Back to work

I know I cut off kind of abruptly at the end of last year, but I had it functional enough to heat my house and my wife was strongly urging me to get back to remodeling the inside of the house. I ran it pretty much the way it looked in my last post for the remainder of the winter with few issues. It is early fall now and we have had to kick on the stupid heat pump twice already, so it is time to get back to work on the wood stove. In the plans for this season are rerouting the water lines so that they run a more direct path into my house and building a structure around my stove.
   





  I never got the lines insulated, so they never got buried. That meant that it wasn't a big deal to move them. I decided on a shorter more direct route that would leave less line outside, but would mean I had to cross the living room in the basement with them. That decided I bored two more holes through my foundation and fed the lines through. I  used cpvc pipes to run up the outside of the house and the pex line inside.













 That left insulating the pex on the outside of the house. I had decided last year that instead of buying the outrageously priced ThermoPex I was going to make my own. I bought 4 inch sewer pipe and used that to encase the lines. I first wrapped them in fiberglass insulation that I had cut into strips and secured with duct tape.
 I got all the line wrapped and put in the pipes and the pipes put together.
 

So far they are just laying on top of the ground because I haven't got around the burring them yet. When I posted about doing this on Arborist.com last year I was told that I would have too much heat loss to make this a viable option. However, I don't think that this is going to be an issue because it snowed last night (it has been about 4 weeks since I composed the beginning lines of this post) and when I cam out this morning there was snow touching the pipe. The fact that there wasn't a few inches of bare ground around it like there was on the naked pipe means that I have made quite and improvement.
   

 The final really big piece of my project was to build a building for my stove to go in. My natural aversion to spending money prevented me from just going out and buying one, though I did at least look into it. When a relative had his property bought out by a coal mine he told me that I could use whatever I could get out of an old machine shed I was in luck. I harvested a couple of sections of the side of the building to be the sides of my building. I decided that the easiest configuration to go with would be and A-frame since that wouldn't require me to build a room. At first I tried to do the math on what kind of angle I would need if I knew all the side lengths of a triangle but not any of the angles, but that led me into the territory of trigonometry, which I evidently haven't retained a working knowledge of. After failing to find the angles I decided that I would use hinges so that I could play with the angles, however I couldn't find any laying around.  What I did have laying around was some main drive belts from the Claas combines that I work on. Cutting those into sections with a chainsaw I used them for hinges.

Using them actually worked really well. I not only used the pieces on the top, I also used them to attach the skids at the bottom.  I then put braces towards the top of the frame to hold the angle.

One of the unforeseen benefits of doing this was that when I lifted the section of wall I had into place the flexibility of the belts allowed for certain inconsistencies in my carpentry skills. I attached the wall sections to the frame I had made, trying my best to get everything straight.

After getting the sides put on I decided that I should move it to it's final location before I put the front and back on. It took me three different plans to successfully find a way to pull the building without destroying it. I got it pulled next to the stove and then used my truck to set it over the top. 

I got it in place and secured the tin where nails had come out and where I had replaced the boards. Since it was covered now I put more fiberglass insulation over it to replace the stuff that had been ruined by the weather. 

With all that done I decided to bump my water temps up to 170 degrees from 150. Doing this made the heat coming out of our vents a little hotter and more pleasing. Over the next few weeks I am going to add a front and a back to the building and also an overflow water tank.