the form of water vapor, a natural by-product of vent-free appliances. after a couple seasons you could count the studs in the walls as the sheetrock had saturated with water and bowed in between the studs!
PROPER USE
There is a proper use for vent-free heaters. Follow these and you should be ok with regular maintenance;
MAINTENANCE: Never miss an annual service by a professional. Keep the logs and burner free from debris or dust.
VENTILLATION: open a window in the room to allow fresh air. about 3 inches should work. Vent-free appliances consume huge amounts of oxygen from the room and it must be replenished.
Here’s a thought; If you follow instructions and open a window in the winter while you are using your logs and the window lets in the same amount of cold air as the amount of warm air the logs is consuming, how efficient do you think that is? I know it is no even close to that 99.9% number we talked about earlier. I also know it is less efficient that about ANY direct-vent fireplace on the market.
Only use for short amount of time to quickly warm a room. NEVER use as a primary heat source unless it is an emergency situation for survival such as a power outage during a blizzard.
Make sure your logs are in their proper position and out of the path of the flame. Flame impingement is a major cause of sooting.
Check under your mantle with a white cloth to check for early signs of sooting. If you discover sooting, turn off the logs and call a professional for service.
Do not use a vent-free heater while sleeping. A malfunction is noticeable but only if you’re up.
I don’t know about you but $2.03 at the pump still does not impress me much! 99 cents, that might impress me a little bit. You know we’ll never see that again. I’d like to see America tell OPEC we don’t need your oil anymore. But how are we going to do that?
CONSUMPTION: We have to learn to use less and the place to start is with transportation. We have more cars per persons than any place on earth. Heck, I have 2 cars and a motorcycle and my Son, who doesn’t even have his license yet, has a car and a motorccle. Even my 7 year old has a motorcycle! OK, all these cars are not zipping up and down the road but I can use myself to make my point. We have too many cars.
What I have learned to do; and it took quite a bit of discipline, is to stop driving unless I have to. Sure I have to take the kids to school every morning so I try and run my errands then while I’m out. Then I come home and work. I’ve also trimmed back a lot on eating out although I support the local econonomy as much as I can afford.
One thing I am considering is converting my Suburban to run on various fuels. I think my plan now is to first upgrade the fuel system to use E-85 which is a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. We make ethanol domestically which will immediately reduce my foreign oil consumption by 85%. This is a relatively simple upgrade although not cheap until you look at the savings and reduced carbon footprint. Then, it is a no-brainer. I think I can do this phase of my conversion for around $400. Not too bad when you consider E-85 also costs about 40 cents less per gallon that gasoline. In the Suburban, that payback is over about 3 tanks!
Phase 2 of my plan is to go dual-fuel. This will be a big step as I will add the capability to use Compressed Natural Gas or CNG. There are currently 3 CNG filling stations around me. Asheville, Fletcher, and Hickory. At less that a dollar per GGE (gas gallons equivalent) CNG is very economical. Recovery of the investment will take longer though as it will run me about $3000 for this system.
E-85 is plentiful in South Carolina (cudos to Stewart Spinx) and is now making its way to local stations here in Asheville. I am seeing the SHELL stations adding E-85 lately so hopefully it won’t be long until it is a common item. The nice thing about the E-85 conversions is you can switch from E-85 to gasoline if you can’t find E-85 and need fuel.
VEHICLE TIPS
Motor fuels is our biggest consumption of foreign oil. Here are a few basic tips to help you reduce wasteful consumption;
REDUCE WEIGHT: Clean out your car. Removing excess weight from your vehicle will give you more miles per gallon. I took all the “stuff” out of my cargo area that I didn’t need and gained 2 MPG!
TIRE PRESSURE: underinflated tires cause undue friction and cause your car to use more fuel. I inflated my tires properly and gained 4 MPG in my Suburban. How about that? 5 minutes work and I gained 160 miles of range from a tank of gas!
AIR FILTER: One of the most neglected things on a car is the air filter. When your air filter is dirty, your engine gulps for air and burns more fuel than needed.
TUNE-UPS: Make sure your car is tuned properly and your injectors are cleaned. Periodically I will clean my throttle body and fuel injectors with over the counter cleaners. If you have never tried SEA FOAM, you will be amazed at what it will do for your intake system. Every 10,000 miles or so I will do a SEA FOAM treatment on my intake system. It is real easy. Your power brake system is powered by intake vacuum. With your car running, disconnect the hose at your power brake booster. It will suck like crazy! Slowly, pour in SEA FOAM and let it suck into your engine’s intake manifold. About 1/3 to 1/2 of a can will do the trick. Your car will smoke like it’s on fire as all the carbon deposits are cleaned away but it is completely safe and will renew the pep your engine has lost over time. Once the SEA FOAM is sucked in, shut down your engine, reconnect your power brake hose and let sit for 15 minutes. Then crank it up and give it a drive down the highway to burn off the remaining carbon. Smoking will stop and your car will run like new again. You will learn to LOVE sea foam. Pour the remaining sea foam into your gas tank and crank case and it will clean your fuel and lubrication systems.
