Also I wanted to mention that I recently bought a big box of mostly 1970s-era ‘Organic Gardening & Farming’ magazines at an auction. It’s amazing how almost every issue is a treasure trove of useful information and I’m especially enjoying reading all the great articles you wrote for them back then.

$5000. The stove was about $1000 of that.

Because I’m in a first floor unit with a unit above me, most of the costs were the chimney that had to be rather long. Inside it would rise maybe five feet, then bend out of the unit wall, then bend up for another 11 or 12 feet to get past the 2nd floor roof line. The fellow was not entirely sure how much draft could be gotten with so much chimney out in the cold and was cautious to even say that.

That project is on hold for the time being. I’m going to discuss with the owner (good friend) if it would be possible to frame in one corner of the upstairs living room to house a chimney. The folks upstairs (the owner’s daughter, her husband and baby and a roommate) don’t use that corner and it would be behind their enormous plasma screen tv anyway. I suspect that I’d halve the cost of the installation by being able to go up through the building and the draft issue would be substantially reduced.

Here in Alaska, the possibility of the electricity going out in the winter is very real. While I’ve been working piecemeal on the place to improve it’s insulative capacity, it still leaks like a sieve. I think I’d lose all heat within eight hours during an extended power outage. But five grand and no guarantee that the stove would draft properly is not making me itching to install a stove just yet.

On the other hand, all your comments on stove handling will come in very handy if and when I ever do find myself in that position. The local cooperative extension service has good literature specific to Alaska that I found useful as well. So I’m surrounded by much wisdom but with nothing to apply it to. Just yet.

Kerri in AK

I know a city fella who loves splitting wood. As soon as I’d cut it down and buck it, he’d want to split it. “It drys faster,” he’d insist.

Perhaps I just don’t want to get that warm the first time, but I know that the wood dries primarily from the ends. It’s important to buck it into rounds, but then I let it sit under tarps until it checks before splitting it — and the splitting then goes MUCH easier than when it’s green.