Winter
Thursday, December 6th, 2007Pellet Stoves Ammendum
It’s been 2 months since I last wrote about pellet stoves. I’ve gone through 24 bags of pellets since winter started here. [each bag is 40 pounds, 40*24=960] Fuel price has varied from $3.25 to $5 a bag the past few months, should have stocked up earlier. [By the way, I estimated it would cost $11 a bag, in bulk. In fact, it's a whole lot less than what I thought.] 40 pounds of pellets fills the hopper of the stove, and the fuel in the hopper lasts for about 3 to 1.5 days. Even though I burn the equivalent of 12 logs, it puts out very little ash, and you only see the heat coming off the vent, no smoke. Each 40 pound bad of wood pellets results in about a cup or two of ash. I’m fairly surprised at how clean it burns. Saves a bit of money compared to electric heat too.
I installed a thermostat for my stove. As I mentioned before, the stove is fully automatic. Self-starts and self-feeds. Just requires cleaning. It’s not very good at heating quickly, and runs for a hour or two at a time. The start cycle doesn’t waste as much heat as I thought it would. One main issue is that it takes a while to cool, and you can’t exactly clean it is. By the time it’s cool, the room is cold again, and it kicks back on.
College
I’m offically enrolled in College. Taking the IT Network Security option from my school, after I was scared to death of the Web Programming description [it screams WTFU]. Though I feel that I know enough right now to get a job, which brings me to my third sub-post.
Jorbs
I’ve been programming in PHP for over 3 years. Have several successful and still active projects, and know HTML/CSS/JavaScript/MySQL/XML. Experience with a few *NIX platforms, and been admining Windows Servers for the past 2 years for friends. If I can get a full portfolio together, I’m sure I can score a job at a place I like.
The reality of things, there’s no where near by that looks remotely like I want. They either require many years working experience, or require knowledge of languages/platforms I’ve never heard of. It really sucks to be in the middle of nowhere. I may need to look out of state. Moving out of state would mean the college my parents just payed for will go towards nothing.
Snow
Living in the middle of nowhere has it’s benefits: Skii resorts! Very cold up here on the mountains already, and we’ve gotten snow twice this year. There’s several skii resorts open in the area, and most of them are cheap. Too bad I don’t skii.
We’ve gotten 3 snow falls this year so far. First one we got 5 inches of snow. The power in the area is flakey, it’d be fairly bad if the power went out in heavier snow. The previous owners had a whole-house generator connected, but they removed it when we purchased the house. I since noticed a lot of houses in the area have generator units. Snow storms must get pretty bad sometimes.
Christmas
In case I forget, Happy Holidays, happy [whatever you celebrate], and merry christmas.
