Peak Oil News and Message Boards

I recently bought a house that has a wood burning stove installed in the basement. Thankfully, I've learned through the last few years living with a two story house that fan placement is critical in distributing heat evenly throughout a structure. It's much easier to push cold air towards a heat source than it is to drive hot air to a cold place. This helps enormously in propagating heat. I have been able to use a single fan to blow the cold upstairs heat down to the basement, which almost equalizes the temperature throughout the house.

Today on Craigslist I found a wood source that should give me a couple cords of green soft wood that I can stack for next year or the year after. There seem to be quite a few free/scroungable sources of this and that on CL. I found bricks that I can use to build a raised bed for raspberries on one side of the house and on another side to raise blueberries.

I figure my daily rate is $250. If I can scrounge $250 worth of stuff, it's worth my time and gas. Less than that, and I'll let it go. Tomorrow should be a $350 day after gas.

I just moved out of a house into a trailer home (caravan). We sold about a thousand bucks worth of stuff like fridge and washing machine, lawnmower etc. and the rest of the furniture we put out on the edge for the council to collect for recycling and/or landfill. Funny that when we were selling stuff we had 20+ people a day looking, some buying, but when it's give away hardly anyone has shown up, with ads on the same site.

Our car is recycled (near 20 years old Euro diesel).
Our van is recycled (near 20 years old 3 meter caravan).
Only things we own we bought new are our laptop computers (both being online a lot).

We get 30+ MPG (7 liters per 100km) with everything we own in it.
We will very rarely pay rent.

Downsizing, recycling, being happy with less, looking at life as an adventure rather than a competition; all good things to be doing in this era.

Some municipalities have wood piles from trees they've cleared. There are also lumber mills that sell "tail ends" - a friend used to get 4" cubes of dried oak for $20 a pickup truck load. And of course there are those residential pear trees that always fall over.

Ayoob wrote:I figure my daily rate is $250. If I can scrounge $250 worth of stuff, it's worth my time and gas. Less than that, and I'll let it go.

There is a lot that I do that is well below the rate I get paid for work. The equation changes for the better if I consider what I get after tax rather than the basic hourly rate. It also looks very good if what I do is in my own time (ie when I would not get paid anyway). For example when I am making jams, I make a small 'profit'* per batch, but that profit divided by the time works out at between 1/4 and 1/2 of minimum wages. Because there is still a profit I find it worthwhile although the hourly rate is lousy.

Unless your trips prevent you for doing other work, you should price the cost of the wood etc as the actual costs - I think you will find it worthwhile.


* 'profit' here is the difference between buying the equivalent finished product in shops less the cost of ingredients and cooking.

Collect hardwood if you can find it. It has a lot more heat then the same sized pile of softwood, has a better bed of coals that lasts longer through the night and makes less soot. Many pallets are made from various hardwoods but the labor of breaking them down to stove sized pieces makes them expensive based on your energy input. Softwood is OK if it is cheap and easy to get to but if your cost in the pile is over $100 dollars a cord I'd pass on it.

Ayoob wrote:I figure my daily rate is $250. If I can scrounge $250 worth of stuff, it's worth my time and gas. Less than that, and I'll let it go. Tomorrow should be a $350 day after gas.

I'm a scrounge but much less choosy. I think I need to take a lesson from you.

As I think about it, maybe I need to take a lesson from Gypsy!

Anyway, custom cabinet shops are a great source for hardwood scraps. I'd think furniture factories, flooring mills and subdivision job sites might also be good.

I have a whole wood lot surrounding my home of dead and dying beech and ash trees. I've got the local mill coming over to remove about 10 acres of them before they fall over and rot. They won't take the ash as they're regulated in not transporting that great import from Asia, the emerald ash borer, which has killed all these trees and looks to be unstoppable in any case.

The forested areas are going to look like the praries of the upper Midwest in the next 50 years. Wood is going to be one of those hot commodities in the second half of this century. A side effect will also be a dramatic decline in woodland wildlife as their habitat and food source disappears. Welcome to the new Darfur.

Pops wrote:Anyway, custom cabinet shops are a great source for hardwood scraps. I'd think furniture factories, flooring mills and subdivision job sites might also be good.

You may have to go to China to find those woodworking manufacturers anymore.

Tree service companies in towns and urban areas often remove trees and have to pay to dump the trees. When I lived in Florida I would get the tree shredders to back up on my drive way and dump truck loads that I used as mulch. It was free.

When I lived in Seattle we had a wood burning stove and I bought rounds of Big leaf Maple, ash or cedar from tree service companies for under $100 a cord and I split the wood myself. There was a UPS driver who on weekends gathered the rounds and split wood and sold this for $ 250 a cord to folks as well. I always thought he had a nice gig going, driving around in his UPS truck during the week spotting the oppornities for harvest during the weekends.

Winters there weren't so cold in Seattle but we slept with no heat at night as the wood stove slowly burned cold. My daughters have fond memories of this.

Here In Panama at 1900m we have a wood burning stove for cool nights. We have an endless supply of tropical hardwoods that are as dense as teak and are at times hard to get started but once they get going two pieces will burn for hours....

There is nothing like the dry heat of a fire on wet cloud forest nights.

Lore wrote:

Pops wrote:Anyway, custom cabinet shops are a great source for hardwood scraps. I'd think furniture factories, flooring mills and subdivision job sites might also be good.

You may have to go to China to find those woodworking manufacturers anymore.

LOL, true, may have to settle for IKEA boxes.