8:08 PM
| Sunrise at | 7:56 AM | in direction | 90° | East |  |
| Sunset at | 8:03 PM | in direction | 271° | West |  |
As an aside to today's rant, notice that we now have just over 12 hours of sunlight. Denver, Colorado has 12 hours and 4 minutes of daylight. We have more daylight than most anyone who would read the blog that does not live in Fairbanks. Just three months ago, I was recording daylight hours so low that I had to extol the virtues of twilight (which I am happy to continue to extol, actually), in order to tolerate the hours of dark. But there it is, for the next six months, we will have a surfeit of sun above the horizon.
Wood is a messy fuel. It's messy for the environment. It's messy for the inside of the house and it's messy inside the stove itself. Our borough tried to get ordinances past that required those using aging and polluting wood heating devices to face fines or replace them. The borough instituted a program whereby a home owner could replace an inappropriate heating device with one more environmentally friendly - at the borough's expense - in order to stimulate acceptance of the bills and ordinances.
The bill went down in a flash of hot flames and smoke filled skies. The residents of North Star Borough, as a whole, far prefer particulate-filled air over the possibility of having their choices for heating regulated. I am not a part of that majority because I would love to replace our inefficient, smoking, uneven heat-producing and polluting wood stove with one that more comfortably heats the house while using less wood.
This year has been particularly bad and I am not sure why. Several times, we have had a not-so-fine layer of smoke residue across our living area. We have repeatedly cleaned bark debris from around the stove area. We have had to clean the chimney more often than any of our family and friends. We have used 5 full cords in addition to diesel fuel. We have been too hot in the upstairs loft while radiant heat from the diesel fueled boiler still is required to heat our bedroom toward the back of the house. We have scarred several planks of our timbered wall unloading wood into the wood rack and the wood framing the stone pedestal upon which the stove sits is thoroughly ruined.
We also have air leaks around the stove pipe exit that are detectable due to the encroaching spider webs developing around the area. And speaking of air flow, the previous owners and builders of the house took air from the garage to add fresh air to the stove itself. So, not only are we drawing from an area that if heated, needs to be heated by oil, it pulls from around doors and windows to draw air to burn.
An unexpected consequence of the uneven heat combined with draw from the doorways was the radiator pipes freezing under those same locations. During the day, while we are away, the house will not maintain heat with the stove we have. So the hot-water heat takes over. But during the 4th coldest January (since they began recording temperatures for the Interior), our pipes froze just at the location of the doors and we came home to a house not heated by our inefficient fuel guzzling stove, nor our radiators. The demand for fuel was there, so the furnace went on repeatedly, but did not heat the house itself.
We have had to purchase our wood and the least expensive way to do that has been to purchase logs which we cut, split and stack ourselves. That means several weekends over the summer and fall are devoted to the preparation of wood stores for winter. Honestly, using less wood would be perfectly fine with me.
I am not sure why other residents of the borough don't agree.
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