Unbelievable cold for over two months now - lessons

I am 56, living alone on my off-grid 10 acres in Scandinavia. The winter started early, and has been fierce. Luckily, the cold sort of crept on me and my chickens, otherwise you would be paying your respects to the dead.

My house builders left the insulation full of gaps. We argued about it for ages, and finally I got a settlement: 30% discount of the house price. In October. Too late to start fixing anything. So I am living in an only partially insulated house. And then we get the record super cold freezing bastard of all winters.

I have been struggling to keep the house above freezing. If I devote all day to adding wood to the fireplace, temperatures stay around 10C /  50F, but come night and temps plummet. Often the thermometers shows -10C / 14F in the morning. Water freezes in containers. All food is frozen dead solid. Even my olive oil is half frozen! My mobile battery runs out fourvtimes faster than usually.

My oil lamps don't work, as the wicks are frozen and cannot lift the oil. Only matches work, all lighters are useless. No way to wash clothes as I would never get them dry. My breath steams my eyeglasses frosty.

My brave chickens have their hot substrate, which heats the henhouse 10 degrees warmer than the outside. But my Northern Landrace chickens eat like horses, are fluffy like expensive down pillows and have started roosting in the smaller and warmer room - tightly packed together. I bring them water five times a day, as the water freezes in half an hour.

Lifesavers:
- HOT WATER BOTTLES!!!
- Woollen mattress and two fluffy down blankets
- Down pants
- Several layers of woollen sweaters
- My father's big boots, stuffed with wool soles and three pairs of woollen sock
-sense of humour: at least the outhouse does not stink!

Adaptation is a marvel. In the start of November, I thought +2C/35F in the morning was chilly. Now I would be overjoyed if it were that warm.

At least food spoilage shouldn't be an issue, lol!

That is a beautiful scene even if it is cold.

I wish I had some words of wisdom though it sounds like you and your chickens a adapting.

Best wishes for the new year.

It may not seem so yet, but spring is moving this way.
Here in northern Montana, we will gain an hour of daylight during January.
Currently, we are expecting -27C as low by the end of the week.
9 more weeks and it will be spring... on the calendar anyway!

By next winter you will have made many improvements and winter will be better.

I can’t imagine. My house is also poorly insulated and about 55 inside in the mornings. I workout in the morning to get my blood pumping and warm up. It truly helps for hours. Do you have propane space heaters? We run ours a lot.  

I sleep with a 0 degree sleeping bag and stay toasty all night. Wine helps too hahah.

Good luck. It’s suppose to be hella cold everywhere this season. We shall see!

"If I devote all day to adding wood to the fireplace.."

Unless there is some kind of language barrier/word usage problem, right there is your problem. My experience is that it is nearly impossible to heat a house in cold weather, using a fireplace. A fireplace works by reflecting heat out into the room from the firebox where the wood is burning. If you keep adding enough wood, heat is reflected out. When you stop adding wood and the fire goes down somewhat, much less heat comes out of the firebox. When the fire really burns down, no heat comes out, and all heat goes up the chimney. Once that happens, eventually all the heat in the house is pulled up the chimney, and the house freezes.

Our first winter, we tried heating with just the fireplace. And every morning, there was frozen icicles in the sink, frozen indoor plants, frozen us. We very quickly learned to get an airtight, firebox insert, wood stove. We pushed the stove all the way into the firebox. Ran the stove chimney up thru the damper. Then stuffed fireproof insulation into the rest of the damper so no air could get up the chimney, except thru the air vents in the stove. By keeping a good hot fire in the wood stove all night, and mostly shutting down the air flow into the stove, we gained heat all night and lost very little heated house air. We stayed much warmer, using much less wood, and with far less danger of a roaring fire in the open firebox, that always had the possibility of catching any chimney creosote on fire.

Get a wood stove, put it in your fireplace, most of problem solved.

P.S. In the US, there are always used wood stoves for sale on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. If you have those internet market places there, I would check those listings first, instead of buying a much more expensive new stove.

Kaarina, I salute your courage and your resilience! Thank you for sharing this with us. It is valuable.

I live in a similar climate, and I understand fully the challenges you face. Below -20C, everything is hard. If you are fully off-grid, it is much harder. And then it is even harder when one person is responsible for everything. Keep up the fight, and let us know how you are doing!

Jim Fry wrote:"If I devote all day to adding wood to the fireplace.."

Unless there is some kind of language barrier/word usage problem, right there is your problem. My experience is that it is nearly impossible to heat a house in cold weather, using a fireplace.  ... Get a wood stove, put it in your fireplace, most of problem solved.

I am not sure of her situation, and there may be miscommunication as you say. I hope she is not relying on an actual simple fireplace in those conditions.

