Great article once again. I'm definitely interested in learning more about the water pressure tank you use to heat your stock water. I can't really tell what is in that picture of it. Is it all underground?
We are also in Canada and planning to go off grid in the next year or so and having delt with stock watering troughs freezing up in the winter I have been scratching my head about how I would keep them from freezing without the conventional stock tank heaters which are electricity hogs.
I thought it was interesting about how you are self assessing your wood stoves I have been doing something similar using an infrared digital thermometer. Is that what you are using? The infrared thermometer works amazingly fast and quick and allows us to measure areas we can't normally reach.
Yes, I use the infrared thermometer. Works well, except ours only goes up to 300C, but that is fine as that is all I need to make sure the stoves are safe.
As for the stock tank heater, the tank is laying on its side and then covered with earth until the point where I can then put the barrel (cut in half) on top so that the metal barrel touches the heater. Then I finish burning everything in thermal mass (clay) so that when I do a burn, the stove heats the water but also heats all the thermal mass under the water tanks. When I cover the water at night there will be only a thin sheet of ice by morning. I break it apart for the animals and do that for one or two more nights. By day three the water is either consumed or frozen. At which point I re-fill the tanks and do another burn to re-heat everything back up. I could also melt snow if necessary as it is capable of doing that. I also don't worry about the water getting to hot for the live stock as I only do a 4-5 hour burn which is enough to melt ice but not boil the water or make it too hot for them.
The idea came to me to do this as the old timers used to use an old cream can, put some sand in the bottom of it to have it sit lower in the water and then burn a fire in the can. But I wanted something that would burn easier, longer and more efficiently. But a lot of the solutions to the challenges that you run into can be found from our elders that lived 80-100 years ago. Talk to the really old people before they loose their memories!!!
Thanks for the reply. I have a much better understanding of how that stock tank system works now.
I totally agree about older generations having valuable knowledge. My Grandmother who is 92 years old grew up during a time when they had none of the modern conveniences we have now. Even my mother in-law who is only about 60 grew up in a home without running water when she was a small child.
They definitely had ways of doing things that are almost forgotten now. It also shows just how much we take for granted these days.