Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

This morning, Lisa hitched up the utility trailer to the Small Orange Pickup and we went over to Big R shortly after they opened at 7 AM and collected what we hope will be the final pallet of Pres-to-Logs this season. This pallet was not in the best of shape, and despite Lisa being very cautious on the slow drive home, things didn't go that well.

( Emergency Unloading and Filling the Box )

Measuring only based on the large wood box, we are now at 105% of capacity on firewood, as the small box on the front porch and the ready supply of up to 24 logs in the living room were also full. We pulled the pallets out of the trailer for later reduction to kindling (the pallets are untreated wood, so we consider them safe to burn), I put the plastic wrap into the trash, and Lisa put the trailer and pickup away. She then went to bed, having been up all night working on a project. I'll see her again in the wee hours of Sunday morning as we plan to go grocery shopping.

I was very glad to get all of that wood put away, as the wind came up this afternoon, and it looks like it might rain. I would have been very annoyed to have spent all that money on firewood only to have it make like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and last night the temperatures were below freezing, making for an icy porch and sidewalks. Today we had intermittent rain and wind. Now I know the weather has been much worse for many other people, with blizzard conditions back east, but it's really unusual for us to get this much rain over a day or two. Or if we do get that much rain, it will happen all at once, with 20% of our annual precipitation falling in an hour.

During a break in the rain, Lisa moved wood from the large wood box to the small one on the porch and also filled up the smaller box in the living room. I offered to put on my work clothes and help, but she said she'd do it, as I'm still not supposed to do heavy lifting for a while. I've been carrying only two logs at a time rather than four, and that's still up from one log (they weigh around 3 kg each) when I first came home from the hospital.

I mentioned that I ran completely out of wood in the indoor wood box yesterday. That is primarily because Kayla did not feel like going outside in her office clothes, and I knew that there was more wood close at hand if we really needed it. Here is how we stage the firewood.

( Small, Medium, and Large Wood Boxes )

Kayla could have stepped outside and got a few logs if necessary. It was not as if she was unwilling to go outside at all; she walked down to the other end of the property a couple of times on Friday. She just was being a little lazy and leaving the work to me.

The temperatures have dropped low enough and stayed that way the the electric heater cannot stave off the cold any longer. Yesterday, I gave in and got the fireplace lit for the first time this season.

( Burn, baby, burn )

The living room is now warm enough that I can feel my fingers again.

While we had about a half-full wood box at the end of last season, Big R told me yesterday that they have only one pallet of the Pres-to-logs in stock and none on order, so at our first opportunity, Lisa and I plan to go over and buy that pallet. Running out of wood is a Bad Thing.

Yesterday, Lisa hooked up the utility trailer and we collected the pallet of firewood for which I paid last weekend during the break between snowstorms. The days are long enough now that when we got home, we were able to unload the pallet before dark. The woodbox is now almost completely full, which is a good thing.

In some of the photos of the area near the woodbox, you may have noticed a pile of uncut cord-wood as well as a not-very tidy pile of pallets. We accumulate pallets, as the Pres-to-Logs and other wood is packaged on pallets. Lisa has tried to cut these down to short lengths so we can burn them in the fireplace; however, the pallets are generally full of nails, and you don't really want to try cutting them with most power equipment. Cutting them with hand saws is very tiring, and consequently, we've got a lot of uncut pallets.

Lisa, after doing some study, decided that a new tool was needed, and so off we went to Lowe's.

( Time for Some Demo )

As our time and energy permit, we will cut up these remaining pallets and store the pieces in the wood box. The area behind this pile of pallets is a place where Lisa is planning on building a second wood box so that we can lay in as many as three pallets of Press-to-Logs at a time, which will help soften hiccups in the supply chain next winter, we hope.

I knew the forecast was for some more snow, but I didn't expect even as much as we did have overnight.

( But It Doesn't Stick Around )

With the roads cleared once again, I went out to complete the errands I'd planned to do yesterday but postponed: refueling the Astro and going to Grocery Outlet for milk and other perishables.

Plans we had to start cutting up the pile of pallets that accumulated over the winter will need to wait until after the pallets have dried back out from last night's snow. Once the wood is cut down to size I can put it into the large wood box to keep it dry and to supplement the Press-to-Logs.

I am promoting replies to well-intentioned people suggesting what to do about the firewood here. I contacted Lignetics, who make Press-to-Logs, and learned:

Most importantly: Lignetics' log-making machine is broken and they are having difficulty repairing it. Consequently, they have been unable to fill orders to their customers.

