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.

Spammers are getting clever

I’ve been seeing a new kind of spam recently: blog-comment spam. Actually, this has been around for a long time, but it has recently become much less stupid.

Before, spammers would try to leave comments on my blog that had some kind of explicit “buy our worthless junk” message, plus a link to their site. The spammers hoped to find unmoderated blogs where these comments would be approved automatically, and would stay up until the blogger noticed them and deleted them.

Now, the actual message consists of nothing but unfocused, non-specific praise for the blog. No ad at all. But there’s still a link back to the spammer’s site.

The goal here is not so much that readers of the blog will click on the link, since they probably won’t, but to fool Google into thinking that the spammer’s site must be important, since so many other sites link to it!

So now I delete all comments that contain nothing but empty praise and a link. I wonder how many bloggers are so starved for attention that they let such comments stand? Probably a lot. Might make an interesting research paper, if you’re in the psychology biz.

By the way, this blog uses the b2evolution package, which is great, but in the future I’m just going to go with blogger.com, and let Google do all my maintenance and updates and backups for me. The price is right (free!), and, frankly, they’re better at it than I am.

Tractor Trouble: Watch the Electrical System

A long time ago, someone, probably my dad, told me that “80% of all carburetion problem are really electrical.” In other words, your engine doesn’t run, and you suspect a fuel or carburetor problem, when all the time it was an ignition problem.

This happened to me over the last week, when my tractor (a Ford 640) would not start. I wasn’t the one operating it, and the issue became confused because he didn’t use the fuel shut-off, so we really did have a carburetion problem — the carburetor was flooded.

I messed around with various stupid and irrelevant actions until I finally woke up and brought a voltmeter into play. I discovered that the ignition fuse had voltage at both ends, but the fuse HOLDER had no voltage at the far end. It had corroded and wasn’t making a good connection. I burnished this up a bit, the voltage magically appeared, and the tractor started right up.

This, by the way, is what you get when you use inferior parts. When I converted the tractor from 6V to 12V operation, I added an el cheapo fuse block. I should have bought a marine-quality one. Never again!

Another take-away is that, if you allow things to go downhill, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I was down to one working headlamp, and then zero. With working headlights, I can use the lights as an impromptu voltmeter, because the way things are wired, the ignition is getting voltage if the lights are. But with both of them burned out, I had to go find my multimeter. Life is simpler if only one thing is broken at a time!

Nevertheless, I designed a T-shirt this morning, commemorating old iron, which you can see below. After all, my tractor is older than I am!

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

The Ideal Roof for a Chicken Coop.

I’ve been meditating on the ideal roof for a chicken coop. It ought to have the following properties:

Easy to install.
Cheap.
Lasts forever.
Strong.
Rainwater doesn’t cause mud in front of the house.
Chickens don’t roost on top.

Also, if you live in the suburbs, it should be gorgeous enough to keep your uptight neighbors from deciding that the world is ending.

Galvanized Steel Roofs for Chicken Coops

One of my "low houses" with walls just four feet tall. — One of my “low houses” with walls just four feet tall and a simple galvanized metal roof. There are no rafters. The roof is attached to the three horizontal purlins at front, middle, and back.

Most of my houses have shed roofs made of galvanized steel roofing. The configuration is a “shed roof,” which just means that it’s higher and the front than at the back, so rainwater pours off at the back of the house where is causes less trouble.

I prefer using the cheapest corrugated roofing, which is readily available from lumber stores like Home Depot, but you can get metal roofing in all the colors of the rainbow, with baked-enamel coatings that last forever, and in shapes that are less industrial than the corrugated ripple.

My roofs are just metal, with no plywood decking underneath, and no insulation. This is appropriate for highly ventilated houses with enough airflow that the inside temperature and humidity are about the same as outside. You don’t have to worry about condensation in such a house.

