Breadth of Necessity
On the weekend Josh came over and we cleaned my chimney. I had already taken out the chunk of chimney between the stove and the ceiling, so it was just a matter of putting the brush in and attaching one after another long fibreglass rod to clean the next 2.5 stories' worth of steel pipe. I had picked up a system for containing the creosote and soot on some forums -- basically poke a small hole in a garbage bag, tape the garbage bag around the chimney hole, and feed the pipes in through that.
We were cleaning the chimney because it needed to be cleaned and no one in town would clean it. I'd pushed it last year and ended up with a spring chimney fire -- luckily no damage was done. Because of that chimney fire we had to also remove, clean, and replace the catalytic converter on my stove, which meant buying a new gasket to seal the catalytic converter in place. During the first fire the gasket expands, so all the hot air is forced through the catalytic converter (which looks like a honeycomb, basically it has a magic surface that burns the creosote so it 1) doesn't plug up the chimney and 2) produces more heat).
I was nervous about doing the thing myself, and when I'm nervous about something I'll often wait till Josh can help. He's an engineer and is much better at sorting physical things than I am.
We cleaned the chimney Sunday and lit the fire up. I kept it running more or less continuously till last night It wasn't acting how I remembered. The bypass door handle was stiff. Then last night there was a thunk and the bypass handle was extra stiff, there was a clunk, and suddenly it moved freely without a sense of weight behind it.
There was a fire in the stove at the time.
So I added a little more wood (it was a cold evening) and determined to figure out what was going on tonight.
In the morning the fire had burnt itself out and the stove was cold. I'm always more confident and enthusiastic in the morning, so I took the morning off work.
First I took the chimney back down. Then I took the catalytic converter out. The bypass door is a flap of metal that channels the air either through the catalytic converter or straight up the chimney -- when everything is cold the smoke needs to go straight up the chimney, then when it's warm enough it is channeled through the converter. I couldn't get that door to hang properly off the rod that attached to the handle so I stuck my phone inside it and took some pictures and sent them to Josh. While doing that I found a slot the door was supposed to slide into, got everything sorted, put the chimney back on, reversed some loose metal bits that had been put in wrong on the weekend, and cleaned myself up.
A stop at the hardware store revealed that they were out of gaskets, so I am awaiting a shipment of those. I know how to put them in, at least, because we did that on the weekend already. Then I can start a fire again. Luckily I have backup electric heat.
This is a steep learning curve. Even just learning to start a fire properly in the stove required the manual (you lay the logs front-to-back, whereas in a normal stove you lay them side-to-side, like in yule log pictures). Plus: cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, sourcing wood.
And the thing is, everything up here is like that. Raise some meat birds? Learn to fence (no one around here does fencing), learn to make a bird shed, learn to slaughter and pluck and gut and cut up and freeze - the nearest waterfowl slaughter location is 8 hours away. Learn to remove your door and put it back on to get the freezer into the house, no one's gonna do it for you. While you're at it, learn to plumb in an outdoor tap that won't freeze, the main waterline is easy to access from inside the house at least.
Following the chain of something up from one piece of knowledge to the next used to be a hobby: I like gardening, so I learn to cook and make booze from grown food, and then I learn to preserve what I cook, then I learn to make dishes to eat from, then I learn to grow animals to more efficiently compost/return nutrients to the soil. I do that sort of thing naturally.
Here nearly everything is like that.
I've come up and dived right in, to be sure. A house in the city would require less learning. A house without animals would require less learning. A house with an electric or gas furnace, with attachment to city sewer and water, a job that was the same as I'd done before: all less learning.
It's pretty tiring sometimes, when I just want a thing to be done. Some things I can put off: last year I paid to have my driveway ploughed, this year I got a snowblower (And of course there is no snow to be seen). I considered replacing my wood stove with a pellet stove after the fire. My house is not off-grid, and I've put off getting milking/hay eating/ruminant animals that can be fussy digestively. I did not end up on a snowmobile last year at all.
So this is less specialisation. It reminds me of the Heinlein quote about what "a man" should be able to do. It gives me a lot to think about.
I think I know my environment better than I did in the city. I know better how the things around me work.
I have less ability to trade money for free time than I did in the city, and probably less free time regardless (more things are externalised in a situation like this).
The threshold for asking for help from people is higher here than in the city, because...
A thing going wrong is less worthy of a helpless flail, and more worthy of just fixing it.
Fewer people make youtube videos about things that need to be done out here as compared to things I wanted to do in the city.