USE BIODIESEL: If you are driving a diesel vehicle, there is no reason to be sucking up all that OPEC oil. Our friends at Blue Ridge Biofuels manufacture biodiesel from sustainable local resources. You can cut your foreigh oil dependence by 100% in the summer and by 50% in the winter. Be sure and check them out as well as find local biodiesel pumps at www.blueridegebiofuels.com
YES, it will smoke (lots is steam) a lot for a couple of minutes but your car will have MUCH cleaner exhaust and better fuel economy after this treatment. Environmentally, it is a big plus.
With the consistently escalated price of fossil-fuels I believe America has been forced to wake up and read the writing on the wall. At least gasses such as Propane and Natural Gas are domestic products, but that does not mean we should be wasteful. They are still expensive and there is not an infinite supply of even these rich resources.
When you are heating your home with gas your focus should be on your source of consumption first. There are gas furnaces that guzzle up a gallon or more of gas per hour to heat the whole house no matter where you are in it. Furnaces are ok, but we should really rethink that whole scenario.
If you heat solely with your gas furnace, even if you turn down the thermostat to 68, you are heating the whole house to 68 degrees. You know where I’m going with this don’t you? ZONE HEATING is a relatively new concept to Americans but in countries like Japan and China, it has been a way of life for years. In Japan, homes will have a small gas heater mounted with a quick-connect gas line. The residents will move the heater from room to room based on where they are spending their time and warm that room. Now I know this does not mesh with our lifestyle but we can still zone heat to save huge amounts of fuel and money.
You can install a gas stove or fireplace in the living room, den, playroom, or wherever in the house you spend most of your time. Use the stove or fireplace to keep that area warm and cozy while the bedrooms and nether regions of the house stay cooler. You won’t be going to bed for several more hours anyway right?
When it gets time for the family to go to bed, you can turn off the stove or fireplace and then let the furnace warm those other rooms. Even the largest gas stove will only consume about 1/3 the gas your furnace will in an hour – often even less! Now to shut that big gas hog down for 2/3 of the day will have a major impact on your gas bill, wear and tear on the furnace, and your carbon footprint.
Gas stoves are not cheap and if they are, they are probably very inefficient. You want to go ahead and bite the bullet when buying your stove or fireplace and get the best you can afford at the time. It will immediately start paying for itself in the saving mentioned above so be glad you went with a better stove.
EFFICIENCY is important. There are a couple B-Vent appliances with good efficiency ratings but there are only a couple. Even those consume room air for combustion so they will create a draft. I always have customers asking if I recommend outside combustion air for a stove or fireplace. I always tell them, “All combustion air is outside air. The difference is how it is brought to the stove”. You see, when your stove burns up room air for combustion, fresh air is sucked into the house through cracks in windows and doors in an uncontrolled manner. Ideally, you want to deliver that air directly to the stove so it does not cool the room.
Direct-Vent gas appliances have this feature built into their chimney systems. They have a small exhaust pipe inside a much larger pipe. The space between acts as an air intake and a preheater to increase efficiency. This is the most advanced technology of the day and what I highly recommend. Since direct-vent appliances have a balanced pressure combustion system, they offer installation advantages as well. If you can locate the stove or fireplace on an outside wall, you can vent out the wall and stop with a special termination cap. That’s right, you don’t even have to cut a hole in the roof with a direct-vent stove or fireplace.
So, if you want to take a chunk out of your gas bill, zone heating is the way. Invest a little more now into a system that will pay for itself in savings. You will also help the environment by burning less fuel in your furnace.
When you choose to heat with wood, there are many things to consider and to know. This article deals with firewood.
Woodburning is a very environmentally friendly act. Did you know a tree decaying in the forest will give off more carbon that the same tree burned in your wood stove? People that say burning wood is irresponsible are simply uneducated on the facts.
Each and every year I hear the same questions from my new woodburning friends. “What kind of wood” is often asked. My answer may surprise you.
The species of wood, ironically is not as important as your stove or how long the wood has been split and stacked in the dry!
