Road Trip

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I am back from my most recent roadtrip. I loaded up the Tesla and started letting the hands-off Full Self Drive (FSD) supervised take me to points North. First stopping in a campground in Tennesee and up to Pittsburgh for the CIDM Convex Conference (which was the best conference in years). There was a celebration of the 20 years of DITA XML. I was an earlier adopter. My presentation went well and I semi-stealth launched wisdomino. I demo'd some extra cool software we developed and will be selling in weeks to come. It's truely game changing. Of course, there will be much more than that to come. After that it was on to Franklin, PA. to meet with some colleagues in the mining division and onto the farm stopping in Olean NY for the night. I am pretty sure it was the first time I had driven across the entire Allegany National Forest. I ended up driving through the very dark forest expanse during a night time thunderstorm. Although I normally trust the Tesla FSD on the Interstat...
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http://www.woodmaster.com/

I am looking at better ways to heat our house. I have some initial ideas of building a large chimney that will have a fireplace and a flue for the coal stove. The coal stove will be in the basement and the fireplace will be in the living room. Bonnie brought me some excellent information on designing and building a chimnney and fireplace from the architect library where she works. So far that information is great.

Unlike many contemporaries, we will be putting the chimney structure inside the heated space of the home. Although you lose usable square footage, you gain a great deal of thermal mass. That means the house will be secondarily heated by the heat slowly given off from the masonry after the fire cools in the early morning hours.

A lot of chimney and fireplace design information is reverse-engineered information. Successful fireplace systems are measured and then those dimensions are recommended. I am looking forward to this project. I like masonry and building with stone so this looks like a lot of fun.

http://www.ovencrafters.com/

I am trying to figure out how I can incorpoarte the brick oven and the incinerator into the same project. It probably won't happen though. I am planning on building a combination incinerator and brickoven. The brickoven will be based on the designs offered by ovencrafters. The incinerator will be around the back of the oven with a separate flue. All masonry construction will be used or course.

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