Spring is here!

Here we are, approaching the end of March and the temperature today approached 60.  Same yesterday and it's going to be that way throughout the rest of the week.  When it's this warm, I do not use the wood stove.  It heats the house too much so instead I'll turn the central heat up for a short time in the morning to take the chill off.  That usually takes care of it for the rest of the day.

Later in the week and next week it's supposed to cool off a little and there are a few days of rain and temps in the low 50s.  Those kinds of days are perfect for a nice little fire going but for all practical purposes I'm pretty much done with using the wood stove for the rest of this year.  This is especially true considering we're going to be either in Aruba or at our condo in FL for most of April.

With this in mind I took inventory of our wood situation.  I started the season back in September 2020 with 6.75 cords of wood on hand.  I now have about 3.5 cords on hand.  So for the season we used a solid 3 cords of wood.  About normal.  We have the same amount on hand for the coming winter but I need to get busy for future winters. 

The thing is since I turned 78 about a month ago the question is how much longer do I want to keep doing this?  We've talked about the possibility of converting our fireplace to a propane powered insert.  This wouldn't be difficult to do since we installed a 500 gallon propane tank for our generator.  We could use it also for the fireplace.  The downside is propane is not free-nor is it  particularly cheap but my wife is pushing hard for it.  

For myself I still love wood heat.  Especially in view of the fact that the fuel is free since there's so much around.  I just have to cut, split, haul and stack it!  That's a lot of work and I'm not sure I'm still up to it.  So this is an issue that needs to be resolved soon.  We'll probably decide this summer.  We'll see.