Ncd!

[deeaa]

Just got me a new chainsaw, a Husqvarna, proper Swedish quality...oh wait, it's not a guitar :thwap...but it makes a nice noise anyhow :saw::saw::saw:

http://www.husqvarna.com/dimage.axd/productDetail/h110-0198/435-76dd1055.png

[progrmr]

haha! Nice!

What's the specs on that baby?? I've got a 14", but it's not Husqvarna. It'll handle medium sized problems but that's about it. And you have to manually adjust the chain tension - when it gets loose it can pop right off on ya.

[Eric]

Wow, those are top of the line. Nice pull!

When I was growing up, my family would go up to my grandmother's house and my dad would cut down dead trees and cut them up, then my mom, sister and I would split the logs and load them on a trailer. We used that wood to heat our house during the winter with a wood stove in our family room. I'd say we would get like 1-2 full cords per year.

I remember my dad always lusted after Stihl, Johnsered, and (particularly) Husqvarna chainsaws, but he had to make due with a Craftsman for all of those years.

Anyway, HNCD!

[sunvalleylaw]

Yep, I used to work in the woods too, at my old ski area where I worked as a kid for a couple weeks each year to earn a season's pass. The big Stihls and Husqvarnas were my favorites. The Husqys were just so cool cause they were different. Congrats!

[Katastrophe]

Congrats! Husqvarna makes a quality product.

And, chainsaws are good for screamin' solos. No YouTube icon, here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfhkKAfxmk&feature=related

[Tig]

I did some research for a new chainsaw last year, Husqvarna and Stihl were the tops.
As a kid, I grew up riding dirt bikes, and Husqvarna was the king of off road power in the 70's. (I rode Yamaha and Honda)

Steve McQueen liked Husky's for his off road fun and racing.
http://theselvedgeyard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/steve-mcqueen-si-bw.jpg?w=600&h=751

[marnold]

I think I know which song you should learn next:

A52p9jc-gOo

[deeaa]

I've no idea of specs in detail...it's a mid-price saw, not a pro one but not a cheaper hobby saw either. I own only around 2 hectares of forest so I only need to cut down half a dozen trees a year maybe, for firewood. I've felled some 20" trees with an electric chainsaw even :-) it don't matter how big the tree, it just takes more time :-) but most trees round here get hardly up to 17" or so even in 200 or so years, most are like 12-13" when they're ripe for felling.

I had a small Stihl also at my disposal for years, old as ever and hard to start cold, but always worked fine.

[Duffy]

Looks almost like my new Husky 455 Rancher - a really decent chain saw.

Congratulations. How many cords do you plan to use this Winter? I used about 8 full cords last Winter and expect to use aboutthe same this year.

Even though I buy wood, I always like to find sources of free, good wood. Around here we burn totally Northern Hardwood, almost exclusively oak. We didn't use a drop of fuel oil last Winter. Bought a new, big, woodstove and it paid for itself in its first Winter. We got a tax credit for buying an efficient one that amounted to a third of the price of buying and installing it.

We get it so hot in here sometimes we open the door and let in some fresh Winter air.

Good luck with it. You should get a lot of use out of that one.

[deeaa]

I had to go find out about the cord as measure, never heard of it...we go by cubic metre here. I suppose we burn a little under 5 cubic metres, whereas a cord seems to be 3,6m2, about, so a little under 1,5 cords at home. I guess nearly the same amount at the cottage also in the summer, for sauna and the hot batch, and also in the springtime and fall when you need to warm the place up. I just added a new stove there this summer, so now there's three plus sauna plus the bathtub stove...and of course there's also an open fireplace plus a big grill that burns wood as well. So yeah, it might be more than I think.

Let's say it has to be under 3 cords altogether anyway. I don't even make my own wood entirely (for the townhouse), but instead order in a cord or so semi-ready made, something like 4-foot split logs I just need to saw into size to fit the stoves...it's such a mess in the city area to do that stuff all the way.

