Over 80% of Maine Fathers’ Affection Is Directed at Their Wood Piles Are they trying to say other states don't devote enough concentration to getting their wood in?
When you live in a rural area or in the mountains, you better know how to get firewood put up! It's not just "admiring your wood", it's taking pride in providing for your family and knowing that you are being independent or prepared in case of emergency. (Kind of sad that the article makes it sound like you're having a love affair with your firewood. Or that people are strange for wanting to be prepared.)
New Maine News is Maine's version of The Onion. Educated people outside Maine have the Washington Post for entertainment.
I have always said: "In Maine, you better have either a big pile of cash, or a big pile of firewood, but do not get could dead without one or the other". Of course I also referred to my ex-wife as, "Warmth in the winter, and shade in the summer."
There was a thread someone started with a picture of a large house in New York which had just that. Firewood stacked up passed the house roof and also up the back by the garage or shed. I believe there’s only one person on this site who I have seen evidence that they have just about that much wood.
Actually, that was the measure all the old timers used for if they had enough firewood for the winter. Woodpile as big as the house. Hence, a lot of small houses.
I have been building this house for the past 20 years and while it seems it gets continually bigger, the wife and I are actually thinking about downgrading. We can either rent this house out, or end up letting one of the kids having it, but we are thinking about moving underground. We designed a SMALL underground house, partly for the heat retention, but mostly for the wind protection. We live on a giant hill and it gets slammed with the wind. I would say 1-2 times a week the wind blasts us up here and we are tired of it. We designed a small underground house, really like the design and can build it easily by ourselves. So that is our rough, long term plan now.
There are a couple old Finns that built a semi-underground house here. They also heat it with a pot belly type stove, as do you. The house is about half underground....or even more so just banked up with dirt to around 4'-5' minimum all around...(varies). This way, that can use a portion of the sidewalls above grade for penetrations and avoid all the penetrations going through the roof with a totally underground house. And of course, the moisture/water/seepage/leaking problem was addressed better since they had their choice of back fill...sand, gravel, vs, dirt, (building above clay, not in); etc. Their house was/is very comfortable and still had the ability to view out of windows which you'd be without with a underground house. Never remember it as being too humid inside at all.
One of the members of tnttt.com the best teardrop trailer building site in the world, lives in Maine and has an underground house, he burns half a cord a year for heat. He also thinks he could build a house now that needed no additional heat
I started in a tiny house long before it was all the rage, and just added on as I needed to. It saved me a lot of money over the years because I had no mortgage, but it is big enough now so that we are thinking about going the other way. I go to a green type website that has underground houses, but they are all natural. I have no real interest in that, I want performance, so I think a mix of great design, fully underground (not just bermed), and modern materials could make for a very pleasant home. I suppose it is possible to heat a well designed Maine home without additional heat. I would think active solar would be the answer rather than passive solar, only because every passive solar house I have been works really well when the sun shines...too well, and not so well when it does not. Active solar would be more expensive, but also allow better management of the heat produced.
I was reading about a guy that was pretty ingenious. He moved o Idaho in a tiny cabin back in the late 70's and pretty near froze that first winter, so set about building a better house. So he went underground, but unlike many, he did something ingenious, rather than put his house with its back to the hillside, he put the back of his house to the view and put the front of his house to the hillside and carved part of it away...backwards to what you would think. In this manner, he set about making diversion ditches so the water flowed out around his house, and not into it. Typical underground houses have incredible hydraulic forces pushing water into the house; not his. But this allowed him something else, light on two sides, and he claims humans need natural light from 2 sources to feel calmed. On the underground house Katie and I designed, we did just that, getting light in every room (granted there was only 3) in every room. I do have an underground house book and it was done by some University in Minnesota and they did elaborate studies on heat retention and found while dry soil was an insulator, a person could get almost double the heat retention with just a 2 inch layer of insulation under 3 feet of soil. The greenies dislike that, they use leaves and pine fluff, but I have no problem with Styrofoam insulation. Since the house we designed was only 24 x 24 feet, what modern materials we used would not be that significant. As for heat...I am not sure. I have looked into a huge range of options on my current house, from crazy ideas like cavatation pumps driven by wind, to compost heat, but at the end of the day, a few days of gathering firewood puts the most btu's in the house for the least amount of labor. An underground house is different though because while it stays a relatively constant 57 degrees, that is below the threshold of what humans like. That means an underground home must be heated 365 days a year by some means, active solar, passive solar, compost, etc or a combination thereof. Some people feel the earth of an underground house mean they act as thermal mass and negate the need for heat, but I am not so sure. We get a lot of gloomy days in Maine, and so it would seem to me that the earth of the underground house would act more as a thermal heat sink, withdrawing heat from the structure constantly so additional heat would need to be added. In that manner compost heat, and its low temp, constant supply might be best.
I think this underground house needs/deserves it's own thread. Active vs passive solar thread also. I like idea of building with high tech insulation and solar heat gain, but the budget here won't allow that. I need to remodel, and really want to keep the heat in. My house is a very poorly insulated cape cod, which complicates everything .
Human beings are a heat source, so are appliances, and light bulbs. While the government is convinced that incandescent bulbs are a huge waste, those of us living where the heating season is longer than the air conditioning season know that those bulbs are also great heaters.
60 watt light bulb produces around 200 btu. Human body produces about 250-400 btu. (I thought this used to be around 600 back in the 90's....we must be getting healthier!) According to these numbers, it would benefit anyone to have large parties inside their residences during the heating seasons! Getting back to the government's view of incandescent bulbs, they were also convinced that the fluorescent light bulbs (those pig tail looking things) were the way to go.....for a few years anyway! Worked so well for so many years and then had to fix it.......
