“In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.”
-Albert Camus
Today is a lovely winter day. The sun is shining and the trees are flocked with snow. It’s also 8 degrees outside. I’m cold, even though I’m inside wearing four layers of clothing.
In fact…brrr…I’m freezing.
Snuggled up here next to my computer, I’m thinking many thoughts about heating options. We heat our house with a pellet stove. For those who don’t know, a pellet stove burns small wood pellets that are made out of compressed sawdust. The pellets come in 40 pound bags and sort of look like rabbit food. Although a pellet stove burns like a standard wood stove in some ways, you don’t have all that chopping, hauling, splitting and so forth. You dump in a bag of pellets and the stove heats the house. It’s easy and actually not very expensive, especially when compared to electric (eek!) or oil heat.
The bad news is that our pellet stove can supposedly heat about a 1,500 square foot house effectively. Our house is around 2,500 square feet. That means that the downstairs area is fine, but the upstairs is positively arctic. Plus, a pellet stove is not something you want to have in your living room. The fans are loud, so ours lives down here in the daylight basement.
That means even now, I’m dreading going upstairs to make myself some lunch. Let’s just say it’s not exactly relaxing to dine when you food gets cold the moment you take it out of the microwave. You can practically see the icicles forming on it. Yummy.
So as I do every winter, I’ve been pondering alternate heating options for the upstairs area. Unfortunately, we have a number of limitations. The first is that we’re remote. They’ll be running a natural gas line out here sometime this side of never. Second, because of the placement of our house and the topography, there’s not a very good place to put a propane tank that’s not either impossible to get to or hideously ugly. (I’m sorry, but a propane tank is not “garden art.”)
Fortunately,with the Internet, you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about heating options. This morning, I surfed around and learned a lot about BTUs, voltage, and various radiant heat options I’d never heard of before.
It really struck me that having this level of specialized and somewhat obscure information right at your fingertips is an amazing luxury. My fingertips my be frozen, but thanks to the Internet, I may figure out a way to thaw them out yet.