There are more shared experiences here than in the city: society is not as stratified in terms of actual activities or behaviours.
And so on.
Anyhow, tired, but I've been thinking about this some and wanted to get it down.
We were cleaning the chimney because it needed to be cleaned and no one in town would clean it. I'd pushed it last year and ended up with a spring chimney fire -- luckily no damage was done. Because of that chimney fire we had to also remove, clean, and replace the catalytic converter on my stove, which meant buying a new gasket to seal the catalytic converter in place. During the first fire the gasket expands, so all the hot air is forced through the catalytic converter (which looks like a honeycomb, basically it has a magic surface that burns the creosote so it 1) doesn't plug up the chimney and 2) produces more heat).
I was nervous about doing the thing myself, and when I'm nervous about something I'll often wait till Josh can help. He's an engineer and is much better at sorting physical things than I am.
We cleaned the chimney Sunday and lit the fire up. I kept it running more or less continuously till last night It wasn't acting how I remembered. The bypass door handle was stiff. Then last night there was a thunk and the bypass handle was extra stiff, there was a clunk, and suddenly it moved freely without a sense of weight behind it.
There was a fire in the stove at the time.
So I added a little more wood (it was a cold evening) and determined to figure out what was going on tonight.
In the morning the fire had burnt itself out and the stove was cold. I'm always more confident and enthusiastic in the morning, so I took the morning off work.
First I took the chimney back down. Then I took the catalytic converter out. The bypass door is a flap of metal that channels the air either through the catalytic converter or straight up the chimney -- when everything is cold the smoke needs to go straight up the chimney, then when it's warm enough it is channeled through the converter. I couldn't get that door to hang properly off the rod that attached to the handle so I stuck my phone inside it and took some pictures and sent them to Josh. While doing that I found a slot the door was supposed to slide into, got everything sorted, put the chimney back on, reversed some loose metal bits that had been put in wrong on the weekend, and cleaned myself up.
A stop at the hardware store revealed that they were out of gaskets, so I am awaiting a shipment of those. I know how to put them in, at least, because we did that on the weekend already. Then I can start a fire again. Luckily I have backup electric heat.
This is a steep learning curve. Even just learning to start a fire properly in the stove required the manual (you lay the logs front-to-back, whereas in a normal stove you lay them side-to-side, like in yule log pictures). Plus: cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, sourcing wood.
And the thing is, everything up here is like that. Raise some meat birds? Learn to fence (no one around here does fencing), learn to make a bird shed, learn to slaughter and pluck and gut and cut up and freeze - the nearest waterfowl slaughter location is 8 hours away. Learn to remove your door and put it back on to get the freezer into the house, no one's gonna do it for you. While you're at it, learn to plumb in an outdoor tap that won't freeze, the main waterline is easy to access from inside the house at least.
Following the chain of something up from one piece of knowledge to the next used to be a hobby: I like gardening, so I learn to cook and make booze from grown food, and then I learn to preserve what I cook, then I learn to make dishes to eat from, then I learn to grow animals to more efficiently compost/return nutrients to the soil. I do that sort of thing naturally.
Here nearly everything is like that.
I've come up and dived right in, to be sure. A house in the city would require less learning. A house without animals would require less learning. A house with an electric or gas furnace, with attachment to city sewer and water, a job that was the same as I'd done before: all less learning.
It's pretty tiring sometimes, when I just want a thing to be done. Some things I can put off: last year I paid to have my driveway ploughed, this year I got a snowblower (And of course there is no snow to be seen). I considered replacing my wood stove with a pellet stove after the fire. My house is not off-grid, and I've put off getting milking/hay eating/ruminant animals that can be fussy digestively. I did not end up on a snowmobile last year at all.
So this is less specialisation. It reminds me of the Heinlein quote about what "a man" should be able to do. It gives me a lot to think about.
I think I know my environment better than I did in the city. I know better how the things around me work.
I have less ability to trade money for free time than I did in the city, and probably less free time regardless (more things are externalised in a situation like this).
The threshold for asking for help from people is higher here than in the city, because...
A thing going wrong is less worthy of a helpless flail, and more worthy of just fixing it.
Fewer people make youtube videos about things that need to be done out here as compared to things I wanted to do in the city.
There are more shared experiences here than in the city: society is not as stratified in terms of actual activities or behaviours.
And so on.
Anyhow, tired, but I've been thinking about this some and wanted to get it down.