Winter Heating Rethink

I'm switching to paraffin heating for this winter, the fire was nice but the cost of buying logs and finding suitable kindling was ridiculous. Obviously having a fire in the yurt transforms it totally, but the unpredictable nature of the temperature rises and falls with a large fire mean that it's a constant battle trying to keep a stable temperature going. In addition to that, I spend long periods of time in the workshop, tinkering, and in that time the fire normally fizzles.
Anyhoo, the Prity will probably be leaving the yurt this weekend and the space it took up will be utilised as a kitchen area for preparing and cooking nosh. It's an ideal spot, right under the lightest area of the yurt and near what will soon be a ventilation hole (where the chimney went).
Here's the heater (2.5kw technically), will run for about 17 hours on a 3.8l fill.



Obviously it's possible that it won't be up to the job, but the advantages of running something as stable and compact as this heater, outweigh the advantages of a fire, which are mostly aesthetic.

Been a while...

Well, here we are, August already and I've spent pretty much every spare day I can in the yurt. It's been lovely not to have to faff around with the fire every day and be able to get up in the mornings without the desparate sprint to the fire to re-kindle it. The downside is that the kind of food I can eat has changed a little because of the lack of outside refrigeration services one finds in winter. Mainly it's been new potatoes from the garden, and tomatoes, pasta, stuff like that.

A new addition to the tech side of the yurt is a solar powered fan. I re-adapted the yurtcon to suck fresh air in from outside whenever there is enough light to power the fan. Solar panel is a £20 job from Maplins, tucked under one of the crown cover straps. This way there is a constant flow of fresh air coming into the yurt even when I'm away. Eventually it will become an extractor and mounted in a clear section of the crown, this will be to overcome the problem of condensation when cooking, or on hot days when there is something wet inside, like a towel.

I've gone back to the Squadron leisure batteries, doubled up and linked to the solar panel. The Elecsol batteries don't last that well and trying to get any empathy from the person who imports them is like getting blood from a stone. They are ok, but nothing more than that.

Wind turbine is next on the list, right after I have become Moped Overlord, keeper of all Velosolexes (that might take a while)

Z.

Ah! Almost forgot. Insect de jour is the earwig, omnipresent, indestructable, infinitely creepy, you can't even pick the blasted things up and throw them out, they have some sort of anti-human forcefield around them. I am in consultation with the ladybirds, I've told them the earwigs dissed the ladybirds big time. Hopefully this will result in some sort of turf war in which earwig numbers are decimated as a result of scuttle by shootings by gangs of ladybird yoofs. One can but hope.

Wonderful Annoyances

It has to be said, one of the biggest differences between sleeping in a yurt and sleeping in a house is the connection you feel with what it on the other side of the wall. It's hard to beat the feeling of falling asleep to the sometimes comical hooting of owls, or waking to the dawn chorus of what sounds like several thousand songbirds tweeting their little heads off. The have also been a few mystery sounds, yips, barks, yelps, probably foxes or possibly Black Shuck!!! WooOOOOOOoooooOOOooo!!!

The next few weeks will see a slight interior re-design, things that have not been used in the last 6 months will be going, that includes a couple of the leather sofa chairs, and a very nice Bene office cabinet will be pepping up the storage situation.

Storing the duvet in the dragon box has proved to be a winner, it comes out on a Friday night dry as a bone and much easier to get warmed up.

The yurt structure is holding well, the paint on the uprights has bubbled due to the heat (and the heat has been a bit extreme sometimes, so no fault there) and the front door has swollen a little and sill need a bit skimming off the bottom soon. I am so looking forward to spring and summer, not so much looking forward to finding out which particular insect will be joining me though the warmer months.

Spring.

Spring is almost here and I'm sure it will bring a few challenges such as sticky tree buds and ladybirds. The most obvious potential problem will be cooking bread and tatties when the temperature outside is warm. Lighting a fire will be out of the question, maybe it's time to start looking at caravan ovens.
On the subject of cooking, the camping stove that the Welshman threw in with a campervan I bought, has performed beautifully. It's hard to imagine how a full size hob could improve things, so it's staying put for now.
Spring will also bring a furniture review, sumptuous leather chairs for 4 aren't really needed, so three will probably go and be replaced by a beanbag and some more storage. Storage hasn't been a massive problem, maybe it's just a case of living to your means but I dare say it would zoom up the scale of importance if this mini adventure went full time.
One handy tip for anyone thinking of spending time in a yurt, keep your duvet in a wooden box while you are away, despite the yurt being totally waterproof, duvets and bedding certainly "felt" a bit damp after being on the bed for a week. It might have just been the cold, but keeping the duvet in the dragon box means that it's out of the atmosphere and stays fresh and dry.