Nails vs. Screws

In the old days, corrugated metal roofing was held on by nails banged through the high points of the ripple and into purlins. These don’t hold very well, and were replaced by roofing nails with rubber washerss. The nails are hammered through the low points of the ripple and the washers keep them from leaking. These have more holding power.

But all these are going the way of the dodo, because roofing screws have three times the holding power of roofing nails. So use roofing screws and get yourself a good, powerful electric drill or screwdriver for installing them.

Open-Front Houses

Fresh-Air Poultry Houses - chicken coop design — Fresh-Air Poultry Houses

In a tightly closed chicken house, you’d want an insulated roof, but you’d have to be nuts to build a tightly closed house. Ventilation is the magic bullet for chicken health. (You’ll want to read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, one of the classic poultry books I’ve reprinted, for complete information.)

No Rafters

My houses have purlins but no rafters. The sheet metal is nailed directly to the purlins with roofing nails or roofing screws, meaning that they are supported only every four feet. This has worked well for me.

Framing

The purlins should be up on edge for stiffness, not laid flat, and bolted to the studs with ¼-inch carriage bolts, not nailed. (Some of my early houses with nailed-on purlins had their roof torn off by high winds.)

One thing I’ve learned, though, is that if the metal roofing sticks out very far in front of or behind the house, it’ll flap in the wind and work itself loose. So when you have plenty of overhang (which is a good thing), you need to add a 2×4 at the very lip of the roof, under the roofing. Naling the roofing to this 2×4 keeps the sheet metal from flapping in high winds.

Slope of the Roof

One problem I haven’t solved is that of keeping chickens from roosting on the roof. Chickens like sleeping as high in the air as they can, and that means the roof. My roofs have a shallow slope and they can sleep anywhere on the roof they want without sliding off. A steeper roof is clearly called for! I haven’t yet done any experiments to discover the critical angle where the chickens slide off.

Traditional shed roofs often call for a one-in-four slope. A house eight feet deep would have a roof that slopes down two feet front to back: perhaps with a seven-foot height in front and a five-foot height in back. But even my flattest roofs haven’t collapsed under moderate snow loads, in spite of my lightweight framing.

Other Roofs

Any kind of real roofing will work fine in a chicken coop: asphalt shingles, cedar shakes, roll roofing, built-up roofing, etc. I’ve never built a structure using any of these, so I can’t provide details.

Before galvanized roofing became widely available, most coops seemed to have either fancy shingle roofs or lowly tar-paper roofs. I don’t recommend simple tar-paper roofs because they don’t last long enough to be worth the bother. Roll roofing, which is much heavier, is probably okay.

Lots of people use temporary roofing such as tarps for their chicken coops. This is fine for summer pasture houses, and in fact my wife Karen developed a tarp-covered cattle-panel hoop house for pastured broilers. But the tarps on these hoop-coop roofs tend to develop holes during the course of a single season and are iffy as winter housing even in our mild Oregon climate.

Water Well Woes

You won’t believe how little water our well gives us — one quart a minute. That’s 440 gallons a day, which is enough if we don’t want to water the lawn with it. We have a 1500-gallon tank (these things are surprisingly affordable and lightweight black plastic affairs that a single person can roll off a trailer and into place), so we have plenty of water, until we run out.

We didn’t run out, but it started smelling bad. This is the other bad thing about wells in Oregon’s Coast Range — sulfur in the water, and the sulfur-loving bacteria that go with it. Not a health hazard, but unaesthetic.

So we mixed a jug of bleach with a bucket of water and poured it down the well, and followed it with some vinegar. Recirculate lightly every half hour (the pump is on a timer), wait 24 hours, and pump the well dry. It’s called shock chlorination. If you have a well, you probably know all about it.

Yuck! Not only did we get the usual greenish-brownish gunk, but some reddish stuff as well. That’s too many colors for something that’s supposed to be crystal clear!

No doubt everything will return to normal again. It always has. I’d fire my water company, except it’s me.