[Duffy]

I don't know if this will help you out, but I think it will. Here a full cord of firewood is 4 feet wide, by 4 feet high, by 8 feet long, normally split and tightly stacked. A full cord of wood is 128 cubic feet for one cord. A cubic meter of wood must be around 30 cubic feet or so. A so called "fireplace cord" is 4 feet high, by 4 feet long, and whatever width or depth that the wood is cut for your fireplace or woodstove. Normally wood sellers rip people off when selling so called "fireplace cords", mostly to the uninformed, ambience fireplace burners - not people who use wood as their primary source of heat.

As hard as you described last Winter I can't imagine that you only burned less than 3 cords in all of those burners. Are you using wood exclusively or do you have gas or electric as your main or supplementary heating system at either place? Even in a condo unit here in places like Colorado I would expect to burn around four or five cords if used as the sole source of heat.

In places like Northern New York State or Minnesota, where it frequently gets lower than -20 F, you would burn a lot more than ten cords in a long hard winter if you owned a house of good size, or a poorly insulated one. One of my nieces and her family live in Hadley, NY, and burn a lot more wood in their two woodstoves than I do, and they also burn fuel oil in a big furnace daily.

One cord of high quality oak is about 150 dollars. You can order a dump truck load of long logs, uncut or split for about 900 dollars and this is about 8 cords. When you buy by the truckload it is only an approximation and I don't know how many cords you would actually get or how much of it would be big time knots and other hard to cut or split pieces.

Wood is still a major deal around here where fuel oil is the main heating source. One 300 gallon tank of fuel oil is close to 1000 dollars and I would probably go thru close to one tank before it even started to really get cold, around January first. So you can imagine how expensive fuel oil is. I can't figure out how these people around me can afford it. The median income in this immediate area is far from high, and closer to the subsistence level. Almost no landlords will allow the burning of wood. Our house is owned outright so we don't have to deal with a landlord. When you rent here you have way fewer property rights than the landlord. Property rights, the rights of a landowner, tend to be very powerful legal rights in this country; unless you have a title to your property that contains many "covenants" that restrict what you can do and not do with and on your property. Some title restrictions placed on landowners prohibit the building of fences, parking a boat or recreational vehicle on your property, having a dog house, parking your car outside your garage overnight, and all sorts of highly restrictive provisions. These are legal prohibitions and can be enforced at your neighbors complaint ,without restraint, in most cases. Our property has a deed and no covenants in the title. It is also a "homestead"; a type of landholding designation sometimes applicable in this state - in our case because our very large property was at on time a farm. This designation also gives you a significant tax break.

I imagine land ownership in Finland is based upon a quite different system of land law. Some places here prohibit the burning of woodstoves and fireplaces.

[deeaa]

Normally wood sellers rip people off when selling so called "fireplace cords", mostly to the uninformed, ambience fireplace burners - not people who use wood as their primary source of heat.

Well here they tend to rip people off by selling either stacked log cubes, which means they're as full of wood as possible, or 'thrown in' cubes whereby you get just a pile of wood in a cubic metre, meaning there's about half actually. It's cheaper that way but not by half.

Amazing that here, too, wood costs pretty much exactly 150 dollars a cord (I calculated it just now with conversions...high quality birch; we have no oak growing here) but that's when it still needs to be cut to stove length as you desire.


As hard as you described last Winter I can't imagine that you only burned less than 3 cords in all of those burners. Are you using wood exclusively or do you have gas or electric as your main or supplementary heating system at either place? Even in a condo unit here in places like Colorado I would expect to burn around four or five cords if used as the sole source of heat.


Yes we have electricity as well. Actually in the basement the three main rooms, i.e. my studio/rec room as well as the laundry room and the washroom/sauna always have floor heating on all year round. We just turn it down a little during summer. That alone is sufficient to keep the temp in the house above freezing, I suppose, as the heat rises to the other 2 floors. But usually we burn 5-6 smallish logs in 2 stoves until December or so only, and it's quite enough, especially since we have the A/C unit helping a little; that we keep on heating setting till it's around -12 or so outside. The walls have like 2 feet of insulation and triple windows etc.

Three of the old tile-covered and metal-covered huge fireplaces have been already in the 60's converted into electric stoves...they have three 1.3Kw heating elements in each, and you can turn each on one by one. They only heat up at night, when electricity is cheaper, and radiate it off in daytime.