Update.

Last week was the first time I've spent more than a weekend in the yurt, 10 days to be precise. What did I learn?
1) You HAVE to be tidy if you want to spend any time in a yurt. Not having corners means that you can't really get away from the socks you just threw across the floor.
2) Little things make live so much easier. Baby wipes for example are indispensible when you have a limited supply of water, I've used them for general cleaning, getting soot off the woodburner window, and more frequently wiping soot and ash from my hands.
3) Coal really sucks, even when you've stopped using it, the tar and filth lives in the chimney and fall out in lumps onto the nice clean canvas covering the yurt. There's a nasty brown stain on it now, entirely as a result of using cheap house coal.
4) Rugs are the way forward, by rugs I mean small rugs that can be taken outside and shaken out, not massive rugs that encompass the entire yurt floor. Another project for summer.
5) Wind can and will find any weaknesses in the cover and make it flap so furiously that it sounds like some kind of canvas armageddon. Easily cured by throwing big lumps of wood onto the roof to keep the join flat.

Well, That's Handy

Been considering the options for cleaning the soot off the cover once spring arrives and hey presto! sail cleaners who have yurt cleaning experience, awesome.

Speaking of cleaning, Boxing Day was a bit of a disaster, I threw a few BIG chunks of house coal on the fire and shut it down before going out for a couple of hours. Unfortunately the coal didn't actually catch, it just smouldered, and smoked, leaking from the annoyingly leaky Prity fire (I suspect as it gets used more, it distorts more and leaks more). By the time I returned, the entire yurt was filled with acrid coal smoke, EVERTHING stank of coal, and it's not a nice countryside smell, it's the smell of pure nasty. Not a good position to be in, yurt full of smoke, one door, no extractor, think fast!!! Ah! leafblower! Zzzzingningningningning and we're off. After about 30 mins of pumping heaven knows how many thousands of cubic metres of fresh air in though the front door, the smoke was gone. The smell however, was not.
The remainder of the day was spent shampooing the carpet, emptying copious amounts of stink neutralising freshener in though the yurtcon and wiping down every single surface that had collected a sulphurous layer of soot.

Seriously, I've got the proper hump with coal, ok so you could say that if the fire didn't leak, that the smoke would have gone up the flue, but even so, the chunks of soot and smut that fluttered down from the flue like some sort of black snow would have still stained the roof cover. In addition to that, the smoke actually wrecked my carbon monoxide detector which was comically flashing it's "Service" light, as if anything electronic from China could ever be serviced.

Lesson learnt I guess, stay away from the cheap coal and start looking for a less leaky fire though 2011.

Fire Musings

This week I've tried an alternative to loading up the fire before hitting the sack, now the fire is given a bowl of coal and a couple of pallet chunks about an hour before bedtime, that way the temperature has peaked and is on a gradual decline by bedtime. The upside is that the 3am sweatfest whereby the front door has to be opened to let the heat out is now over. The downside is that the temperature inside the yurt drops to about 6c by the morning. Now that sounds a bit on the chilly side, but it's not so cold as to give you a numb nose or cause any obvious discomfort, it's just a bit fresh and to be honest, once the duvet releases it's python-like hold, you're pretty much wide awake in .001 seconds. Although the compressed woodchip logs performed very well indeed, they still proved to be a little on the pricey side, so for now the yurt is heated using hardwood offcuts from a local beehive maker, much cheaper and it's nice to support people who care for bees, bees are nice.

The butane tank was swapped for propane this weekend, butane being the poor winter performer and propane being good for temperatures down to -30 or something. This means that the menu at cafe yurt has now grown from things that can be roasted (which was starting to get a bit tedious), into things that can be boiled like pasta, noodles, peas, tea, coffee and so on. In addition to that, it serves as a handy source of instant heat until the woodburner is warmed up nicely.

As a footnote to anyone planning on using a yurt at weekends though winter, bring your own water from home! mine was frozen solid from a week of sub-zero temperatures, there's a bodywarmer over the container now, but whether it can fend off the expected -6c this week is to be confirmed. Unfortunately it's now too late to deepen the cool box hole outside to below the frost line, it's frozen solid, meh.