Listen Online 
Download 
Get all of the Podcasts in convenient, giant zip files 
Subscribe on iTunes
Summary
part 1 of a 3 part podcast
The topic is "how to heat your house if it's 100 below".
He asks Alexandra what's the coldest temperature she's experienced, which was about -7°F or so. Peter van den Berg joins in and has experienced a similar temperature. Peter says his niece lives in Finland where the temperature can be -30°C
Peter says you need to store fuel inside by the stove, so it's dry and warm and burns efficiently.
Paul is doing an ongoing experiment to heat the house with cardboard, paper and scrap wood. He mentions efficiency of stoves: wood stoves are sold as "80% efficient" but they don't achieve anything close to that in practice. Especially, burning a wood stove slowly is very inefficient.
Peter states that you can get decent efficiency from a wood stove, but mostly people don't. There are 2 factors: burn efficiency and heat extraction efficiency. Burning a wood stove slowly creates very poor burn efficiency, so even if the heat extraction is OK it makes no difference.
Coming back to the 100 below idea, Paul states if there's extreme cold forecast, you need to be prepared: firstly, shut off and drain the plumbing to prevent pipes freezing, as you may not be able to heat the house enough to prevent freezing. Alexandra asks at what temperature Paul and Peter would decide to drain the pipes. Paul thinks he could keep his house warm enough with the RMH to avoid draining the pipes even in extreme cold, but he would need to do various tricks to avoid them freezing.
Peter's house has less insulation, but the water pipes are not in the external walls. Provided the house is occupied and heated it would be no problem. People say that such houses even if empty for 2 weeks in winter don't freeze inside. In his father's house they would drain the pipes if it was freezing weather, but the winter in Holland is less severe.
Relevant Threads
Wood Burning Stoves forum
Winterize your home my Permies!
Workaround To Avoid Frozen/Burst Pipes In Exterior Walls?
Plumbing forum
Support the Empire
Help support the empire and get all of the podcasts in a bundle
here in the digital market at permies.
To support production of these podcasts, make a donation
here at Paul's Patreon page.
This podcast was made possible thanks to:
Dr. Hugh Gill Kultur
Kyle Aster
Sasquatch
Bill Crim
G Cooper
Mehron Kugler
Bill Erickson
Julia Winter, world's slowest mosaic artist
Sean Benedict
Rita Bliden
Brent Lawson
Song Zheng
Dana Martin
David Lucey
Janelle
thomas adams
Clay McGowan
Shay Riggs
Dr. Jackie
Keith Kuhnsman
Cindi Duehmig
Banter Couch
Eric Tolbert
Paul Tipper
Paul F
Gerald Bernard
4