THE STOVE: You absolutely want to start with a modern stove; a stove that has been listed and tested to meet the strict EPA Phase II emissions limits. Older, uncertified stoves do not have any form of secondary combustion to reburn the emissions of the stove. What that means is there will be a lot more pollution from an older stove and those emissions are unburned fuel and lost heat. You will have to burn a lot more wood to get the same amount of heat you would from a certified stove.
THE FIREWOOD: As I stated a moment ago, the species of the wood is not as important as how long it has been split and stacked in the dry. Fresh split wood, even if it has been laying on the ground for years, is still wet. Only when wood is cut to length, split and stacked does is begin to lose its moisture. I can’t count how many people said the tree fell 2 years ago so it should be seasoned and ready to cut and split. Not the case.
For hardwoods, you typically want the wood to be stacked to air-dry for a minimum of 6 months before heating season. For medium to soft woods, a year or more is ideal. Even the best of wood will heat poorly when it is not properly seasoned. That is because so much of the energy from the fire is being used up by the firewood itself to dry up the moisture. Very little heat will be used to heat your home.
“But Jack, my Pappy told me never to burn pine in the stove because it will clog up the chimney”. If it is not dried properly, ANY wood will clog up the chimney. Other places in the US have nothing but evergreens and that is all they burn. Ever burned a bunch of old pine or a bundle of lumber scraps? That burned real nice and hot didn’t it? That is because it was dry.
Here’s a bit of knowledge that will set your mind at ease on firewood;
ALL WOOD, regardless of species, has the same amount of particulate matter. With the same moisture content, a pound of white pine will produce the same amount of emissions as a pound of red oak. Pine is less dense than oak therefore you may need more cubic feet of pine to make the same weight as oak but they will heat and pollute about the same. Since their emissions are the same, neither will gunk up the chimney more than the other.
“I can get pine for almost nothing! So, you’re saying I can just burn pine”? ABSOLUTELY! Like I said, there are places that have nothing else. In fact, you will love burning pine. It starts easy and heats great. The only, and I mean ONLY drawbacks are burntimes and seasoning time. Since BTU in wood is PER POUND, you just can’t get as much pine into your stove as you can hardwoods. The denser the wood, the more pounds per cubic foot of firewood, the more fuel you have in your stove, therefore the longer it will burn on a load. Personally I would like to have some of both so I could load up with hardwood at night and burn softwoods during the day when I am there to load the stove.
Have a friend in the tree cutting business? I bet you can get their softwood for next to nothing. They probably chip it up and make mulch out of it just to get rid of it. Call him up and get yourself free heat. Just stack it a year in advance or more and you will be happy as a tic on a dog.
It is no secret we’re not big promoters of unveted heaters but that does not change the fact that there are millions of these things in homes.
Some states have banned ventless appliance altogether. The reason is not so much that they are going to kill you as it is that they can malfunction if neglected. When they do malfunction (neglect maintenance and it WILL happen to you) they can practically destroy a home’s interior in a matter of a couple of hours!
I have had customers go to bed with everything fine and wake up with soot balls hanging off everything in the house. This was because their vent free logs malfunctioned in the middle of the night while they were sleeping.
Ventless products ABSOLUTELY MUST BE SERVICES ANNUALLY! If you have neglected that maintenance, you better get a tech out as soon as possible to perform the required service.
Jack is an expert in vent-free systems & troubleshooting. I can come out and service you logs, fireplace or stove and have it working like new again – sometimes better than new. Additionally, this will help ensure you do not suffer an unexpected malfunction.
Remember, these are precision machines which are finely tuned. That is why they do not require a chimney. It takes very little to disrupt this precision and cause problems. Let me help keep you safe. Jack@firebyjack.com
We sure have our abundance of old homes around here. Some of these older homes were built for millworkers, servants quarters, summer homes and retreats. While charming, these homes are almost always cold and drafty in the winter. Here are a few tips to help you survive the winter;
If you’re a fireplace lover you probably have a secret place where you dump your fireplace ashes when you clean out the fireplace.
I often get calls on how to build a fire. The most common complaint is that the fire gets going but the kindling burns out and the logs don’t catch. Here are some tips (my picture shows a fire that will not start – no kindling);
The truth is, most people are extremely dissatisfied with vent-free appliances in the home. The reason is simple, THEY ARE TOXIC!
I don’t know about you but $2.03 at the pump still does not impress me much! 99 cents, that might impress me a little bit. You know we’ll never see that again. I’d like to see America tell OPEC we don’t need your oil anymore. But how are we going to do that?
When you choose to heat with wood, there are many things to consider and to know. This article deals with firewood.
It is no secret we’re not big promoters of unveted heaters but that does not change the fact that there are millions of these things in homes.
