Fixing Stuff, EcoFan Edition

Followed by my handful of Netherlands pics.

We've had an EcoFan, the original two-blade model, on the top of our soapstone woodstove for a long time, I think maybe 8 or 9 years.

The EcoFan is a really cool woodstove fan that works by magic! Well, close enough. It has no cord. You just put it on the top of the hot stove, towards the back, and it uses the Seebeck effect to run a little motor that spins the fan blades.

The hotter the stove gets, the faster the blades spin. Magic!

It worked GREAT until last winter, when I began to notice it slowing down, and sometimes it wouldn't start unless I gave the blades a little tap. I had gotten used to being able to judge the temperature of the stove by how fast the fan was going, and I really missed being able to glance up and do that.

So I got on the internet and went hunting. I found Nathan's post at Fixya.com and tried his solution. I bought heat sink compound (silicone heat sink grease) from Radio Shack for $4.

I really should have taken pictures as I did this, but I was nervous of destroying it, and I didn't.

First I took the blades off the motor using a small hex key, just to get them out of the way and keep them from being damaged.

My fan has two hex-head screws that hold the top part to the base. When I unscrewed those and took the fan apart, I could faintly see where this grease had been.

I gently scrubbed it off with a green nylon kitchen scrubby, and as long as I had the whole thing apart, I cleaned all the metal parts except the motor and the Peltier junction.

My fan had the following layers:

A: top with the blades and motor
B: Peltier junction - this is the bit attached by 2 wires to the motor
C: two layers (squares) of white ?insulating material
D: base

I put the heat sink grease on the top and bottom of the Peltier junction. This sticks the top of the junction to the top of the fan. Then I stuck the first square of white insulation to the bottom of the junction and gently squished it around.

(I tried to reposition one of the white squares after it was greased and stuck on, and chipped the very corner off with my fingernail, so if you're doing this to your fan, be careful repositioning them. It works better to slide them to the edge than try to pry them up by one edge.)

Then I greased the bottom square and stuck it back to the bottom of the fan, then fitted the whole thing back together, screwed the screws back in, and put the blades back on.

And she works! Ha!

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Netherlands pictures

(I've put them up small, but you can click to embiggen.)

We went to the Artis (zoo, botanical garden, aquarium) on our first full day in Amsterdam. This was the coldest wettest day of our trip. The rest was warm for late October, and we even had sun!

Sign on a cage in the Artis in Amsterdam:


Penguin-feeding (and herons stealing their food) at the Artis:


From Amsterdam, we went to Rijnsburg and did a little sightseeing in Katwijk:


And we took a daytrip into Leiden:


From Rijnsburg we travelled to Dalfsen. Most of the Dutch windmills look like this:


Then if I turned 90 degrees and took a photo out the window, it looked like this:


And the typical side roads looked like this:


After Dalfsen, we went up into Frieslan and stayed in Lauwersoog:


On the way, we made a side trip to IJlst, where I found some "wildbreien" (yarnbombing)!


It was so beautiful and so green in IJlst:


And finally we had to drive back down through Harlingen to Amsterdam again:


On our last night in Amsterdam, we stayed in an attic hotel room - see the edge of the hook they use to lift furniture through the windows? A beautiful last view of the city before we flew home:

Stove Sparks and Other Stories

Last night my husband poked the burning osage orange wood and annoyed it.

It sparked for about ten minutes straight. It sounded like he was burning sparklers in there!

The sparks shot right out the narrow, half-closed slits of the door damper. Fortunately the stove sits on a concrete floor and they can't reach anything burnable.

Here's another:
(I also enjoy lightning, in case you were wondering.)

Hey, look! The Stargate, aka Soap Bubble Stole, has not been abandoned. I started knitting on it again, ummmmm, a couple of weeks ago.

I was getting nervous that I would run out of yarn before knitting the last couple of charts. I started looking around on Ravelry to find out the status of Elegant Yarn's Daphne and found not one, not two, but four yarns identical to the Daphne.

Three of them I'm pretty sure are identical. The fourth, Jojoland Harmony, is definitely identical.

I ordered it from The Yarn and Fiber Company on Monday and had two out of three balls (the third was back ordered) by Friday. Whew. Now I can knit and not wonder whether the yarn or the pattern will finish first.

Chimney Tales

The Stargate is still in Chart B, the lace ground bit, where every fourth row is a whole round of YO and a double decrease, quite fiddly in the fine yarn. It's slow knitting and it doesn't look much different from photo to photo.

So I was blanking yet again on any kind of a post topic.

