But on to the kindness part. Every once in a while, amidst the pain of waiting for things to get done or builder friends to have the time to help you, you get something amazing. Since last winter, we'd been looking into purchasing a pellet stove for the house. Our place is very well insulated (I should know) but winters in the mountains of Colorado give you several months of 40 below temps overnight. Up in the high country, the cost of heating a place can be pretty major.
When I lived in Chicago, I always lived in apartments with radiator heat. It was included in the rent and I typically lived on the top floor where I frequently found myself turning down the radiators as far as they would go and sometimes even opening windows. Heat was an abundance I didn't think much about.
Cut to five years ago when I moved into a cabin in Creede, where we lived for four years. There, I became much more aware of having to work for heat. The cabin is not really equipped for winter living. It's old, poorly insulated and drafty. It has a forced air furnace run by propane, but it's 40 years old and the pilot light blows out if any sort of wind picks up. It has an wood burning stove which is also old, and itself not terribly well insulated. It burns very hot for several hours, then usually goes completely out by the morning leaving the cabin at a chilly 50 degrees. Sometimes colder if the pilot light on the furnace has gone out. Suck City. Also, we would go through about 10 cords of wood each winter even with a backup source of heat. That's a lot. A LOT. Of wood.
In Creede, wood is basically free as all you pay for is the permit to cut the wood down. But what you save in money, you use in the manpower chopping down trees and cutting them into a useable size. You can easily spend an entire week doing this.
Figuring out how to heat your new home on a budget in the mountains is a huge consideration. The most popular ways are a wood burning or pellet stove (some daring mountain men of the wild west use ONLY this form of heat), radiant heat (aka in-floor heating, which is much more expensive up front to install), electric panel heaters (price based on cost of electricity), and propane. Forced air furnaces run on propane here. Each individual home has its own propane tank and it costs around $250 to $300 each time you fill it up. Depending on how well insulated your house is, you can go through that quickly. When we were delayed getting into our house last year--we aimed for October but ended up getting in there late December, well into the cold season--we had not stocked up on enough wood to heat the cabin. We went through over $500 in propane in one month.
Sorry for the mountain heating lesson. Most of you reading this have probably never thought this much about heat. I surely hadn't.
SO. After all this, we were looking into supplemental heat during the really cold months--typically Dec-Feb. Those are the months when the furnace is constantly on and with a pellet stove, it would cut down on propane costs immensely. Newer pellet stoves are fairly quiet, burn much cleaner than wood stoves and require much less installation and cleaning. According to my research, the cheapest but still decent ones (from Home Depot) are about $1100--and the majority of good, solid stoves cost about $2500-$3000. Though it will save us money and pay for itself in the long run...Gah, that's a lot of money! Well, Creede kindness prevailed and a friend of RJ's happened to have a gently used, high quality pellet stove he wasn't going to be using. He recently sold it to us for $600 including installation as he knows how to do it properly. Once again, through the kindness and favors of friends in Creede, we were given an affordable option that will last and save us money for years to come. As you know, fair readers, I'm a Doer and not the most patient person in the world. But when I start to get depressed and anxious about how long this process is taking, RJ rightly reminds me that it does pay to be patient. So what I really want to express is Gratitude, Kindness, all those hippie dippy words that really do mean something in this magical place called Creede.
 |
| It's so cute! It still needs to be installed but this is where it'll live. (Please excuse the dirty, pink chair. Mr. Dorky Doo has been using it as a perch while I've been gone. Ahem...) |
