Know what that area needs? Some trees. Get plantin.
I’ve planted a thousand trees the last three years.
How do you plant near one tree a day?
Professional tree planters plant a couple thousand trees a day I do three hundred over a weekend once a year.
They come as trays of plugs about the length of your hand and maybe the diameter of your thumb. You job a dibble in to pull a plug out, put the seedling in and carry on. Maybe takes 15 seconds a tree if you’re slow.
The day’s labor ready to split and stack tomorrow.
All to fuel this bad boy.
Funny, I have a very similar fireplace built with the same rock and that same heat induction fan. I don’t have near as much wood as you do though
My fireplace is on straight bedrock which is cool.
Oh shit that is cool. Mine is definitely not but it looks very similar at least. I switched to a geothermal HVAC system last year so I hardly use it anymore but it is a good backup heat source
Nice.
I’m off grid so it’s wood or propane and wood is much cheaper.
Do you have solar or a generator for the rest of your power needs?
Solar with a generator for back up.
You run out buried pex coils on that? Been thinking of doing something similiar but the purpose built heatpump for that seems ridiculously priced. I’ve considered bodging up my own heat exchanger for that and just using a standard heat pump and replumbing the external loop.
I don’t have enough space for a horizontal loop so I had to go vertical. The pipes are not PEX exactly but a similar flexible plastic material. Probably 2” diameter. It was pretty expensive but partly because I live in a cold climate. I was already looking at swapping from a gas furnace to an air source heat pump but the heat pumps that function in cold weather are pretty expensive.
I was going to have to get a new AC unit as well. I also ended up going with a unit that has a desuperheater for hot water. Once you add up costs for a new furnace, AC, and hot water, then subtract the 30% federal tax credit from the cost of the geothermal install it wasn’t as much of a difference as I would have guessed.
All that to say, our situations are different but if you have space for a horizontal loop and a relatively small house I think you could make it work with a repurposed heat pump and some manual labor. I definitely would have considered that if I had more land to work with.
Yah, I’m where air-to-air wouldn’t work for at least a couple months of the year without a gas furnace, so was considering burying loops a couple meters down, below frostline. I have as much space as I want, so horizontal would be fine. But the 20k for an air to glycol pump, even to buy and install myself seems crazy, it’s not rocket surgery. Put an extra valve on an airconditioner and triple the price it seems.
I was wondering about that socket. That is pretty cool.
I mean… Once you have a hammer, a lot more things look like nails.