Jen’s Boot Camp and Allerton Abbey Experience

I'm so excited to see the experiment under way, and so beautifully detailed. How is the dust? If you are getting dusting I get good results painting cob and wood and limewash with a coat of clear home made milk paint. It just gives a little gloss and kills the dust. I was able to visit a "Soddie" last year which was our Prairie ancestors' version of the Wofati. They used limewash to brighten and seal the interior as well.  Above beds and cooking surfaces they plastered with newspapers or cloth or whatever they could get to keep the dirt from settling on them. A "canopy" bed with insulating curtains was pretty normal before central heating too. https://www.patreon.com/posts/22384870

This morning I was working in and around the Abbey with Josiah, so I was able to have a leisurely morning without worrying about my commute down to basecamp. Since I had an hour and a half between waking and starting work, I had several cups of tea with my breakfast (I am working on the caffeine addiction, but the dark mornings and early dusk are making it difficult) and heated up some wash water on the stove (ah, luxury!). By the time eight o’clock rolled around and the work day began, the temperature in the Abbey was up around 50. Hopefully the mishap with the broken door will not prove to be too much of a setback.

Wow, you guys have been getting pretty cold Jen.  Still no killing frosts yet here in Maine, though I'm sure it won't be long.  I'm still picking tomatoes...weird, right?

ATI update:

On Saturday I had to go to Missoula to finally get my snow tires (there have been several weeks of comedy on this subject), which took ten hours of waiting, so I was not in the Abbey all day and dropped into bed immediately upon getting back, without lighting a fire for cooking. Sunday morning I woke at 6:00 to find it once more in the high forties inside.

I spoke to Paul Sunday afternoon, and he made an executive decision that due to the discharging of the mass during the door malfunction, and the fact that temperatures in the Abbey were below 50 degrees, we needed to give the mass a boost by using the cook stove to get the interior temperature up to 85 again before restarting the test (after which point the cook stove will once again be used only for cooking).

We also discussed the fact that the stove was usually taking 45 minutes to an hour to boil my kettle in the morning, and what this meant for the design of the cook stove. Paul suggested trying an all-kindling fire, which worked better than I expected—it boiled my kettle in about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the time difference is cancelled out by the time I spent making all that kindling and feeding the stove constantly, but it will definitely help when I’m crunched for time in the mornings and evenings.

The thermometers will keep running during the attempt to artificially charge the mass; since the mass absorbs heat and resists the change in temperature, I expected it would take a while to reach 85 degrees inside the Abbey. Previously, I was only able to achieve it by spending a couple weeks lighting fires for heat when I was in the Abbey, followed by an entire weekend in the Abbey feeding the fire constantly and never letting it die except when I slept.

However, I was able to arrange to spend the entire day in the Abbey feeding the fire, and to have extra wood brought to me when I ran out. I started my fire at 6:30 when I woke up. Around noon, the carbon monoxide alarm I installed this morning went off, and I had to open the windows and doors and quit feeding the fire for a while, which caused the temperature to dip, as you can see in the graph. Within half an hour, however, the alarm was no longer registering a problem, and I resumed the attempt to charge the mass with heat while keeping a close eye on the CO levels. At a quarter past one, the first thermometer (on the inside of the exterior front wall, through which the stovepipe runs) reached 85, but the one on the bedroom mass wall still read just under 65, so I kept going.

At about 2:30, the carbon monoxide alarm went off again, and I had to open the doors and windows for a while. Then at about 2:45, when I was about to close things up and resume feeding the fire, the casserole dish lid that serves as my oven door sort of gently exploded, and I was forced to stop for the moment. I waited for the fire to die down, since I couldn’t leave with it blazing in an open stove, and am now at Basecamp getting a replacement lid.

Are there lots of sticks and branches there? It might be good to make up a kindling pile of just small branches and logs no bigger than 2 inches diameter. This year, most of the trees we had fall down were small and skinny, so we cut those all up and stacked them. They make nice fast fires without having to chop a big log into kindling pieces.