Tag Archives: fire

Going Low Tech with Lopi to Heat the House

December 20, 2008 – 4:16 pm

Most things in our house are high tech as we can get, except when it comes to heating the house.  When we built this house a few years ago we put in a wood burning stove (see Lopi, Lopi, and Lopi).  Heating our home with a wood burning stove is great, except… you have to have wood of course.  Since Deb likes the house to be WARM, we certainly save quite a bit on electricity over the winter (bill runs around $65 in the winter), it just takes a lot of labor to get it to the point of burning as you see below.

lopi-wood-burning-stove

So, we spend many a Saturday afternoon in what turns out to be pretty tough work of cutting up wood, splitting, and stacking.  Theoretically we should be working on seasoning our wood about a year out from when we are burning it, but so far we haven’t been able to catch up with the seasons and come summer time we really don’t want to be out there doing this type of work, so, we are doing it now.

This isn’t much of a technological post, other than the fact that I do have my phone out there with me, but this is what we did today.  You will have to excuse the quality of the photos, all the images below were taken with my phone.

We have this sort of disaster area in the adjacent property our here.  Early this year the logging trucks came in and clear cut the 40+ acres and left a huge mess of wood scrap bio-mass (mostly hard wood trees they didn’t want), and in the process gave us an almost endless supply of wood for our stove.  Luckily we can’t see the mess next door from our house, and the owner of the property (which use to be a nice deer lease) was thrilled was wanted to clean it up a bit.

Hunting for Wood

Deborah Collecting Wood

Scott Resting

Scott Resting

Splitting Wood

Split Wood

It was a totally exhausting day, but the end result is heat for the house.

By Scott Fillmer | Posted in Journal | Also tagged saturday, stove, trees, weekend, wood | Comments (0)

Youth Boys Campout on the Farm // Friday Feet

December 5, 2008 – 10:00 pm

This week my Friday Feet post is a little different.  We had the boys youth group out to have a campout, cookout, and whatever else they do at that age.  Being Friday I used this opportunity to get a Friday Feet shot in with some of the guys before they ate.  It was absolutely pitch dark but those are my feet in the middle and Rusty Hutson’s one foot stuck in the side, Heath to my right with socks on, and everyone else that stuck a foot in at the time.

Friday Feet

The boys play this sort of cruel version of a game that no one over the age of 25 should play called catch the flag.  I was given the “easy” task of guarding our teams flag (this is pitch dark night at 30* by the way) and when someone came by I was to “get” them.  After several sprints, tackles, and sumersalts that this body hadn’t done in a while I was exhausted.

The food was great.  They brought out some fraternity grill on a trailer and cooked all night until we were all full.  Breakfast was a different story.  I learned you need to cook a normal portion times 10 for these guys, but it was all great fun.

By Scott Fillmer | Posted in Photography | Also tagged boys, camping, friday feet, youth | Comments (0)

What is a Patio Without a Fire Pit, Not Much To Us

May 4, 2008 – 1:04 pm

Scott Looking at the Patio Fire PitThis weekend was busy but relaxing. Saturday was supposed to be a day for outside tractor work and various yard things we all seem to have to do on the weekend, but, it RAINED. Who’da thunk. We haven’t had rain in the southeast in what seems like years after last summer’s drought (in fact I think it has been a year). It was a nice rain shower and didn’t last long enough to rain out the entire grass cutting day.

The rain did let up enough for us a have a nice fire in our fire pit on the patio. We had this built into the patio when we moved in and we use it all the time. There is something about being able to sit outside around a “camp fire” that makes for a great and relaxing time. We sit around the fire pit on our patio all year round and enjoy it very much. If you don’t have one built into the concrete then you can do what we did before we moved in. Get an old washing machine tub from a junk dealer (they will gladly give them away) or just dig you a nice whole in the ground and surround it with bricks.  When we were building this house, the fire pit in the patio was one of the must have’s of the house, but really it is just a circle in the concrete.  You would think such a thing would be an easy thing for a builder to get his hands around but nothing seemed to go that way with this house (see the category for house if you are interested).

The photo to the left here is actually a self portrait.  Something I don’t do all that often but I had the camera flat on the ground and used the timer to trigger the shutter.  The photo below is one I took of Deborah later on Saturday night. It is completely dark except for the fire in the fire pit. The image doesn’t show the fire because it would be to bright for the exposure, but you can see the spark trails of the fire just to the right side of her face. I did have her sit a little closer to the fire than she normally would so she was ready to move since her knees were a little warm.

