In the first part of this article, I discussed the cost of heating our house with wood or oil through the Maritime winter. But we have other spaces that require heating too.

When we moved here, we renovated part of the large garage/barn on our property into my husband’s home office, and a hobbies room. Both are fairly high ceilinged, and represent about 700 square feet of living space. It’s necessary to keep at least the hobby room heated at all times. Since the building is a short city block from the house, it wasn’t feasible to install a wood burning stove out there, since we wouldn’t be available every day or night to tend it, and heat needed to be constant. So we installed electric baseboard heaters.

Keeping the temperature about 65 degrees F (about 18C) costs us about $250 per month in the coldest winter months. That wouldn’t be so onerous if it was our main heating space, but add it to the cost of heating the house (and the added granny flat/visitors’ suite that is also heated with electricity) and we’re looking at a desperate situation.

What are our options?
1) Geo-thermal heating. Geothermal heat pumps use heat from the ground to heat the home. This would be the ideal system since one installation could heat both buildings at a very low cost and with almost zero impact on the environment.

However, since geothermal heat pumps are considerably more efficient than air-source heat pumps, they are also more expensive to purchase and install. To have an adequate system installed here would cost us about $30,000.

2) An outdoor wood furnace or wood boiler system.These heat water by burning wood very efficiently and can tie in to existing hot water baseboards, forced air, or in floor heating. This unit could also possibly heat both buildings and has the advantage of needing to be fed only once every 12 hours or so. In addition, the firewood pieces can be much larger than what would fit into a wood stove (or even the basement wood furnace) and would save on chopping/splitting – either in time or money.

To heat the outbuilding, though, would require installation of ducting and so the cost of installing one of these would be about $12,000.

3) An indoor wood stove on the main floor. This would seem a quick and easy solution except for the fact that we can’t use our existing chimney for it because of the oil-burning backup unit in the basement. (Insurance regulations prohibit a wood burning device above an oil-burning device on the same chimney.) We would have to install another chimney and also take down some inside walls on the main floor to allow for better heat circulation. I’m not sure of the cost of all this – renovations, installation of a hearth, the stove purchase and installation and the new chimney, but I’m sure you get the idea…and that doesn’t address heating the rooms in the barn or the suite.

Either wood-burning solution still leaves us vulnerable to the rising cost of firewood and to guilt whenever we see a clear-cut hillside.

4) Wall mounted air-exchange heat pump. Again, this doesn’t help with the heating of the granny flat or the barn, and would require renovations to the inside walls of the house for air flow. Add that to the cost of the pump and installation and we’re likely in the $10,000 range – and we’re not confident that the lay-out of the house would allow adequate heating on the second floor.

As you can see, we must spend money to save money and right now the capital for any of these isn’t available. That was definitely something we overlooked before we bought.

LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKE. Pay attention to the heating system if you’re moving outside the familiar infrastructure of a town or city. And don’t be swayed by the romance of heating with wood.

Do you have any other suggestions we might consider for heating our buildings? I’d love to hear from you.

Last week, we were on a road trip to southern Ontario where (then) it was balmy and spring-like. While we were gone, most of the snow here melted too and the first three days this week were wonderful and left me full of hope. Then I woke up this morning to this–and still snowing.

Will winter never end? It makes me so down….

Here in Atlantic Canada, winter goes on and so do the heating costs. In fact, we’ll likely be heating through the month of May. It’s a constant search for an affordable method of doing that.

In southern Ontario where we spent the first fifty years of our lives, I always lived in houses heated with natural gas. It was just always there and I admit that I didn’t give heating in Nova Scotia the thought it deserved before we moved here.

Our Nova Scotia home is a renovated, but still old and draughty farm house built in 1878. It’s heated by an old wood furnace in the basement, and backed up by an oil-burning unit down there as well. The oil furnace is necessary and kicks in when we’re away for the day–or more–, when I’m too sick to negotiate the cellar stairs to feed the wood fire, sometimes in the wee hours of very cold nights, and for heating in the shoulder season when wood is just too warm.

