How to Heat an Off Grid Log Cabin with Wood, Thermal Imaging Scan (infrared)

Description

Testing the heat loss in my off grid log cabin, I use my infrared thermal imaging camera to take night time photos of the cabin while the wood stove is on, and then again the following morning when the fire is no longer burning. My woodburning stove is not the most efficient for primary heating, so I show exactly how it functions and what I can do to make it more efficient, saving wood and money in the process. It's interesting to see my dog, Cali the Golden Retriever, show up on the thermal image and how cool she is compared to the surrounding walls, table and bed that she's lying on.

The tiny house should be very easy to heat once the pointing (mortar) is done inside and out and I can use what I've learned on this log cabin to help me design and build the other structures on my wilderness homestead. Working and collecting firewood alone is challenging, so I want to maximize the efficiency of each building in order to make this long term off grid survival situation more economically feasible. If I can reduce the amount of fuel needed to heat each off grid building, I can provide all of the energy I need for free from the property. This is going to require the installation of rocket stove (rocket mass heater) to use the wood more efficiently.

I have a few upcoming diy projects that this thermal scan technology will help with - the bread oven, the sauna, the workshop and the maple sugar shack.

Links to Products Used:

Solar LED light bulb 15W

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Agawa Canyon Boreal 21 Saw

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Copper Fairy lights

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Solar String Lights

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Banneton 12" round

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Lodge Dutch Oven

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Flamen heat resistant gloves up to 500 degrees

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Rocksheat baking stone

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Mora Knife

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Lamp OiI

http://amzn.to/2qz0nZ1

Wall Lantern (candle lit)

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Moka Pot

http://amzn.to/2DEomvO Canada

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Canon 6D

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DJI Mavic Pro

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Bragg's Sprinkle

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To see what I’m up to during the rest of the week, please follow me on my other online channels;

Website: http://myselfreliance.com/

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/MySelfReliance/

Personal Facebook Page (Shawn James) – https://www.facebook.com/shawn.james.msr

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/myselfreliance/

Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Tags: Self Reliance,off grid,log cabin,primitive technology,homestead,diy,alone,wilderness,survival,bushcraft,forest,wood,cabin,tiny home,maker,My Self Reliance,thermal scan,thermal imaging,heat,wood stove,woodburning,dog,how to,off grid cabin,heat loss,infrared,infrared camera,night photos,fire

