Aube Thermostats: Save Money With Supplemental Wood Heat

How can you mix wood heat and electric heat to save money and increase comfort?

Like everyone else in Oregon, I have a wood stove. I have an endless supply of free wood, too, thanks to Starker Forests’ good neighbor policy (they adjoin my farm on two sides). I also have old electric baseboard heaters, installed by a previous owner.

So I have wood heat supplemented by electric heat (or maybe the other way around). How does one go about getting the most mileage out of this?

Use a Digital Thermostat for the Electric Heater

Digital thermostats have much better temperature regulation that mechanical ones. This is important for two reasons:

The house will be a lot more comfortable. It’s worth replacing your thermostats for this reason alone.
The heaters will back off sooner when the wood stove is being used, and comes back sooner when the fire dies down. This prevents the house from getting too hot or too cold and eliminates energy waste, which are the big problems with supplemental heat.

There are lots of digital/electronic thermostats on the market, but few of them had the additional features I wanted…

Use a Programmable Setback Thermostat

A setback thermostat saves you money by maintaining a lower temperature when you’re away or asleep. It also has a psychological advantage: When you come home to a cold house, you tend to start a fire in the wood stove rather than wait for the electric heaters to bring the house up to temperature. (This is especially true if your heaters are undersized, because you don’t want to wait that long!) So a setback thermostat is the bee’s knees when mixing wood and electric heat.

Here in Oregon, I find that a fire first thing in the morning is often all I need. The fire keeps the electric heaters from coming on, and, once warm, the house stays warm through the evening without electric heat or another fire. As things cool off in the evening, the set-back thermostat lowers the heat, keeping the heaters off all night in spite of the cooling house. So I can maintain a very comfortable house with just one fire a day and hardly any electricity in mild weather.

Use a Thermostat With a Power Indicator and Proportional Heat

This is THE big secret. Some thermostats use proportional heat control, meaning that they analyze the heating patterns in the room and make a decision on the order of, “To keep the room at the right temperature, the heater needs to be set to 60% of full power.” It can display this result on the LCD display on the thermostat itself, giving you an indication of how much money you’re spending on heat at the moment.

For example, my thermostats have a five-bar power indicator, with one bar meaning “barely on” and five bars meaning “full power.” Whenever I see five bars, it’s time to build a fire in the wood stove! It’s as simple as that. If the thermostat is positioned where it’s easy to see, you can quickly get into the habit of looking at it once in a while. This can save you a ton of money.

Proportional control also means that your house is more comfortable, because the heat is better controlled. Some thermostats have a 15-second cycle time, where, for example, the heater might be turned on for three seconds out of every fifteen to achieve a 20% power level. It’s much more comfortable to be in a room where the heater is putting out just the right amount of heat all the time, rather than cycling between being stone cold and red hot.

The Winner: The Aube TH106 Programmable Line-Voltage Thermostat

I know of only one manufacturer who makes thermostats that live up to all these requirements: Honeywell, with their Aube line.

I’m using electric baseboards, and the right thermostat for this job is the Aube TH106 programmable line-voltage thermostat. This is a very good thermostat. I’ve installed three of them. It has the power bar, proportional control, and programmable setback.

The TH106 thermostat is as easy to install as any other thermostat. Ideally, it should be installed across the room from the actual heater. It’s a line-voltage thermostat, which means that the current for the heater runs through the thermostat, which is how baseboard thermostats usually work. It uses an electronic triac switch rather than a relay, so it’s silent.

Maybe your thermostats are already installed away from your baseboards, and you can just replace them. If you have on-baseboard thermostats, you’ll want to add across-the-room thermostats. If you aren’t comfortable doing house wiring, your friendly local electrician can do this for you. Believe me, it’s worth it!

The thermostat will work with just about any electric heater. It has two basic modes, a fifteen-second cycle for use with baseboards and other fanless electric heaters, and a longer cycle for heaters with fans (fans don’t like being turned on and off rapidly). Use the short cycle if you can.

I looked around and found that Amazon.com had the best deal. In the end I bought three Aube TH106 thermostats from them.

Aren’t using electric heaters? Aube makes thermostats for everything. You can get all the same advantages for your gas or oil heater, heat pump, whatever.

My house is more comfortable than it has ever been, and yet I expect I’ll spend less on electricity than I did last year. So run right out and give this a try. You’ll thank me.

Chicken Predators Return, For a While

Yipe! Starting a couple of weeks ago, something was killing my chickens, as many as five per night. This is not only heartbreaking, it’s the sort of thing that can leave you with no chickens at all in very short order.

The dead chickens were in various places, but always on the fenced pasture, or so I supposed. A strong predator like a bobcat can leap a fence with a dead chicken in its mouth, leaving nothing behind but a splash of feathers where the kill took place. Coyotes are much the same. Hawks and owls eat the chickens without moving them, and raccoons will go either way, sometimes dragging the dead chicken long distances, sometimes not moving them at all.