A properly engineered wood stove insert is a magnificent tool for heating. But a simple and cheap wood stove, tied into a fireplace flue, is 100x more efficient than an open fireplace.

Those are good tips guys. However, she has a wood cook stove, shown in this thread.

Is there a way to make it more efficient?

I made mistakes I greatly regret. One was to try to squeeze cooking and heating into one. The house is 200 sq foot, and this vastly more efficient than should have been necessary.

But coupled with the roof and floor leaking like sieves, and record-breaking cold "spell of over two months, it just does not cut it.

Actually, this beast is apparently approaching large areas of the US as well, with temperatures 80 degrees F below average for this time of the year.

I have stuffed the oven with stone slats. Several are on the cooking surface as well. I keep 10 gallon kettle on the stove - once it boils, it reflects heat and stays warm for ages. I burn wood slowly and with a setting that heats the oven as well. The exhaust has no smoke, just swirlinh air above the chimney. I have forewood for at least 6 years, so no need to lead false economics.

I think the major problem might be insulation. I will just have to tolerate it for a couple of more months until spring arrives....

Several things:

Do you have a damper on the chimney pipe? That will make a large difference, by not allowing the heat to escape up the chimney so fast.

It helps to keep a pot of water on the stove. The boiling water puts moisture into the house, then the house feels warmer by several degrees.

I don't believe I'd keep the wood stacked so close around the stove. It's a fire hazard and it blocks the air flow. I've seen punky wood light up, just from thermal radiation.

