Warm and cool shops

[robinson46176]

I finished "insulating" my shop a couple weekends ago with 3/4" thick styrofoam boards. One side has a foil coating on it. I don't know how much it is going to help, but hopefully it is better than nothing. And the shop is mostly in the shade all day. But even the shade is hot and humid in the summers here.

Someone was lecturing me years ago that the stuff I was using in a shop was no good because it was only an R factor of 1. My response was that it was a thousand times better than an R factor of 0...

I really love that FBBF (foil, bubble, bubble foil) roll material. It is not bad as an insulator especially as a radiant reflector but it is so easy to work with and install that you don't mind the tiny effort to use it in hard to deal with locations. One of Diana's brothers has a shop in about half of a pole barn that is maybe 50'X30'. The shop part is completely insulated with the FBBF and a mid-sized Fisher stove burning a low fire keeps it comfortable in pretty cold weather.
Side note: many of you guys would kill for his firewood for project wood. Before he retired he drove semi for a lumber yard just up the road from his house. They did a huge amount of specialty pallet work. He gets a lot of free stuff from them. Most of what he burns in his stove is clear white oak about 4" x 7" x about 14" long. I am constantly drooling over the stuff he hauls home.


.


.

[heathicus]

And I've always heard that white oak doesn't make good firewood because it pops so much. Maybe that's only a concern with an open fireplace? But as much as I love a fireplace, I hate good hardwood going to firewood.

[robinson46176]

And I've always heard that white oak doesn't make good firewood because it pops so much. Maybe that's only a concern with an open fireplace? But as much as I love a fireplace, I hate good hardwood going to firewood.

All of the men (total of 8) but one in Diana's family has cut firewood for many years including her dad as number 9. I was the only one with a woods of my own to cut from. The one big difference in our cutting was that all of the rest always wanted to go out in the woods and cut the best tree they could find and cut the trunk up as firewood and walk away from the tops and stumps. They were always looking for different wood lots to cut in and paying for the privilege.
I was doing planned cutting in my own 20 acres of woods for over 40 years. A lot of it was coppice wood with multiple sprouts growing up from old stumps where someone had made a pulp wood sale some years before we got most of that property. I spent years doing selective cutting, many times reducing six 3" to 4" sprouts down to the best two then later cutting one more leaving the best one standing. I also cut a lot of scrub stuff and used most of the tops as well. When I would make a (mostly black walnut) sale I would cut and use most of the tops.
Today I have a woods full of good harvest-able logs many of which will be paying for some of my retirement hobby activities and many will be going into my own lumber stash. Today many of those 3" to 4" coppice sprouts are tall straight 20" to 22" trees.
Had I followed their advice back then to just go in and cut the best logs for firewood, today I would have pretty much nothing worth having... 20 Acres of scrub...
I also scrounged a lot of wood including tons of hickory scrap and tons of misc. scrap from a local high production, low cost, kitchen cabinet factory. I also used tons of sawmill slab wood that I was buying from an Amish mill operator I know who was selling it for about $15 a ton. Much of the salvage wood was cut up with a power handsaw (aka Skilsaw) instead of a chainsaw. For a number of years I was burning slab wood from my own mill. I also had "other sources" of fuel which allowed me to not have to over-cut my woods.


.