Jackson Bradley

Judith, we've found there are some factors other than wood chip depth that will determine if the grass will come up through the chips.

Wood chip make up/size, the amount of rain we get and if the grass is dormant.

If we apply a 8" layer of finer chips (less than 1" in length/diameter) over dormant grass in late fall or winter, with no cardboard underneath, there may be a little grass pop up here and there but nothing a little weeding can't manage. The amount of rain we get seems to also have an impact. The more rain, the more likely to have to do some weeding of grass that will pop through. That same 8" would not work, without cardboard, when the grass is growing unless it was tarped first to slow the growth of the grass.

If the chips are larger, 12" seems to work about the same as the 8" of finer chips over dormant grass.

6" seems to be adequate on bare soil.

Keeping chickens has made the biggest difference for us.

We keep them in a combined run/coop with rabbits and have ~12"-~16" of deep litter. We bag and add all of our grass clipping and fall leaves as well as any extra mulch to their area. I remove some of the material in late fall or early spring and age it. Then it gets spread over the regular garden beds and raised garden beds.

It took about a year for the magic to happen in the deep litter, it didn't look like much until then. I turn it with a garden fork regularly to speed the process up and keep from getting any hard pan areas. It is a somewhat labor intensive process at the times where I am harvesting the material or turning it. Otherwise, the chickens do everything.

A close second would be mulching every area we could, as we had the time. I think those 2 approaches work well together.

For context, we normally like to have 22-25 hens for eggs, and a rooster or two. We also hatch eggs and tractor those to butcher but the only contribution they make to the deep litter is what I move from the brooder into the coop/run after I move them to the tractors.

I have seen where some people will build a lightweight portable tractor and move it around their garden bed after the season is over. They put a couple of chickens in it during the day and move them back to the coop at night. I have not had time to try that yet.  

Carmen Roth wrote:How is this temporary? For a temporary location?

The fencing will come apart in a couple of minutes, the loose ends from where I cut it are just twisted back around the other end making the circle.

Stack the wood and then spread the dirt out. Or move the dirt to a new bed. Done.

You mentioned firewood.

I am experimenting with using 2x4 welded wire fencing, cut to 24" height. I have 1/2x1/2 mesh at the bottom due to the proliferation of moles here. You could omit that if you do not have issues with moles.

I lined the outside with ~20" oak splits and filled it in. I am on my second round of planting in it and it looks like I should get many seasons before the wood is broken down. It'll be easy to dismantle and rebuild.

150" length of fence yields QTY-2 48" circles at 24" high. The 1/2x1/2 mesh I had was 48" tall so I wanted to do 48" circles. I plan to do more over the winter and when I split rounds, I will keep this in mind and cut some into rectangles verses triangles to make filling them in easier, if that makes sense.

I had all of the materials on hand so the cost was only what I previously paid for the fence and mesh.

You could increase the size of the splits and fence to get to 36" or 48" height.

Christopher Weeks wrote:double down

That is a tough habit to break!

Burton Sparks wrote: I use steps around the compost pile so I don't need to lift so high, but do you have any other tips there?

My compost end product doesn't grow anything, and I think it ends up hydrophobic.  Perhaps I'm keeping the pile too hot, but it has to keep going all winter down to -27F and I live in an area with decent winds.  I use kiln dried pine sawdust bought from the store as cover material because I wasn't able to find or make readily accessible right-sized cover material.  I'd hydrate and age the sawdust, but I don't have room to store months of cover material for so many people inside the house to prevent it from freezing solid outdoors.  Any ideas there?

They have shoulder straps for buckets that clip into the holes that hold the metal handle. You can lift the bucket once to the height needed to dump the bucket into the compost and let your shoulder hold the weight while rotating the bucket. I wait until I have 6 buckets to add to the pile and have thought about using a 4 wheel cart to carry the buckets. I do not currently have a 4 wheel cart so I just carry the buckets for now.

We may use similar cover material. I stopped at a local saw mill about 10 mins from my house. Several sawmills around here are owned by one company whose offices are an hour away. The workers said that they have a large blower that blows the sawdust from the pile into dump trucks. I contacted the office location to see about getting a load of sawdust, even if I had to buy it. I never got any traction with them. For now I use pelletized bedding made for horses for bucket cover material. 100% pine pellets without glue or chemicals from TSC. I do not sperate urine. I bag grass clippings, let them dry and use them to cover the large pile outside.