Regarding us purchasing multiple pallets when they are available and loading multiple pallets on the rental trailer:

1. The largest U-Haul utility trailer (the one we rented) physically can hold two pallets, but it would overload the trailer's rated towing capacity. This would be dangerous and would void our towing contract, making us liable for any damage or towing failure.

2. If we can get multiple pallets delivered to the local Big R (possible if Lignetics gets their machine fixed), we can get the pallets one at a time using the small utility trailer, which we can use at slow speed for short distances. (3 km / 2 mi @ less than 40 km/h / 25 mph).

Regarding the idea of doing a direct purchase from the manufacturer:

1. A full truckload of Press-to-Logs is 24 pallets. (At retail prices, that would cost more than $9000.)

2. They do not bring a forklift with their deliveries. The purchaser must have a lift with which to unload the truck.

3. They do not sell to individual retail customers. They sell only to retailers or distributors.

So I think that's it for this season. We have to hope that we have enough wood to last until it warms up and that the manufacturer is able to get their machine repaired by next season.

There is one other type of fire logs sold through a retailer in Fallon and Yerrington. We have purchased from them in the past, and they do have a truck that can hold two pallets, and they've been reluctantly willing to deliver to us in the past, and we have been able to ask one of our industrial neighbors to use their forklift to unload the pallets in the road (they won't take the forklifts off the paved surfaces). This makes unloading harder for us (we use a wheelbarrow to shuttle logs between the unloading location to the wood box), but possible.

Paving a strip of the East Lot is possible, but not something we're considering in the short term, because we would then have to fence the property to put a gated on the pavement to prevent people from using it as a cut-through road. We know they would do so, because when we first moved here, there were signs of people doing so on the dirt surface. We dragged some concrete logs and part of a fallen tree over to discourage people from doing so.

Every proposed solution has its own complications, and so far, nobody has proposed a solution that we hadn't already considered. Owning the East Lot helps, but does not solve all problems.

I've almost used up the Sis-Q-Logs, so it was time to bring Pres-to-Logs up to the porch wood box.

( Old Logs and New )

While the rest of the country to the east of me is apparently in the Deep Freeze, it has warmed up somewhat here and it looks like we'll have a few days around Christmas with even the overnight lows above freezing. That will mean not having to keep the fire roaring to keep the house warm.

With the "heating season" behind us, I did some accounting on our expenditures for firewood (the primary heat source in the house) for the past two years. Somewhat to my surprise, it turned out to be almost exactly the same for the past two "seasons," which I reckoned as June-to-May. For the past two years, we spent between $1500 and $1600/year on firewood and related supplies like fire-starters and Enviro-Logs and "tips" to the the local industries who kindly drove down and unloaded pallets of North Idaho Energy Logs from the flatbed trucks. The only difference was that in 2019-2020, we had two deliveries of two pallets each of the North Idaho Energy Logs, while in 2020-2021, we bought five pallets of Pres-to-Logs from Big R.

Nobody in Fernley sells the North Idaho logs anymore, so we have to pay to have them delivered from Fallon because we don't feel comfortable taking the utility trailer on long trips until we can spend the rather substantial amount of money to have the axle replaced so we can put new tires on it. (It has proven nearly impossible to get replacement tires that will fit the current wheels, and for complex reasons, it appears that new wheels aren't available for this particular axle. It's a long story.) With the utility trailer, we can get Pres-to-Logs from Big R, which is only about 1 km from our house and is thus a short and slow drive that Lisa doesn't consider too taxing on the trailer.

The North Idaho logs are bigger and heavier, and we think the pallets have a bit more total heat capacity than the Pres-to-Logs. We can only store about one pallet at at time in the wood box, so this means when we were buying two pallets at a time, we had to unpack and store the overflow in the garage, which was not ideal, but did work.

I say this is a surprise because it seemed easier to heat the house this past winter, and we attributed this to the partial completion of Lisa's project to install under-floor insulation. The previous year was the biggest improvement, though, when we discovered that we were leaking all of our heat out of unsealed roof vents and plugged the vents and put in more ceiling insulation.

If it's possible to complete the under-floor insulation project this summer, we'll know by next year about this time whether it reduced our heating expenses. for now, though, it's good to know about how much wood we're using and how much we should expect to pay for it. I just hope that Big R continues to stock the firewood. We would have bought one more pallet this spring (the wood box is effectively empty right now and I'd rather have wood in stock when it turns cold this autumn rather than having to scramble for it), but by the time we were ready to buy it, they'd sold out for the season.