And then! I finally got around to catching up on the blogs I read, and Antonia did a post about chimney sweeps (look at her gorgeous fireplace: I am so jealous), and I started to type a novel in her comments and realized, "Hey! I have a post topic!"

We heat our house with wood and now with the little gas log. When you burn wood, you need to keep the chimney clean.

The first time we started to think about this, we called the only chimney sweep around, and he came in and looked at our short, straight length of chimney.

Then he draped everything lovingly in tarpaulins, took the vent cap off the top on the roof, and swept it from the top down, and came indoors and carefully vacuumed the whole stove as clean as a dinner plate.

Amazing.

And then he said, "Not to shoot myself in the foot or anything, but you could easily clean a nice straight chimney like this yourself." Sweeps really are like Antonia's, even in the wilds of America.

(It is, too, wild here: I saw an owl fly across my driveway this afternoon when we walked down to get the mail.)

Of course, our chimney is just boring black metal, and our chimney pots are soot-blackened shiny galvanized metal, not very photogenic.

The stove itself is pretty, light bluish soapstone with fancy castings. Also in need of a wire-brushing and spray of new high-temperature stovepaint on the cast iron parts.

But!

Last winter the child learned that when the fire had burned down to a nice bed of coals, I would open the stove door and allow the toasting of marshmallows.

Mmmm, marshmallows.

The Burning Question

The burning question when we decided to buy the mini Franklin rather than the cottage stove, was "Will it be big enough?"

This morning I can say the answer is yes!

Last night the overnight low was 44 F. (7 C), so we let the stove burn all night long. When we turned out the lights, we discovered that you can't see the glass at all in the dark. It looks like a little open fireplace in midair.

The open living room/dining room area and the kitchen were all pleasantly warm this morning. There is nothing quite so nice as radiant heat. It's like the sun on your face.

It looks like tonight will be another mini-stove night, with lows in the 30's F and the first frost of the season predicted.

This little mess was my first attempt at knitting "Lilac Time" from a center start. I messed up where the start of the round should be, so the center diamonds didn't line up and got turned into zigzags.

If you view this picture at full size, you might also be able to see that I twisted all my center knit stitches the same direction. Instead of a line of sideways Vs, that made a line of left-leaning slashes down the middle.

In contrast, here is my second attempt, with left twists down one long side and right twists down the other. And I eventually figured out where to start so that the centers lined up.

I pinned out the end of the Stargate so the pattern would show. Right now I'm knitting a stretch that's a peculiar browny-purple color.

Not my favorite part of this ball, but exactly like the color you get on a soap bubble just before it pops. And since I don't like it, motivation to knit past it to the next section I like!

When I knit with this, some of the colors remind me of the Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test. I'm in shades from the second row, shading to the top row.
The little twists of thread are my pattern repeat markers, and I had to put a dime in there to show Daphne's light weight.

Yesterday I weighed the ball to see how much of this loveliness I had knit up. Out of a 50 gram ball, I had 45.1 grams left. Cool.

I've decided to wake up the blog and join Blogtoberfest with Bells and TinnieGirl this year. A post every day, for the month of October!

Can I do it? Well, I guess if I can't think of anything else, I can always keep weighing how much of this yarn I have left to knit!

A Sampler Post

Sort of like those candy boxes that have all different things in them.

In no particular order:
For Roxie, our mini soapstone stove with a coffee mug for scale. The curved metal skirt in the front is about 14-1/2 inches (37 cm) wide, and it's 17 inches (43 cm) tall.

No, I don't plan on leaving my mug in front of it, but I'll bet the soapstone top will work just as well as one of those electric mug-warmers.

The weather has warmed back up a bit, so I won't be able to try it as a mug warmer until it cools back off outside.

I saw a hummingbird on some of the New England asters, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, that I rescued from the bulldozers a couple of years back, but I was too slow to get her photo this time. We had a really dry year in 2007 and I lost a lot of the plants I moved. The survivors are thriving this year, which was much wetter.

Yesterday I was thrilled to see a volunteer plant blooming down by the neighbor's drainage trench. They always remind me of the magician's bouquet that he pulls out of his sleeve.

On the non-knitting front, the Vale of York Viking hoard is going to be on display at the Yorkshire Museum from 18 September to 1 November this year. I particularly love the silver-gilt cup. This is the hoard that was only discovered a couple of years ago.

On the knitting front, lace knitters, we can start the party today!

Susanna Lewis's long out-of-print book, Knitting Lace is being reprinted by Schoolhouse Press and is currently available for pre-orders!

If you were planning to sell your copy to pay for your retirement, I guess you're out of luck. But if you've been watching copies on eBay go for $100, now you can order your very own for $29.95. That's only $5 more than the original price back in 1992.