What kind of wood are you burning? Older standing dead when you cut it doesn't have as much "heat" in it. Soft woods like pine, ditto. We burn any slightly rotted woods and soft woods in late Fall and early Spring. We keep the well dried, hard woods for colder weather. Big difference.

~~~Finally, move to Northern Ohio, USA. We haven't had a real winter since 1977/'78. We get enough cold that poisonous insects and snakes stay far south of us. And we get enough cold to kill off the more obnoxious garden bugs. But in the main, we just get enough snow for the kids to occasionally sled ride. We did have enough snow year before last to require me to snow plow the driveway. But that's hardly a bother. And our summers are a virtual garden paradise. 1/5th of the world's fresh water is just a bit north of us. We have deep rich soil. It got up to 90*+ once or twice lately, but nearly all the time there's plenty of sunshine but not really hot heat. There're very large Amish communities nearby, so that's a huge bonus. And the "english" around here tend to be much nicer than many of the folks on either coast of this country. --(But since this is supposed to be about heating with wood stoves, ~~we also have abundant firewood and lots of stove shops.)

What an amazing and inspiring homestead challenge Kaarina!
Around here in the high altitude winter, people build strategic raised (modular insulated platforms), drop ceilings filled with insulation: raise the floor, lower the ceiling. I imagine you are thinking about and making specific incremental improvements each day. I see that the white curtains aren’t insulated in your photo. Have you made some changes to insulate the windows this winter? In addition to the hot water, how are you increasing thermal mass around the wood stove (perhaps even storing your beautiful ceramic plates and kitchen ware under the stove)? Please share your current little victories and summer building ideas with us. Every little detail helps. Thank you for sharing  your many hearth-warming learnings!

Good to see that you are holding up in this cold winter.  There are a few tips below that might help.  

It can be a struggle to deal with an inefficient system, but I think you are correct that the problem is more likely your lack of proper insulation or seal. It's a shame that you had such poor contractors that they would not give you a good product to begin with. Good that you persevered and were able to get a settlement.

You might be well-off to purchase wool blankets or quilted or down comforters and use them to hang in your doorways or over windows, and such to isolate the heat to a given area, or even cover the windows with a plastic film.  Around here you can buy a transparent thin plastic film and you use a hair drier to seal it against your window frame edges.  These methods are a lot more effective than one might think.  It's always nice to have extra blankets.

You might want to consider building a Rocket Mass heater in the future as well.  It will, in the end, save you a considerable amount of labor and the heat from your labor will last a lot longer.

laundry can actually be freeze-dried when it's that cold, and this method works quite well.  Besides that, I use a small folding clothing rack that dries clothes indoors, and a friend has a horizontal rack on a pulley that hangs his laundry on and hoists up at ceiling level.  

A camping cooler works well as a fridge indoors when temperatures plummet. I've used this trick when winter camping.  Add a regular water bottle but full of hot water if it gets super cold, and this warms the insulated space enough to keep things from freezing.  A little experimentation with varying water temperatures and bottles for holding temperature goes a long way.

Also, if it gets even colder, and it may as the weather is so unpredictable, you might gain some valuable tips from this video:


Here we have had pretty much the opposite type of winter, a remarkably warm one, so far, but that has just changed and we are expecting it to be minus 30 C by Thursday.  I hadn't even put on winter boots this year yet as there was no snow (as it was abnormally warm and even the little bit we just got in the last few days I was wearing summer but waterproof hiking boots).  I got my winter boots out of storage yesterday.  We had a brown Christmas and Brown New Year (in contrast to a white snowy Christmas) and only had small amounts of transient snow all winter until a couple of days ago.  None of the oldtimers around here have seen a winter this warm or dry.  This region is in a Stage 4 drought (only Stage 5 is worse), the worst in history.  I doubt this little polar vortex will last long, but the weather is far too unpredictable these days to assume.  Because there is hardly any snow on the ground to insulate it, there may be people with frozen water lines and sewage systems with the coming cold snap if it lasts a while.

Keep your chin up and your smile on.  You've obviously got this.  A sense of humor definitely helps!  :)  

Hi Katrina,

I was looking at the pictures of the outside of your house as well as the inside.   Are your exterior walls only one board thick?   Anyway,from a person who lived through -53 F , depending upon your available $, quilts or blankets on the walls and more carpet on the floors.    I don’t recall what your ceilings look like, but if there is anyway to add more protection to your ceilings it would help greatly. Of course, make sure noting will fall on your stove.   As has been mentioned, I have concerns about the wood close to your stove, but photos can mess up perspective.  

Your home is beautiful, so hopefully next winter will be more comfortable.

Howdy Katrina,

Despite the snow,
Nice Blue Eyes,
AND a
Warming Smile!

Yes, expecting 10 more inches of snow here, I don't have all my winter firewood, drafty doors and windows, still cozy.
stay well, and Happy New Year.

you will have quite a few stories to tell of this adventure!

I once was sleeping in an uninsulated single metal layer box (a steel shipping container) during a 2 week cold spell.  The door could not be closed all the way  either.  the temperatures overnight inside got down to minus 18F, which is nothing compared to what you are doing, Kaarina.

but i had NO means to heat it, so it was cold all right.  I put a mattress between me and the sheet metal which stopped the radiant “cooling” from the wall next to the bed… and I hung a blanket to make a tent over my bed.  And I had a good down comforter.

When I would go to bed (from the log cabin with the wood stove) I would take a half gallon jar of  boiling water with me… with a long wool sock pulled over it … to pre-warm the bed.  It was that water bottle that made it possible to sleep!  Without it, my body did not have enough heat to warm the mattress and blankets, nor could I generate enough heat.  Before the water, I would lie there for hours, slowly inching my feet further down into the cold territory, then rapidly rubbing my feet back and forth to create friction…

Do you think it would help to have a dog to sleep next to you?

Best of luck!

Wow, this has become quite a discussion ❤️
If I could have another human close to me, there would be no problem. I cannot have a dog either, as they eat more meat in a month than I do in a year. So the lonely me has to survive alone.

I did insulate the windows Previously I had a padded cloth frame but this is ugly and hard core.

John F Dean wrote:e.

The walls are solid timber. The problem is the construction. The crew stuffed the insulating panels in, but did not tighten them with foam or anything else. Si I have great insulation but between them there are one inch gaps.
