Joined
·
1,187 Posts
Have you given any thought to how you will keep warm next winter? What if, between now and then our cities infrastructure goes to hell and your electric heat pump/gas furnace no longer functions? Do you have a back-up plan?
If your back-up plan is to purchase a wood stove maybe you better think again. I'm building a new house and had my wood stove all picked out and had designed the whole house heating system around it.
So I go down to my dealer the other day and dejavew, it's like I'm at the local gun store. "We'll put your name on our waiting list, but we can't give you any idea when we might be getting more of that model stove in".
Here's the story: Stoves are not manufactured in the United States anymore, almost all stoves these day come from China; except right now the supply has dried up.
I hope to get my stove before we're ready to move into our finished house, but whats a person to do if he find the need for heat some cold winter day?
One possible solution I'm offering for your consideration:
About forty five years ago I lived on the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona. All the hogans at that time were heated with oil-drum wood stoves. They were easily made at little or no cost.
An 55 gal. oil-drum was cut in two so that the bottom end is about 22" high. The bottom of the drum becomes the stove top cooking surface. A square door is cut into the side for feeding the fire, saving the cut-out piece to be wired back in place to open and close for feeding the fire. On the side of the top opposite this door (right at the edge) trace a circle the diameter of whatever you are using for a stove-pipe. Then bisect this circle into six pie-shaped sections, cut along these scribe-lines and bend up; these are what the stove-pipe screws to.
If I were making a stove today I would certainly use a right angle grinder/a cut-off wheel attached. But back in the day I saw one of these stoves manufactured with nothing more than a cold chisel and a hammer. BTW - Be sure you know what was in the drum originally, try to steer clear of drums which might have contained gasoline or other explosive stuff.
Of course hogans all had dirt floors and a smoke-hole in the center of the ceiling; to put a drum stove in a modern house would take some improvising. A shallow clay box to set it on and maybe a short run of stove pipe out a window would suffice.
I realize that with enough time and money, a better stove than this could be constructed. I just threw this out in case someone got jammed-up next winter.
Elgin
If your back-up plan is to purchase a wood stove maybe you better think again. I'm building a new house and had my wood stove all picked out and had designed the whole house heating system around it.
So I go down to my dealer the other day and dejavew, it's like I'm at the local gun store. "We'll put your name on our waiting list, but we can't give you any idea when we might be getting more of that model stove in".
Here's the story: Stoves are not manufactured in the United States anymore, almost all stoves these day come from China; except right now the supply has dried up.
I hope to get my stove before we're ready to move into our finished house, but whats a person to do if he find the need for heat some cold winter day?
One possible solution I'm offering for your consideration:
About forty five years ago I lived on the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona. All the hogans at that time were heated with oil-drum wood stoves. They were easily made at little or no cost.
An 55 gal. oil-drum was cut in two so that the bottom end is about 22" high. The bottom of the drum becomes the stove top cooking surface. A square door is cut into the side for feeding the fire, saving the cut-out piece to be wired back in place to open and close for feeding the fire. On the side of the top opposite this door (right at the edge) trace a circle the diameter of whatever you are using for a stove-pipe. Then bisect this circle into six pie-shaped sections, cut along these scribe-lines and bend up; these are what the stove-pipe screws to.
If I were making a stove today I would certainly use a right angle grinder/a cut-off wheel attached. But back in the day I saw one of these stoves manufactured with nothing more than a cold chisel and a hammer. BTW - Be sure you know what was in the drum originally, try to steer clear of drums which might have contained gasoline or other explosive stuff.
Of course hogans all had dirt floors and a smoke-hole in the center of the ceiling; to put a drum stove in a modern house would take some improvising. A shallow clay box to set it on and maybe a short run of stove pipe out a window would suffice.
I realize that with enough time and money, a better stove than this could be constructed. I just threw this out in case someone got jammed-up next winter.
Elgin