Now I can finally order my own and quit worrying that the library's will go missing.

One of my favorite things, a cone of . . . gray string?Very nice string. ColourMart cashmerino string, over 2100 yards of it. I'm not sure what it's going to become yet.

When I cut and pasted the Woywod chart, I discovered that the join makes a little three-petalled flower, so I am going to knit enough of a second repeat to make that show.
Our son kept saying, "What flower?" when I showed him this, so I dragged the photo into PhotoStudio and made free with the spray paint tool.
Now I only have about five more pattern rows before the flower is finished, so I must go knit!

Feels Like Fall

The weather is cooling off, and we finally have the new soapstone ministove completely installed. Is this thing cute as a button or what?

It took us almost a year to the day to get everything ready. We tore out the old furnace closet, scrapped the nasty old inefficient LP gas furnace, bought a cabinet & countertop to put it on, and came up with a heatproof pad for it to sit on. Then we had help installing the chimney and had to find someone to connect the gas.

This morning (44F, 7 C), manual in hand, I turned the little knobs on the side and look, flames and everything!

We still have to get through the yuck period of high-temperature paint-curing smells, but we only have to go through that once.

Anyway, I did promise knitting, so here's what I've been knitting.

In the back of The Knitted Lace Patterns of Christine Duchow Vol 3, there are several hand-drawn charts of patterns from the notebooks of Gertrud Woywod.

I started wondering what they looked like knitted up, and here is the result.

Not exactly Herbert Niebling, but interesting.

After a while, my brain adapted to /=YO, g=k2tog, r=knit, a=ssk, and rv=ktbl. I eventually figured out that "WM" (Wickel-maschen) was like what Mary Thomas calls "clustering tie stitch," where you wrap the thread around and around the base of the indicated stitches. A nupp would probably work, too.

But I got kind of tired of trying to see the cursive-written rs and so on, so I poked around until I found David Xenakis's Knitter's Symbols Fonts over at knittinguniverse.com.

A couple of hours of chart-translation later, I have a Burda-like chart I can read without taking off my glasses. I can see why some of the weirdness in this pattern happens. And I can cut and paste and see how it would look if I knitted more than one repeat.

So that's been my fun for the week! What's yours?

This is My Country

Although it's a lot less monolithic than some of the news media on either side might have you believe. (Overall state results at the top, county-by-county results at the bottom. Map source, the New York Times. It's interesting to move the little slider over on the left and see which counties did and didn't change.)

There has been more knitting, although it got a lot less lacy. It's going to end up being a woolly lap blanket, so the lack of laciness is fine. I am just finishing a couple of plain rounds and psyching myself up for my weird vision of squaring the circle. I have to decide about dyeing the last skein of this yarn. I'm pretty sure I don't want to leave it plain Dijon mustard, but haven't picked out a new color for it yet.

I meant to take this photo of the blueberry fields yesterday on our way to the polls, but I forgot to bring the camera. Fortunately today's weather is just as spookily beautiful as yesterday's, when it hit 71 degrees F (22 C)! In November!

After we voted, we went to pick up the countertop we ordered for the cabinet where the new gas soapstone stove will stand. (It's from Woodstock Soapstone Stoves, the mini cottage stove.) When we did, I bought a new birdfeeder.

When we moved here, we had the rare and strange good luck to live in a patch of land with no squirrels. For a bird watcher with a feeder, it was great. Naturally, this couldn't last, and about 8 years ago squirrels found and started to colonize our little spot. I guess there are finally enough acorns on the maturing young oak trees and enough maple seeds to sustain them.

What this means, of course, is that my old hand-me-down hopper feeder is now regularly occupied by a fox squirrel, Sciurus niger, happily stuffing its face with the black oil sunflower seeds I usually offer and gnawing the suet out of the suet feeder.

Although I don't believe it's possible to completely stop a determined squirrel from getting into a feeder^*, at least it should be entertaining to watch them attempting to figure this one out.

^*What else have they got to do? And anything that doesn't stop them just makes them smarter!

Dreaming Hearts

So Bells posted about Blue Lace, and asked if she was dreaming those hearts. I see them, too.

I wonder if I can work a round of hearts before I start to square the circle?

Not much knitting happened yesterday. Sunday I took advantage of the dry and sunny day to dig up my four o'clock roots and mow the grass for (I hope) the last time before snow, and my wrists and the palms of my hands are still feeling it enough to make knitting painful.

Today has turned into beautiful knitting weather: overcast, and alternating between rain and icy drizzle.

A perfect day to stay indoors, feed this pretty thing, and read and knit!