I searched the perimeter of the fence and found no obvious game trails leading onto my chicken pasture, which made me wonder if I didn’t have a problem with owls. I readjusted the electric fence to make sure there were no high or low spots where a raccoon could squeeze through. Making a truly raccoon-proof fence is difficult, because, unlike other animals, they have no fear and probe the fence for weak spots. I found one trail leading to where a chicken had been killed outside the fence. Otherwise, nothing.

Next, I pulled out my snares. I don’t like using snares except on a well-defined game trail that’s leading straight to my chickens, since I have no quarrel with critters that are leaving my chickens alone. I started with the one trail leading to a chicken kill, and put a couple more in likely spots. After several nights I had caught two raccoons, and the predation ceased.

I’d lost many more chickens than could possibly be eaten by two raccoons. This doesn’t mean that there were lots more chicken-eating predators: it means that the raccoons killed far more than they could eat. Nature is neither nice nor efficient!

I used to rely on the federal trapper for this sort of thing, but Benton County has become very stingy on supplying matching funds to the wildlife control program, and this has taken a toll on everyone’s livestock. So I learned how to do trapping myself. Snares are particularly easy to use, and if you do it right, cause no collateral damage. As I said, you want to find a trail that’s used exclusively by predators who are commuting to what they imagine is a 24-hour chicken buffet. I learned most of my techniques from the works of Hal Sullivan. His snaring book and video are unpretentious but good. I recommend that you buy both, and his snaring starter kit, if you have a predator problem. This is the sort of activity where you want to exercise due care from the start.

I don’t like snares very much, but it’s a lot better than having all your chickens killed. I’m responsible for the well-being of my chickens, while the predators are quite literally crossing the line to get at them: they have to brave an electric fence.

Staying up all night and shooting the predators is an option if you can manage it: I can’t pull all-nighters anymore. Some people have excellent luck with livestock guardian dogs, which intimidate predators. But fencing alone generally isn’t enough.

The Screwdriver and the Tree

Here’s something you don’t see every day. On my morning walk, I noticed that someone had driven a screwdriver deep into the trunk of a tree:

It’s about six feet off the ground. Pounding it in must have been mighty inconvenient.

What could the purpose be? If I pull the screwdriver out of the tree, do I become King of the Loggers?

I’m afraid to try!

More Crazy Book Auctions

Let’s go nuts and do it all again! Last week I auctioned off a full set of Norton Creek Press titles (thirteen in all), which sold for low prices, with savings ranging from 10% to 99.93% of full price — one book sold for a penny!

So a bunch of people got great bargains, especially considering how good these books are (I won’t publish a book I don’t love). And I’m doing it again this week. Why? I think that a consistent presence in eBay auctions will eventually attract enough bidders that prices will become reasonable. So far, though, it’s a bargain-hunter’s paradise.

So check out my auctions. Christmas is coming! Buy books for your friends and don’t let them know you got them at a bargain price!

Winter Pasture for Grass-Fed Eggs

A lot of us live in climates that are mild enough that “winter pasture” is a valid concept. If you can manage to keep a green range going all winter, you can achieve that grass-fed goodness year-round. So what kind of winter pasture works best?

Cool-season grasses for free-range chickens. Traditionally, cool-season grasses have worked very well, with cereal grains (oat, wheat, and barley) providing good, reliable, palatable, rugged, nutritious cool-season ground cover. Here in Western Oregon, it’s not too late to plant such things. A lot of people live in warmer climates than I do, and they’ll have even better luck.

The problem with these annual grasses is that they die in the summertime, so you’ll want to sow something else by the time the cool-season annuals start to give up the ghost. This is where a grass-legume mixture shines, since clovers do very well in the season where cool-season annuals don’t.

Perennial grasses for free-range chickens. I haven’t seen any perennial grasses that leap out of the ground after a fall sowing the way wheat and oats do, but of course they don’t turn up their toes and die as soon as summer arrives, which is a bonus.

Permanent pasture for free-range chickens. Having a pasture ecosystem with a maximum amount of biodiviversity, that is tuned to your local micro-climate, sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? This is what happens on permanent pasture, where you never plow, and just accept whatever grows. All you do is mow (and re-seed bare spots). Start with whatever will create a good ground cover quickly, and allow other species to creep in. You’ll soon have a mix of multiple grasses and legumes. That’s what I do.

Grass height for free-range chickens. chickens are fairly low-slung. Tall grass restricts their movements, provides concealment for predators, and gives them opportunities to lay eggs where you’ll never find them. There was some research done on the topic of grass height, way back when (don’t have the reference handy, sorry), and cutting the pasture at two inches worked best. Six inches was too high.

It’s not edible if it’s not green. Chickens will happily eat bright green pasture plants, but when the green starts to fade and the plants go woody, they lose interest.

A lot of this information came from Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. If you want to do anything more demanding than feeding your chickens out of a sack, you need this book. Over 600 pages of information and wisdom about poultry nutrition, including a chapter on green feed and pasturing. Written in the Fifties, when people still knew about such things, but when modern nutrition had been figured out, too. Highly recommended.

Happy pasturing!