She did real well to sit there through a 15 second exposure without moving. Thanks hun.  It is a little spooky (not Deb of course) with the fire glow as the only light source but I love how it turned out.  If you haven’t tried sitting absolutely still for 15-20 seconds at a time shot after shot after shot, you should try it some time.  Deb did great as a subject with fire on her legs.

Cold Night by the Fire

Sunday, May 4, 2008

We had a very nice service that completed the current series on missions. I plan to update my faith based blog, d.amasc.us soon with more information. The rest of our Sunday was spent enjoy one of the most beautiful Spring days here in the lower south. We can now finally eat out on the patio without freezing to death. There is a new moon tonight, and I will try to take a few star trail images and see how they turn out for tomorrow’s post.

By Scott Fillmer | Posted in House, Journal | Also tagged home, image of the day, weekend | Comments (0)

The Lopi Wood Burning Stove is Running, in April

April 30, 2008 – 7:50 pm

Wow, today was a busy day of work. I usually wear many “work” hats throughout the day, today was no different, but there was a lot of heavy lifting on my part, mostly from boxes of books.

lopi wood burning stove

It started off by my normal reading of all my email and feeds from other blogs and as it would happen sometimes, I came across this really cool idea that ragamuffinsoul had about doing a time lapse of your day, A Day In The Life…. Of course, I had to give it a try. I have to say, nothing like his, but it was pretty cool. I may just use it as my “welcome” video I have been putting off doing over and over.

A Fire in the Stove, In April?

The morning was quite cold for down here in the south, almost 40° when we woke up, cold enough that Deborah requested I get my act together and get a fire going in our wood burning stove. Yep, last day of April (in the far south no less) and we had a rip roaring fire. The exhaust temp got up to about 1,000° and the stove top temp about 350°, just about the same as dead of winter. We had the house built with a Lopi Wood Burning stove and we never have to run the heater.

Everything Else

I managed to get in a bit of practice on my E blues scale. I am getting a little faster at it but my bent up little finger on the end is having a hard go at the A blues scale. I am supposed to stretch it out, we’ll see. I was able to learn a nice little accompaniment to Hootie and Blowfish’s Michelle Post. All done pretty much with the g-chord, not to hard. After all that I still managed to get in about a 4 mile walk around the property before I was ready to collapse.

At the last minute I decided to join a small blogger group on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s that should be good, if I can find the time, and that post is over on d.amasc.us at Vagabond Blogger Small Group, I’m In.

By Scott Fillmer | Posted in Journal | Also tagged stove, work | Comments (0)

A Cord of Wood for the Lopi Wood Burning Stove

October 10, 2006 – 8:42 am

Can you guess what this goes to?


October 6, 2006

YES!! The wood-burning stove has finally been installed.


Receiving Operating Instructions

It looks so good on our hearth and is ready to be used. We have already been busy gathering and splitting firewood. Conveniently, there is a mill nearby where log trucks haul their loads and for one reason or another they sometimes drop their loads on the side of the road near the entrance or even in the parking lot of a vacant gas station nearby. We have found this to be an unbelievable source of free fire wood for anyone who wants to haul it away.


FREE Firewood

In September, we purchased a log splitter on sale at Home Depot (apparently at about half price according to my parents) and got busy.


Log Splitter


Meager Beginnings (9-20-2006)

We have collected several trailer loads to date of both pine and mixed hardwood. My father in law is afraid, at this point, that we are going to go into the lumber business. HA HA


Wood Collection as of October 24, 2006

One thing we love to burn in our fire pit is cedar. We found a dead cedar on the back part of the property our house is on, hooked a chain to it and dragged it to the splitter with the community tractor. While cutting it apart with the chain saw the tree began humming. We didn’t consider this normal so we investigated further. The tree was (and had been for quite some time) the home to a huge number of carpenter bees. These bees are extremely large and don’t fly very fast either. However, they still look a little menacing. We left the cut apart pieces to rest for about a week thinking the bees would relocate. No such luck. So we claimed their home with our log splitter and a little delicate handling (and a little bee spray).


How bad do we want this log?

By kim | Posted in House | Also tagged home, stove, wood | Comments (0)