Our wood bills will always be much smaller than electricity bills; burning wood does help a lot, in that we only need the big electric stoves downstairs for maybe 3 months a year, and never on full either. Upstairs there are several smaller electric, heat-retaining heaters as well, though. But we could easily heat without wood as well, it's just a nice plus and I think it is a little bit cheaper than electricity.


In places like Northern New York State or Minnesota, where it frequently gets lower than -20 F, you would burn a lot more than ten cords in a long hard winter if you owned a house of good size, or a poorly insulated one. One of my nieces and her family live in Hadley, NY, and burn a lot more wood in their two woodstoves than I do, and they also burn fuel oil in a big furnace daily.


Well, I can't really burn that much in the first place, since the heavy stoves are built to be heat-retaining very efficiently, with the exhaust gases circulating inside the stove's thick limestone walls etc. Once I get the limestone one warmed up, I can only burn one set of wood in it per day, it stays hot with just that. If I burn more, it just goes to waste as the stone cannot retain more warmth and it just goes up the chimney.

In the cottage it's the other way round; when it's cold, say under -5C, it gets hard to keep the smaller fireplaces warm, as you'd need to burn too much wood in them, and then you run the risk of literally melting the iron whatchamacallit grid there, and erode the stove. That's why we don't usually go there much at all between September and April.


Wood is still a major deal around here where fuel oil is the main heating source. One 300 gallon tank of fuel oil is close to 1000 dollars and I would probably go thru close to one tank before it even started to really get cold, around January first. So you can imagine how expensive fuel oil is.

LOL you guys have it cheap! 300 gallons of fuel oil costs roughly 1900 dollars here :-)

It's hard to say about the income issues, as things cost so differently in every place. We for instance have loads of taxes and things like fuel and cars cost a fortune.

One way to approximate things is the car index: a good quality family size car such as a Volvo V70 or such, costs 1.5 times the average annual net income of a citizen. I for instance could just barely buy a V70 if I could use all my gross yearly salary with no taxes or living expenses.

But, take off taxes, and for instance my yearly electricity bill alone is in dollars ~3300, so you can imagine there's no way I could ever afford a nice car like a Volvo with my salary. Our running costs, again in dollars, are also just about that 3300 a month, living in our own home with no mortgage, but that also includes fuel for the car and food etc. mostly...everything but the occasional visit to the restaurant. Last year I made...um, about 47.000 net income, teaching a touch over a 1100 hours in a year (22,7 a week in the winter). This year I'll only work a touch over 900 hours, so my income will drop by a couple of thousand. But I can't imagine ever working much more than that, it'd mean constant 5-day weeks for easily 9 months a year if I did, and I just can't live like that. Don't want to work all my lilife, have to have some little room to live as well. I'd much prefer a 4-day week and a few thousand less a year, even.

My wife's salary is even less than mine, as she works in the university with her PhD now, so I think we must make around 80K a year altogether. Which would just be enough for a nice mid-class Mercedes...so if we saved every fourth dollar we make, in 4 years we could buy a nice new car :-)


I imagine land ownership in Finland is based upon a quite different system of land law. Some places here prohibit the burning of woodstoves and fireplaces.


About the zoning etc, I suppose there must be many differences. But certain things surely must be the same. One is that all fireplaces must be inspected yearly for instance. And when you build a house, it *must* have a fireplace.

One weird thing is, in the city area, despite I own my property, I have to ask for city permission to fell larger trees on my yard.
Sometimes they don't give a permission...but I've felled 'em anyway. Can't imagine them checking again, and if they do, I'll just say a storm did it.

[otaypanky]

I luvs me a good saw. :) I got a Stihl 031 back around '71 and only decided to get a new saw about 3 years ago. It got a fair amount of use over all of those years and even without being fanatical about it, it started every time. The key to a good saw and a safe saw is a properly sharpened and maintained chain.
I got another Stihl but it didn't last but a few years, my fault. While clearing some woods to erect a pole barn I stupidly set it on the fender of my buddy's bulldozer. When I went to get my saw for the next cut I found it pushed down in the dirt with a big tread mark running across it. I replaced the bar and it still ran, but the case was cracked and I eventually had to trash it.
When my father in law died his wife gave me his Stihl Farm Boss, great saw ~