My end result does not look as beautiful as what I see in the humanure handbook pics. I think that is due to the bucket cover material that I do not take the time to age. I change piles and let the full one rest for 1 year or more. The current pile gets to 4'x4'x4' when I start a new one. I have added chickens that died of natural causes, deer carcasses, etc. and there is no sign of them after the year is up. I am convinced from the Humanure Handbook testing and my own experience that the material is innocuous after a year or more. Jenkins uses his on his vegetable gardens and I know many others do the same. All of that depends on your comfort level with the material, I suppose. When I make a deposit to the pile, I get temps around 160F for a week or so.

Do you have chickens? After the pile rests for 1+ years, I add the material to my coop/run and the chickens mix it in with all the other deep bedding. I dig this chicken deep bedding out of the coop/run a few times a year in sections and pile it in a compost area and let the BSF move in. It must be a little hot from the chicken manure because the BSF larvae take over in numbers I do not see in other material that is composting.

On my list of things to try is using the rested deep litter pile material (after the BSF are done with it) as cover material for my bucket system. I have another bucket system set up in a small tent in the shop where I plan to test that out. I think the end result may turn out better that way since the rested chicken litter will be full of microbes instead of the kiln dried pine shavings which is not. More to follow on that experiment, I expect a learning curve to it and it just may not work. If it does work, I will be producing my own bucket cover material, which would be encouraging.  

Benjamin Dinkel wrote:Hey Jackson. The problem here was that we’re not in a first floor, but a second floor of an old house. It was reinforced not long ago. So the owner was obviously concerned about weight and had it checked.
Of course the people with the calculations stick to the safe side of life. But they also have the responsibility of something goes wrong.

Benjamin, that makes sense. I was thinking it was on the first floor. That would definitely be a situation where you may want to know for sure what the bearing capacity would be.

I also wanted to mention that I am not singling out/disparaging the design professionals themselves. The design criteria is very rigid, and the design professionals have to follow the design criteria.

On a positive side, reading the updates/posts, it sounded like you had to really adapt to the limitations which could be some priceless experience. It turned out great!

Benjamin Dinkel wrote:It's on a first floor and the architect calculated a maximal weight of 300 kg/m2 or 62 pounds per square foot.

The calculated loads on concrete floors have always raise an eyebrow for me. I deal with it somewhat regularly with the equipment we install at different locations. Sometimes we have an engineer run calcs to tell us the psf an existing floor can take.

A monolithic house slab 4" thick typically has a 40 psf rating. Most driveways and garages are 4". An average weight car/light truck is 3000 to 5000 pounds. Because a light truck footprint is 80"x240" (134 sqft) and 134 sqft x 40 psf = 5360 pounds, you can park it on the same slab even though the tires are making contact on less than 4sqft.

In one sense, it is too bad an architect was consulted. That house slab must be fairly thick or have some good reinforcement to have 62 psf rating. You probably could have parked a large masonry heater in a smaller footprint and still not have loading issues (actual in the field, not in calculations and on paper).

There are risks associated with consulting a design professional and risks associated with not contacting a design professional.

thomas rubino wrote:
As far as bypasses go.
Appropriately built to specification, you should not need a bypass, BUT... they are a darn good idea.

Thanks, Thomas.

I mentioned the bypass because, from what I understand, you are making the masonry stove more like a conventional stove for a short time. I didn't know if that would make the flu draw easier or harder than when in "normal" mode for the masonry heater.

Am I right in thinking that once the mass is heated up, you would not need to do anything to heat the flu to create a draw for the next fire?

Are you finding that you still need to follow the "3-2-10" rule with the different heater styles? What has worked for you not following that rule?

Would having a bypass make it necessary for correct draw when starting a fire?

My current conventional setup is 2' above the roof line with a 5/12 pitch. So the closest thing 10' away is 50" high. I am not even close to fulfilling that rule. I always light a piece of paper and hold under the chimney before I start the fire to get the draft going and never experienced any issues. Metal roof so sparks are not an issue and even on windy 40-50 gust days, no downdraft.

3-2-10 rule
Your chimney must extend at least three feet above the point where it exits your roof.
It must also be at least two feet higher than any part of the roof (or nearby structure) within ten feet horizontally.