I've had my fireplace going for quite a while this winter, and have added an extra fan to help improve the amount of heat getting into the rest of the house.  Hey who knows it might even improve my fireplaces EROEI as it's blowing on a part that didn't have the best heat transfer before.

However in some ways I always look forward to the first bill of the year, when the bill comes in for our propane.  Since I track our efficency of propane use vs. degree days (coming soon?), it gives you an idea how much heat I've been putting out in our fireplace downstairs.

At the end of last year, I had the blower go on my wood stove.  For whatever reason it would get up to temperature, you could hear the motor kick in, but it would just sit there.

Last night I managed to take it off, remove all the dust, clean it out and get the fan spinning again.  Another quick lubrication job, cleaned off the contacts and hooked it back up.  Fired up the stove and.... IT WORKS!

I almost feel like a handyman now.

From reference, the blower consumes 42W of power when it's running according to the sticker on the blower motor.

Current Status:

Potatoes (8 rows).  10% of them are now flowering.

Beans - Yellow: 2 Rows, 2 weeks to flowers.

Beans - Green: 2 Rows, 1 week to flowers.

Beans - Purple, Flowering this week.

Zucchini 4 plants - Flowering this week.

Tomatoes - Cherry: Green fruit is now on the vine

Pumpkins - Started

Cantaloupe - Started

As a quick followup to an earlier post on what the fuel equivilance is here between wood and propane, especially with the wood stove. 

Now that we've been in the new house for a few months, we have a better idea of the heating costs.  Our propane vendor, WO Stinson gives us "degree days" which is a measure of how cold it is.  A long story short, you can easily convert between degree days, and the amount of fuel you would have expected to use.  Great when you're a stats junkie like me. :)  Since I had spent a bunch of time at home last month using the wood stove, I was hopeful that I would see an impact on our bill.

Welcome to the new home of the DIY revolution!

For right now all I can do is point out a couple posts that I've done on the topic.  A big thanks to my friend Ryan Taylor for his help on various projects here, and moral encouragement.

Projects

Sadly a lot of these have to have the documentation on here and howto's brought up to date.  I've broken them down by status and date I started them.

I've always been curious about how much propane I would have needed to offset the amount of heat that I'm generating from my stove.  So today since it's the last day of my vacation I tried to come up with a rough number.

What units are you using?

I have a physics background so units don't mean too much, but you have to be careful with them.  Since I have to pay by the litre, but many things are in BTU when it comes to heat, or BTU/hr. So here's what I have, it may not apply to everyone.   That's how I'll try to work things out to end up with pricing as it sits today. :)

The Equipment in the Lab