Sorry this is hard to explain with no expertise and in a foreign language

The problem is the insulation company probably doesn't own a thermal imagining device which they should if they are any kind of decent, knowledgeable company, but it seems like they are not. After installing the insulation they should have used that device to look for open spots and like you said seal in with foam. This is one of the first things you need to discuss with any company, do they have the right tools and technology for the job. The place I bought 10 years ago has interlocking 9 inch (>20cm) foam block for insulation in the ceilings and walls. Place is on an Alaskan slab due to the ledge all around. If you have it redone, make sure the company has the proper tools and technology and request to see what they plan to do and how they are going to properly tackle the job. Haven't been to Finland since the late 70's.

you know, this discussion of insulation panels not connected to one another made me wonder if it is drafts or radiant and conductive cold that are the problem

if it’s conductive and radiant heat loss then you are probably concentrating on padding those spaces with blankets and etc.  and that would slow down air exchange with the outside… and decrease the drafts created by air “falling” down those cold surfaces.

I can’t remember if you said you made a tent to enclose your bed.

seems it was a couple years ago Pearl faced a winter in a cheap drafty cold rental, and there was a great thread of ideas for living in extreme cold in a house that was impossible to heat.  have you seen that thread?

here’s that thread, in case there’s any inspiration in it for you.

I went to a list of threads started by Pearl, but she is so prolific that all thousand plus of hers were not listed.

BUT, luckily I said something a reader found apple-worthy, so I was able to find the thread on the list of “apples grNted to this user” (me).

https://permies.com/t/188138/Tents-space-reducers-heating

Thanks everybody ❤️
I have beed padding both the house and myself 😄. I can survive some more months, but I need to fix this next summer. Hope I am up to it.

You are a woman full of courage, Kaarina. Praying the winter eases and you find more ways to stay warm.

I love your honesty in sharing the challenges on your homestead.

OK folks, now I gpt fed up. Last night was windy, and when I lied snuggled into my bed (all sedentary tasks have to be done either next to the woodstove or in the bed with hot water bottles). I felt that howling icy wind on my face!!

Next morning, I went to inspect. And found the examiner had not put the cover board back. The Arctic wind has been blowing into the house through gaps in the insulation panels. No wonder I felt like living on the top deck of an icebreaker.

I decided tjis is just too much.I had thought I would fill in the caps myself in the summer, which usually are warm and dry. But I woke to a house that was 10 F today. By any standards, that is a tad cold. Even my unheated chicken coop is warmer in the night than my miserable freezebox of a house.

So I ordered natural blown wool. Found a nice local company, who eere really knowledgeable and said they can blast the wool into the tinies crevises, effectively sealing them. I don't need to rip away the ceiling panelling. As they heard of my predicament, they promised to come next week.

I am in a remarkably good mood, despite the fact that my fingers are clumsy from cold as I am writing this. 🙂

Wow!

I am glad you found that!!!

and that there may be an easy and quick solution!

do you have a sauna available in the meantime?

sending you thermal thoughts

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Thsnks Thekla ❤️.

Last bits of humour: I washed laundty yesterday. As the pld dilspitated sauna is now a henhouse, and the new on has not arrived yet, I did it in the living room. Carrying and boiling water and washing took half s day, so I decided the pants will lie in soapy water overnight and be duly washed tomorrow.

Well.

In the morning I found out that I am the lucky owner of a 4 gallon ice cube with several pants in it for aesthetic effect. (In the white bucket)

just when you didn’t really want another surprise

what ever does one do with a big soapy ice clump?

Someebody here posted a great reference to a No Tech Journal. It had great ideas pretty muvh like out Paul: heat the body, not the space.

https://www.notechmagazine.com/?s=heat+the+body

I am touting the value of hot watrr bottles (and definitely in plural). Sitting with one under your feet, one in your lap  makes things comfy even if it below freezing. Amazing really.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:what ever does one do with a big soapy ice clump?

At least they will not get moldy!! I could actually start freezing my dirty clothes in soap water, store them outside and deal with them in the gentle sunshine of spring! Onlly downside is that I would need more clothes, if in the end of winter my whole warderobe is standing in a pile of ice cubes in the yard...

I know you already have people scheduled to come out.  But one option I have used on a lot of campers, barns and iceshacks that let the wind blow right through them was to wrap the entire building from ground to eaves on the outside with plastic sheeting.

One iceshack in particular was about 100 square feet.  It was build kind of like your house with a tiny gap at every board.  When the weather was near freeing we could keep it warm inside with no problem.  But one day we went out there when it was -10F and STRONG winds.  We had the stove and chimney glowing red but could not keep it warm in there.  To solve it I wrapped it in plastic and then even the smallest fire was too hot.  I actually had to cut holes in the plastic to let some of the heat escape.

Because the space was so small and had no insulation or thermal mass as soon as the fire went out it got cold in there even with the plastic, but having to feed the fire every couple hours at night was better than what it was before.

J Hillman wrote:   .....one option I have used on a lot of campers, barns and iceshacks ...... was to wrap the entire building from ground to eaves on the outside with plastic sheeting.

I can testify to having done this with tarps as well....to block the wind on some free-standing chicken housing in northern Minnesota.  Works wonders for temporary temperature boosting in such structures and can be modified to block the worst winds while allowing for air access where needed.  Worth testing out on some of your worst air-gaps, Kaarina!

John, thank you ❤️. You make me more confident in not just trying to fix and tweak a house that is shoddily built and leals like a sieve.
Insulation it is.

Though...

Not over my dead body or anything like that. If I have survived this gor two months, I deserve some kind of human-version-of-solar-bear badge, don't you think?

Kaarina Kreus wrote: ..... I deserve some kind of human-version-of-solar-bear badge, don't you think?

Absolutely!....     I think the badge should look like a pair of frozen underwear....covered with a shiny lacquer to look like laundry soap!    

Kaarina, I can't imagine how it will be this coming summer during the warmest weeks of the year, when you look back upon this endurance quest that you are having to experience.  Sending support your way....the days can only get longer now, right?  And hopefully make the insulation and other warming amenities the priority projects for the coming months.  It sounds like you are already on your way with those plans....Good luck!