Video Transcription

everybody Shawn James here from my self-reliance and welcome to the cabin excuse the red nose and the red face I just washed my face with some snow didn't realize there was some ice in there I kind of braided my nose and my cheek but anyway that's cabin life I'm actually heating up water right now on a stove to do the dishes and I wanted to talk about the stove answer some questions that people have had about especially about how I'm heating the place but also how efficient it is how warm it is inside when it's cold outside for example and things like that so here I am by the stove it's a medium temperature right now it's maybe -10 Celsius outside right now got down to minus 15 Celsius last night so I did something that I've been meaning to do for a while and that was to bring my infrared camera and scan the outside of the cabin while the fire was burning it was cold outside so that was really interesting to see the heat where I was losing heat where it was cold which areas of the cabin actually were not letting any heat him and which areas led to more heat than I thought so check out these photographs I think it's pretty cool one of the things I've learned is that wherever the moss is in the walls with no mortar over top from what no clay is actually more efficient or it's not conducting heat out so much as the sections about clay so this wall for example has moss on the inside only on the outside as mortar filling those joints but what's happening is the heats getting through and then it's collecting in that mortar and then that's transmitting as a heat spot as a hot spot so it is losing heat through there the spot over here where I actually have the inside and the outside mortar there's only a thin layer of moss in there wherever the gap was big enough to have Moss some places there's none and with the clay touching you can see that the heat is transmitting right through that now log cabins work in this different way than a traditional home because there's a lot more thermal mass these logs can heat up and hold the heat and then he can slowly release it so even though the fire died last night at probably 11 o'clock 11:30 by 6 o'clock in the morning the cabin was still comfortable it was cold but it was comfortable for sleeping had no way she's holding wake me up and cally was completely fine sleeping on her bed so a little bit cooler than if you're used to living in a traditional home where you just keep a furnace on and it comes on it keeps the temperature at 15 degrees Celsius or something I think but something you just get used to when you're living off-grid take a look at these thermal imaging photos from this morning the fire had gone out at that point so I thought I'm going to go outside and get some shots of the cabin with no heat without the fire started yet and see if there's much heat in the building and where is escaping if any and whether the stove and stove I'm still hot so check these photographs there there's pretty interesting I was surprised to see how closely they resembled the photos from the night before so the other questions around that or what am i heating with how much what am I going through and what's the deal with this wood stove so first of all I do have mostly hardwood on this property it's comprised mostly of sugar maple it's quite a few red maple there's yellow birch then the other tree like birch quite a bit of hemlock and balsam fir things like that but they're not really firewood so using those for building materials or just leaving them now this year I had to buy in firewood because I just didn't have time to cut while I bought the property in March and didn't get a chance to cut fire wouldn't have it seasoned so I've been cutting some trees that are dead standing and they've been great firewood but I just haven't got around to cutting any more of that so I had a whole load of logs dropped off so that's what I'm eating with but there it's local as well so it's all the same species so the question is how much what am I going through well when I'm here long term I'm burning probably an average of a log so what happens is that night I let it go out so there's some may be burning three logs over say six or seven hours at night but then during the day I have to put on at least one log per hour to get it up to temperature again so let's say my averaging 24 logs per day 24 pieces of firewood these are 16 inch pieces so that's 720 pieces of firewood that I need to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature when I say comfortable I'm averaging probably 20 degrees Celsius so in terms of cords a cord of firewood is 4 feet high by 4 feet deep by 8 feet long and then typically they're cutting to 16 inch lengths so that 4 foot log that would make up the core is cut into three pieces 16 inches long so based on a 30-day month I'm using an average of 720 pieces of firewood so I'm essentially burning a Bush cork a month which is a lot so why is this stoves somewhat inefficient because people are going to probably be surprised at the amount of wood that I'm going through well there are more efficient ways to heat an off-grid home one of them is a rocket mass heater which I had planned originally for this cabin the very first cabin I started last spring for my friend I was actually planning to do a full heated clay bench rocket mass tile in that cabin which I may still do this year again if I get back to it this year if not I am planning to do that in at least one of the other outbuildings either the workshop likely the workshop and the sauna or something like that or or one of the other buildings so I probably shouldn't get all into that right now because I I need to show you the design I'm planning on using but check out the rocket mass heater or rocket stove on just google that if you want to know what that's about or just tune in later this year when I get around to that you'll see me build one up here at the Wilderness homestead I call it the cabin but I'm probably better off calling as a wilderness homestead because that's really what I'm doing here building the whole infrastructure to live here as a wilderness homestead not just building this cabin okay so back to the stove the stove is so that's one way to be more efficient use a rocket mass heater rocket stove and more efficient than this would be a an airtight stove with a with the glass and with more dapper control I'll show you what I mean careful stove is hot enough to burn you still or to make you uncomfortable are you doing okay so this stove as you see has a glass front as glass doors it's stove is cast and enamel coated it's made by Vermont castings and it's the encore model it's more decorative than efficient although it's big enough to heat probably 2,000 square foot home easily

