Greetings

[Jim Post]

Greetings from Southern Wisconsin,

I heard about this forum through an email list at woodheat.org. I currently provide heat to my house and family with a tarm down draft wood boiler and would like to learn more about economical power generation and increasing building efficiency. Hopefully I've come to the right place.

jp

[Risa Beckwith]

Hi!

Greetings from Chicago, Illinois. I joined today and heard about it from a renewable energy Yahoo group.

Welcome to us! :D

[Rob Beckers]

Welcome Jim!

As it happens I'm in the process of replacing a 20-year old open wood fireplace with a high-efficiency (closed) wood burning fireplace. The original fireplace is almost useless, it produces no additional heat when burning (because it's pulling heated air out of the house) and because the dimensions are wrong it is prone to releasing smoke in the house.

The new fireplace will hopefully solve both those problems. In fact, part of the reason for doing this is to have a serious backup heat source in case power goes down (and the high-efficiency gas furnace with it). Hopefully it will also offset some of the natural gas use in winter. The downside is that installing this involves taking a 18 foot wall made of natural stone apart (it's in the living room, which has a cathedral ceiling), inserting the fireplace, then putting that wall back together again. Not cheap.

In any event, just wanted to say 'welcome', and if you have specific questions about building efficiency and power generation I encourage you to start a few new threads in the appropriate forums with those questions. With a little luck you will get lots of suggestions!

-Rob-

[Rob Beckers]

Welcome to you too, Risa!

Didn't mean to be rude by not mentioning you in my previous post. Your message was posted just as I was typing my reply to Jim, so I didn't see it until after posting.

-Rob-

[Jim Post]

Hello Risa and Bob!

How do you like this El Nino induced weather pattern? We have been enjoying March like weather for the last 3 weeks....I laughed when I heard the newspeople say it was caused by El Nino....They just can't bring themselves to say Global Warming.

Stay warm,
jp

[Rob Beckers]

Hello Risa and Bob!

How do you like this El Nino induced weather pattern? We have been enjoying March like weather for the last 3 weeks....I laughed when I heard the newspeople say it was caused by El Nino....They just can't bring themselves to say Global Warming.

Stay warm,
jp

As I was just yesterday discussing with my (Canadian) neighbors: We loooove global warming! :D
It's supposed to be -15C during the day this time of year (that's 5F). Instead it was 7C (and that's 45F). That has been going on all 'winter'.

-Rob-