It's Here!

Besides our regular soapstone woodstove from the Woodstock Soapstone Company, we now have this:
That's a CD case on top of our new Mini Cottage Gas Stove. Yes, it really is that small! It's so cute.

Last winter we basically didn't use our old LP gas furnace at all. The soapstone stove, located at one end of our long narrow house, heated the entire house comfortably (with a little help from two fans). And when I say "comfortably", I mean lovely soaking radiant heat. ahhhhh

However, there are those days at the beginning and end of the heating season when the woodstove is just too much. When the temperature gets up into the 50s or maybe low 60s F during the day the chimney doesn't draw very well. Plus the soapstone stays hot as the day heats up, and it ends up too hot.

This little stove is going to replace the furnace. Isn't that weird? I think it's weird and I'm the one doing it!

It will use less gas and heat us more comfortably. As soon as we do all the work of getting it installed.

I did some finagling and printed most of the Siebmacher book out. I have had the experience of trying to open a .PDF file and getting the dreaded "The file is damaged and could not be repaired message", and I almost always prefer a physical paper book to an electronic version.

There are wonderful things in this book. Besides the dramatic charts of gryphons and unicorns, there are lots of little motifs that would look great on a mitten or scarf.

Unlike Lord Peter Whimsey, I could never afford an original copy of this book. I can't even justify buying some of the modern out-of-print knitting books. It's hard to put into words what I feel when I have this in my hands in book form. I think about how the printing press was the internet of its time. Instead of copying books one at a time, many books could be printed. Instead of being the property of royalty, books and literacy could be enjoyed by many. And now instead of sitting on a library reference shelf, I can hold the contents of this book in my hands.


I slowly figured out that the Roman numerals at the top of each chart equal the height of the chart. And I am guessing (completely guessing) that the "Schniden" [sic] at the top of the charts towards the back might be modern "Schneiden", or cutwork. It looks like reticella.

And now, since it's a cool and rainy day instead of a baking-hot day, I'm going to go and knit!

Oh, Yeah! Double-Knitted Mitten Weather!

Not much snow here, but it's cold as bejabbers. The temperature has been sitting at 12 degrees F (about -11 C) since 5 am, with a windchill of around -4 F (-20 C).

Definitely weather where I can wear my double-knitted snowflake mittens and not feel like they're overkill.

We're heating the house with osage orange wood, Maclura pomifera, today. Shortly after we put in the soapstone woodstove, I went online and Googled for the BTU values of various woods. Osage orange is right up at the top.

Shortly after that, my husband ended up on a crew clearing out osage orange tres on post at Fort Custer, and he brought a couple of trailer loads home.

It's supposed to be the densest wood in North America, and I can tell you that a dry piece of osage orange is a lot heavier than any other piece of firewood the same size I lift on a given day, including oak or black locust.

It burns hot! Usually we burn one smallish piece of osage orange in the stove with other woods. Mmmmm, radiant heat.

This is what we're getting today, tiny little flakes in bands of lake-effect snow. The radar picture is from up in Grand Rapids. (The snow doesn't really end in a neat circle: that's just the limit of the radar's range.)

When I go outside today, it'll be double-knitted mittens all the way! Yeah!

Singing

I heard a weird noise just now, and walking around to suss it out, found that the cast-iron steam kettle on top of the soapstone woodstove was singing.

The kettle was singing.

How often have I read that? And now I've heard it.

Christmas music on the CD player: Butch Thompson's Yulestride, one of my all-time Christmas favorites, alternating with things like Bethlehem after Dark, Anonymous 4's On Yoolis Night, Ethan James' Ancient Music of Christmas (primarily hurdy-gurdy and definitely not for everyone), Christmas with Sonos Handbell Ensemble, or The Jethro Tull Christmas Album.

What? You didn't know there was a Jethro Tull Christmas album?

It's an education, blogreading, innit?


Now [says to self, firmly] must go get ready for Christmas!

Good Socks for the Weather!

The blue socks are done and washed just in time for snow!

I've been asked more than once, "Do you really like wearing such thick socks?" Yes, I love it! I even wear them in the summer a lot of the time, when I wear shoes at all.

I completely ran out of the "Denim Twist" color, but I am happy with the stripey transition to the "Blue Mist" yarn. In fact, close up, the "Blue Mist" is a blend of blue with fibers of other colors. It's so pretty to knit that I've already started the toe of yet another pair of socks.


We did get some snow, but we got ice first. All this white stuff is on top of a layer of ice. The trees are creaking and clicking in the wind. I felt lucky that we didn't lose power.