if the woods in good condition of the woods dry it does have a fairly good sized firebox being horizontal rather than vertical but I can get three or four logs in that I can just place in this way it has these end irons in the front that hold logs from going out so from that perspective it's fine it it does hold enough firewood it does have a damper inside the back here just before it goes up the chimney instead it circles couple times inside and it burns more efficiently if burned some of the gases and some of that smoke some of the solids and the smoke and then that remaining goes up to chimney so it is more efficient so it's kind of rolling around and they're heating up the firebox instead of the chimney we're instead of setting the heat directly out now my wife and I bought this stove secondhand she found it on Kijiji four hundred and forty bucks so a great deal it was made in 1986 so these things do last a long time this damper here I don't know exactly 100 percent where it is but I'm pretty sure that's a fresh air return damper so in the back of the stove is a plate that if I remove that there's actually a duct that I could hook up to go directly outside if I put a hole in the wall ran it inside instead of this stove drawing air from under the door or from inside cabin and heating that up and setting up the chimney it would pull the fresh air in from directly outside and then cycle it without using up room air which is actually more efficient but it also creates a situation where you might not get enough air exchange in the building and we get to steel there and you want to avoid that now one of the things I don't particularly like about this stove is I'm used to having a wood stove that has dampers on the front and I like this spiral rot ones that you can turn on both doors or on a single door at one so I have no way of controlling how much air I'm feeding this thing unless I open the door or the handle broke off and this handles broken but I can do that that leaves a little space doors open maybe a half an inch so that gives it some air but what's unique about this stove again that's something I'm used to be used to having a fire bricks in the bottom you scoop it out this has a great inside this is how you clean it with the ash got a tray and that's tray so what happens when you open that there's a box in there so there it is fully lined so ashes aren't dropping on the ground if when I have that out we just drop into that box and I can clean that out but when I open that up and that damper the air rushes in here and then goes up the chimney

ready to fire start raging so that's the way I'm controlling this stove and like I said I don't think that's really proper but it doesn't work extremely well I just can't imagine they would design it that way so that you have to open that to pent it because no you have a little bit of a gap behind that pan so that I just can fall down behind the pan and forced me to have to reach in there and clean that out but it is extremely effective doing it that way so one of the reasons this stove is not as efficient as it could be is because of all those gaskets when you have a two doors like this that closed in the middle it's just like doors double doors entrance doors to a home they can't really seal because they're both operating be better if it was one door but what you have three all the spaces are all the moving parts inside in here on the door is this rope gasket now I don't know when and if that was ever changed by the previous owners but I haven't changed that so I really should pull the doors off and there's actually gaskets even inside in between the glass and the frame here I need to replace those or need to replace these gaskets there's a foam gasket here I need to replace that you're not a foam roll gasket and there's a insight and that damper there's a gasket as well so I really need to change all those to stop here from just free flow flowing into the stove when I want to dab it down at night so this here without that I wouldn't know what the temperature of the stove is or how its operating so I can tell by this thermometer whether I'm create have an efficient fire going or not so this surely should be in the burn zone I'm letting it die down right now isn't Cal your boat to head out but it should be in this burn zone and if it gets up to this area up here beyond 300 or 600 Fahrenheit you get into a temperature where you're at risk of creating a chimney fire because it creates so it builds up in there now when I'm down here what's happening is it's an inefficient burn and there's creosote building up inside because it's not burning off it's too much smoke going up that has particulates in it so it's starting to collect on that stovepipe so every day I want to have some fires that get up in this top range of the burn zone so that it burns out some of that creosote in the chimney the pipe really heats up and so does the top part here because the hot air collects up there you need to have this backstop here this is temporary I do plan on doing a clay one or you saw me bringing some copper in the last video or an upcoming video and that copper may go behind here had a really nice subscriber to the channel sent me that copper I gave it to me I went picked it up from him really really appreciate that so he thought I would use it for back here I still might do that but I so many other cool uses for it as well but you do need a barrier non-flammable barrier to stop this heat from heating up the wood and potentially starting a fire so that's it for this video I hope I answered your questions if not just leave a comment below and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible don't forget to tune in on Fridays to watch me continue with the cabin build finish the interior and get to my outdoor projects and my other cabins that I'm building around the property so look forward to seeing you up here on Friday take care of a great week [Music]