When we moved here in 2003, firewood was $90 a cord. Since there is no ambient heat from the furnace the way there would be with a wood stove on the main level, we found we needed eight to ten cord to get through the winter. Clear cutting is allowed here so our hillsides are quickly being denuded of their woodlots and this year the price of firewood has crept to $200 a cord. Wood heat seems worth it, though, as it is a toasty warm.

In addition to the cost, wood heat is a lot of work. The basement will hold three or four cord but first the wood has to be thrown through the basement window one junk at a time. Then, of course, it must be stacked in the cellar. The wood that’s left outside has to be stacked & covered until such time as the basement needs to be filled again and the wood restacked once more. More than once, we have been caught short with no wood in the basement and no access to the woodpile because of snow and ice.

When that happens, we fall back on oil. We have a small (half) tank that holds about 300 litres (approximately 80 gallons). At the time of last week’s fill-up, oil was $1.02 litre (about $3.85 U.S. gallon). Translated, that means that a tank of oil that costs $295. will last 7-10 days. That’s anywhere from $900 to $1,100 per month–and it’s not even a comfortable heat.

Are there alternatives? Oh yes – and other parts of the property to heat. I’ll explore that in another post.

We’ve had rain and temps above freezing all week, and last night when I went to bed, there was no snow to be seen. I thought I’d show you a real contrast from last week.

Alas, this is what I awoke to. That’s a main highway out there. There’s a wind gusting to 50 mph from the south (?!), which is the other side of the house, that blowing a icy mist of snow across the roads.

An e-mail invitation has me thinking about getting a group together this weekend and going sleigh riding. There’s more than one place within 20 minutes of our house where we could do this, but one of my favorites is the Sugar Moon Farm.

Husband and wife team, Scott Whitelaw and Quita Grey have a thriving maple syrup business in the Cobequid Mountains in Earltown NS. They use these gorgeous draught horses in the sugaring work and in winter, before the sap starts to run, for sleigh rides through the woods. There are also hiking trails for snowshoeing and crosscountry skiing.

We often take friends to the “sugar shack” for breakfast, and sometimes go, just us, if we have a weekend morning available.

In the city, one can just keep warm in winter, at a movie theater or a bowling alley or a mall. Those venues are at least an hour’s drive from here.

Want to sleigh ride, snowshoe, or hike in the beautiful outdoors? No problem. This is the sort of winter activity that is often easily available in the country.

What about you? What kind of winter activity do you enjoy: city or country?

Disclaimer: I am NOT an affiliate of Sugar Moon Farms nor am I in any way compensated by them. I received an e-mail about the sleigh rides from them today and decided to share because I simply love the place!

Technorati Tags: Sugar Moon Farm, draught horses, draft horses, maple sugaring, sugar shack, maple syrup, sleigh rides, all-you-can-eat pancakes, Chef’s night, hiking trail, Nuttby Mountain, Earltown NS, Rogart Mountain Trail

One of the things that makes me feel so cozy here in our little village is the presence of a full-time dentist. And, serendipitously, she is also a really good dentist.

Last night I broke another tooth (it seems that my teeth are crumbling away on me, but that’s another story) and needed emergency “looking-at”. Unfortunately, Dr. Whitman was booked solid with a waiting list of ten already. That’s the risk of Read the rest of this entry »

Not being camera-savvy, I couldn’t get the picture beyond the window this week. The lens would record only the ice on the pane.

At 4 p.m., it’s as dark as night, the wind is howling and blowing the trees and the sleety rain horizontal.

What a change from last week!

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Such irony: on Saturday, I offered a sample of the small things that had given me pleasure in the past week. One of the items I chose was “no traffic lights within a 40 minute drive”.

Yesterday morning, I turned left out of my driveway and almost immediately saw a traffic light on our road.

