October 25th or January 25th?

[Jeff]

http://www.adventurevision.com/somepictures/OctoberSnow.jpg
And you wonder why I was asking about pellet stoves... :whistle:

I know some people like snow pictures so here are the pictures my wife took in case anyone is intersted...
http://www.adventurevision.com/somepictures/OctoberSnow/

[LichtJF]

Pellet stoves ROCK!!

They will never get me to give mine up...


... unless I am dead...


......Wonders if they can make a casket big enough to take it with me.......


....NAH it will be hot enuff where i am headed.....



:fireboun:

[Bok]

I dream of snow....

Kinda makes me want to relocate. Been looking at a few places recently..

Bok

[Shish]

Why pick Jan 25th, my birthday.

Pellet stoves sound good apart from availability in UK and smoke regulations.
I remember the best house we ever had was an old one with a massive cast fireplace with built in ovens and hobs and an equally massive feeder area at the back which you could stack up with coal coke wood etc. We bought it cos my Granma had the same thing on which she used to bake the most glorious bread and stotties (large flat bread) and it never went out all winter and as well as providing cooking and heating the house, we were never short of red hot water. Also very cheap to run but it used to eat central heating pumps when we eventually installed radiators as the water was always hot and we frequently had to run water off to stop it boiling up.
The house we bought after that had a pot bellied stove in the kitchen and I think that was the cheapest central heating we ever had cos it burnt wood logs from the next door forest (always gave off a glorious smell with pine and some other wood like cedar which was cropped from the forest) and we also burnt graphite bricks from a local factory which made them for nuclear power plants and other manufacturing places. Trouble is graphite actually burnt too hot and again we had to be careful about the water temp.
Good ol` days? Sure they were cos neither of them were maintenance free but they were very cheap and effective and they didn`t take up that much time and energy while always having a comforting glow.
Nowadays, smoke and other regs make this sort of thing a very naughty item in the UK and the demise of the gas producing industry ( my father worked in a coal gas plant) means cleaner coke fuel ( a pain to light) is too expensive and flue cleaners to clean up the smoke are either too expensive or not available anyway.

Anyway, I`ve bought the site for my next house and thats what they call a "brownfield site" which means ex-industrial so I have to arrange ground tests and possible cleanup but that`s no problem with my contacts and I`ve got a prime site in an expanding housing area which is becoming much sought after which was also about 70% less than similar sites and after calling in a couple of favours (that`s the way I`ve always worked....you scratch my back and we settle up later :D ) I`ll have a larger than normal site which is presently on the edge of a very expensive area for housing (re-zoning can be magic if you catch it right) and getting the house built will reduce the cost by an enormous amount and I`m definitely going for geo and solar plus maybe some wind power for good measure. Just a hopefully short delay while the government gets back to sorting out grants for "green energy".
I`ve noticed it`s been in the news quite a lot recently with early adopters making it pay for itself, even with small turbines, and selling surplus power back to the grid.
Energy efficient houses really do pay for themselves nowadays with rapidly spiralling energy prices, just wish they`d get round to sorting out something reasonable like hydrogen fuelling for cars. Surely some of the majors can get nationwide hydrogen going cos gaz is already available at many fuel stations.