We have been going through our wood supply at what seems like an alarming rate with nearly freezing temperatures every night. I’m trying to keep the house comfortable and also save on the heating bills. I found a guy locally who delivers firewood and bought 5 cubic metres/ one truck load which was delivered on Monday night. It looks like pretty good stuff, dry enough to burn already and with some big chunks that are good for overnight burns. It should be enough to make up any shortfall this winter and for all of next winter as well. At least I don’t have to worry about running out for a long time.
I finished stacking up my big pile of wood, I have about 2.5 cubic metres stacked up in the shed with all of the bigger chunks split down to a more manageable size. I probably have about 1.5 metres of leftover wood that has been drying for a year or two, but at the rate we are burning it will probably only last till the middle of June. Winter starts June 1 here so I think we may use all of the new stuff in the shed before it’s over. I would like to keep the big stack outside which is about 3.5 cubic metres for next winter if possible. This will be the first winter that we have had the wood heater right at the beginning and it’s already making a big difference with our heating bill. Last year at this time our bill was $277 for April/May and this year it was $88. For May/June it was $417, now it looks like it will be closer to $80. The backup battery is also helping a lot as we are using almost no peak priced electricity at all. With the combination of using the wood heater and the battery together it will be a huge difference from last winter.
The new battery and inverter seem to be going well apart from a few minor issues. They discovered that the inverter did not have the correct code for connecting to the network here in Tasmania which is required to make sure the voltage and voltage frequency are compatible. It’s different to the requirements on the mainland as we have a separate electricity grid on the island. They updated that and I had to reboot the inverter, then the battery would not charge, so I had to reboot again, and finally everything went back to normal, no more “frequency derating” messages Hopefully that’s the last of the issues, although this is a fairly new product and they keep making little updates.