Read the rest of this entry »

The headlines here are exclaiming over the coyote attack earlier this week, when a young woman visitor from Toronto was killed by two rogue males while she was on a hiking trail in Cape Breton. Read the rest of this entry »

Business isn’t so brisk at some old country service stations, so we had to slow down and get a look at the “mechanic” here, especially since the taillights had been on the previous evening.

Incidentally, look at the hills in the background. We’re in the Cobequid Hills, part of the Read the rest of this entry »

Bill’s daughter, Laura, has arrived from Vancouver with her 16-month-old son for an extended visit. Of course, we love having them here, but for me, there is an added bonus: the country through a city person’s fresh eyes & ears.

One of our first crisis arose this morning. I heard out of my bedroom window that overlooks the side deck: “Come in here! Get those bugs off you!” with a touch of panic. Worried that we had an infestation of late mosquitoes or spiders, I peered out to find my window screen dotted with the culprits: ladybugs.

Photo via “How to Start a Ladybug Garden”

During the night, Read the rest of this entry »

Okay you city gals. You ran some errands at lunch today.

Me too: picked up a sandwich, signed for a registered letter, paid some library fines. Remembered to drop off dry-cleaning, pick up eggs, and return a movie. Drove by this.

I never promised you the country was classy.

Technorati Tags: pumpkins, decorating with pumpkins, butt cheeks

Sometimes I wonder how I can have read so many books in my lifetime and never have heard of some authors that apparently have quite a following.

One of those authors is Miss Read, the pen name of Dora Jessie Saint, an English novelist, by profession a schoolmistress who began writing for several journals after World War II and eventually produced a series of novels from 1955 to 1996. In 1940 she married her now late husband, Douglas, a former headmaster. Read the rest of this entry »

When you live in an old country house, you have to come to terms with dealing with wildlife of many sorts. One of the most common is the tiny mouse who is scurrying this time of year to find a warm place for a winter nest.

So I wasn’t totally unprepared to open the door this morning to see what the dog was barking at, to find a wee mousie cowering in the corner of the deck against the door jamb. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of my pre-country life (50 years), I lived in homes heated by natural gas. It was just as the ads say: clean, easy & relatively inexpensive. The gas supplier also sold the furnaces & provided maintenance service. We never gave heating a second thought, really.

When we moved here, we had a rude awakening. Read the rest of this entry »

Hurricane Bill is barreling up the Atlantic coastline and due to brush Nova Scotia tomorrow. It is, of course, the talk of the town.

The year we moved here (2003) was the first year in a very long time that Nova Scotia had been affected by a hurricane to any extent. But that September, Hurricane Juan Read the rest of this entry »

For the rest of my week, see my blog at the Grace in Small Things site.

1. Clean sheets

2. Two paying gigs in two nights!

3. The Fabled Pig ham sandwich

4. Sent home on glass plates

5. That we’re trusted to return.

Wage a battle against embitterment and take part in Grace in Small Things .

[tags]grace in small things, Fables Club, Fabled pig[tags]

The front page of the daily paper in our nearest town carried this picture last Thursday morning. The picture is in color and measures 7½” x 9″.
As you can imagine, it WAS the front page story. Page 3 continued with the headline: “Tatamagouche sunflower thief has business owners up in arms” over a smaller b&w photo of one such owner displaying the holes in her flower arrangement.

Six years ago, Read the rest of this entry »

John Payzant was born in Halifax Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast. But, like so many Atlantic Canadians, he spent most of his working life in Toronto Ontario as an investment dealer on Bay Street, considered to be Canada’s version of Wall Street.

In 2004, he decided to trade in city life and move to the small town of Lunenburg near his birth city. Lunenburg’s historic waterfront is also on the Atlantic.

Since his city friends thought Read the rest of this entry »

Hilary Clinton’s now-famous quote — “I believe in a zone of privacy” — made at a press conference to promote her 2003 memoir, Living History, referred to the media’s exposure of public figures.

But in the country, privacy is about your neighbors. Our nearest visible neighbor is across a field about 150 yards from our house. We lost a couple of trees in Hurricane Juan (2004) and Read the rest of this entry »