How We Heat a Large House With a Single Wood Stove
(Page 2 of 5)
November/December 1976
By the Mother Earth News editors
While we don't have any data to prove that being nestled amongst the trees has helped us conserve heating energy, we can state that the air around our house is considerably warmer than the air on nearby fully cleared sites. And we've noticed that on particularly gusty days, the trees do neutralize the windchill factor on our site. So having a natural windbreak..certainly hasn't hurt us any!
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THE HOUSE: DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION
Our home is a single-story structure that rests on a gravel base which extends to the depth of our region's frost line (three feet). We protect the dwelling's 16" of crawl space (see Fig. 1) from winter winds by wrapping the entire base of the house with polyethylene plastic sheeting, and then packing snow against the plastic after the first good storm of the season.
Four- to six-inch-thick cedar logs—planed on one side and rough on the other—serve as the structure's primary building material. These timbers not only provide a durable and attractive wall material, but (since cedar is a very porous wood) several inches of insulation too.
The hip roof—with four sloping sides that meet at a sixfoot ridgepole—is insulated with three-inch styrofoam boards nailed to one-inch sheathing. This arrangement probably doesn't prevent heat loss as well as would a conventional roof with three to six inches of rolled fiberglass . . . but it seems to work well enough, while allowing us to enjoy the aesthetic rewards of an open ceiling.
HOW MANY WINDOWS?
We decided to give the sun every possible opportunity to enter our house by installing as many windows (including three homemade skylights) as we could afford. In this way, our home is warmed—in part—by passive solar heat during the day. (At night, though, we have to cover all our windows—which, of course, are double-paned—with heavy, insulated curtains to keep the stored warmth from radiating back out into the cold darkness.)
On chilly, overcast days—when we don't want to draw the curtains but we DO want to keep heat from escaping through the windows—we pull down our "Rescue Blanket" shades. These are just some ordinary blinds that we jury-rigged from a thin, lightweight, metalized plastic sheeting—called "space blanket" material by some folks—of the type that's often carried in survival kits by skiers and backpackers. All we did was tape one edge of this sheeting (shiny side facing into the house) to the wall atop each window, and the other end to a long dowel so that the whole affair can be rolled up or down as necessary. These shades offer the twofold advantage of allowing some sunlight to enter the house while letting little—or no-heat escape. (Rescue Blankets are sold by L.L. Bean, Inc., Freeport, Maine 04033. At $2.00 postpaid for each 56" X 84" sheet, we think they're a pretty good buy.)
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