When the electricity goes out, we still have heat -- the soapstone woodstove heats the whole house. What we lose is water, since the well pump runs on electricity. I don't mind burning tealights or pulling out the pierzyna, but I really miss flushing the toilet.

Here is our friend Mr. Stumpy in the snow. You can see that the snow is not very deep. Locally, we mostly got ice and just a little snow. But it was icy enough that all the schools were closed, so I have had a fun day of watching old cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Three Stooges cartoons, and Tweety and Sylvester from the early 60's) and making cocoa for a chilled kid.

Bitten by the Dishcloth Bug

After many years of tatting, I find the speed of knitting refreshing. When people see me tatting in public, they say things like, "You could make a lot of money making those," not realizing that at top speed, I could probably net about 17 cents a day. (We won't talk about people who say, "You could buy that at Wal-Mart for $1.50 and say yourself the trouble.")

Knitting a dishcloth is particularly fast and gratifying, never mind the price at Wal-Mart. And I am using up a couple more balls of crochet cotton from my stash into the bargain.

This cloth is made of blue and yellow crochet cotton and yellow linen. I started putting in concentric diamonds of stockinette because I like to play with patterns. First I learn a pattern, then I play around with it. And the diamonds keep me awake, of course!

My brother is a graduate of the University of Michigan, so I will probably give this cloth to him. (I graduated from Michigan State University, myself.)

I don't know whether it will block out square or not. Another one I made with linen and a cotton-linen blend, with a wide stockinette diamond, was very diamond-shaped as I was knitting it, but blocked almost perfectly square. So I'll have to finish the point before I find out.

It is still raining today. Great knitting weather, with a forecast high of the mid-40's. I do wish I had mowed the grass a second time. With the rain, it looks like it will be knee high in some spots before we get dry weather again next week. But I would rather have rain than drought.

And the chilly damp air gives me a good excuse to keep a little fire going in the soapstone stove, the size I call a "day fire". A day fire keeps the chill off and forces me to get up every so often to check and see if I need to add another stick of wood.

My husband makes "night fires". A night fire is a stove fully loaded with wood and damped down, so we get slow heat all night, and have a nice bed of coals in the morning to rake up.

Woodstock Soapstone Stoves is having a drawing!

Note: I have no association with Woodstock Soapstone Stoves other than having one of their stoves in my house, which (the stove, but the house, too) is bought and paid for. I get no compensation or other consideration for mentioning them. I just think they are ultima cool. (Or should that be hot?)

Anyway, I was recommending them to some friends, and as I went through their website, I found they are having a drawing for one of their new mini-stoves. Their gas stove page is here: Gas stove link
and the drawing page is here: Drawing

The fine print says

"* Drawing Date will be December 17th, 2005:
One week before Christmas!!!

One registration per person (duplicate registrations will be cause for disqualification). To register, you must be 21 years old, and a resident of the United States. Winner will be responsible for shipping charges, installation, and direct-vent pipe required for installation. You can re-register if your information changes. Void where prohibited or unlawful."

Cold November, perfect for knitting!

If you have ever paged through the Mother Earth News and seen the ads for Woodstock Soapstone stoves, and wondered if they were really as good as they say, they are!

We've had one for, hm, four years, I think, and learned the lost art of starting a fire in a stone-cold stove. We put it in the end of our long, narrow house, thinking we'd use it once in a while to warm up our front room, which used to be so cold we would close it off in the winter. Ha! Instead we open up the front room and literally heat the whole small house, including the geodesic-dome-room we added. We still use our furnace in the spring and fall, when it's not quite cold enough to use the stove without the heat blasting us out of the house, but is too chilly for no heat at all.

I love this stove. In the winter, I used to hate washing my long hair and shivering as the overhead blower blasted me with "warm" air. Now I just go and sit out in the front room by the soapstone stove. In the morning I go out there and stand on the warm concrete in my bare feet. Luxury is a warm floor in the winter! And heat that doesn't go off when the power goes out.

These days Woodstock even sells these tiny gas soapstone stoves about the size of a CRT monitor. If I lived in the city and not in SouthWest Outer Nowhere, I'd want one. Because let's face it, love it though I do, a woodstove is messy. Wood sheds bits of bark or sand, and we have to deal with wood ashes. Soapstone plus gas, what an idea.

And here is my naughty Ajax, who opened the closed trash can and pulled out everything while I was taking John to school.


PS: My husband says I cannot put up a picture of the dog after talking about the woodstove! I tried to take a picture of the stove, and the camera insists it is rusty-looking. After all my hard work with the wire brush -- it is not! But I am not playing with the camera any more right now.