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Yeah, I'd love to go ice fishing, but it takes so dang long to chop a hole big enough to put the boat in.....
Just park your truck out in the middle of a river and chop a small hole.
I have a number of friends who chop holes in the ice so they can bail water for their homes.
One of my friends, makes a point each winter of never putting on shoes [unless she has to go to work, she is a lawyer and is required to wear shoes in the office and/or courthouse], every day she has to chop a fresh hole in the ice where she bails water for her home [drinking, cooking, cleaning, livestock and bathing]. She says that she wants to toughen her feet.
I bet the next popular thing to have in Texas will be a wood burning fireplace. It's the easiest thing to add to any existing home and cheap to run.
It may be 'easy' but it should involve some serious consideration.
The 'Right Worshipful Grand Master' and Brother Ben Franklin was very wise when he invented the potbelly stove with stove-pipes, to be placed in the center of a room. Yet we still see a lot of masonry fireplaces with many tones of stone and concrete, built in a manner where most of the thermal-mass resides outside of the house. The thermal-mass heats up and radiates that heat outside.
A small portion of the heat goes to heating the interior of such a house. Unlike a woodstove located in the exact dead center of a house.
Where I live there are house fires every year. I enjoy reading the Fire Marshalls' reports on them. Builders like resting wooden framing directly on the heated stonework. As the masonry gets hot, it heats the wood framing of the house. Eventually you know that such a house is going to burn down.
Never put combustible materials in direct contact with the heated components of a fireplace.
People continue this practice, every year.
I have two woodstoves, one is a cookstove, and the other heats water which in turn heats our floors. Both of our woodstoves are located on the center-line of our house [20 feet from the nearest exterior wall].
Internet here goes out a few days into a power outage, usually the cableTV drops first, then eventually the local cell towers start to go offline as they lose their backup power (mostly battery, some have onsite generators but not piped-in natural gas so they will run out).
Right now I'm on Starlink low-latency satellite, but even that is susceptible to regional power outages as the ground stations are relatively close by, for example New England is served out of a data center in Maine. On the plus side, these datacenters tend to be well-supplied with backup power and huge tanks of diesel.
Both my primary (automatic) and backup (portable) generators supply 220VAC, sized to run the well pump.
With many wells, it is possible to get water via a smaller pump or even a manual pump, but you won't get the usual pressure that way.
Back when power was out for days I slowly saw all the neighborhood WiFi signals drop....
For several days I was the only one with Internet only because my Internet is DSL and never went down
It may be 'easy' but it should involve some serious consideration.
The 'Right Worshipful Grand Master' and Brother Ben Franklin was very wise when he invented the potbelly stove with stove-pipes, to be placed in the center of a room. Yet we still see a lot of masonry fireplaces with many tones of stone and concrete, built in a manner where most of the thermal-mass resides outside of the house. The thermal-mass heats up and radiates that heat outside.
A small portion of the heat goes to heating the interior of such a house. Unlike a woodstove located in the exact dead center of a house.
Where I live there are house fires every year. I enjoy reading the Fire Marshalls' reports on them. Builders like resting wooden framing directly on the heated stonework. As the masonry gets hot, it heats the wood framing of the house. Eventually you know that such a house is going to burn down.
Never put combustible materials in direct contact with the heated components of a fireplace.
People continue this practice, every year.
I have two woodstoves, one is a cookstove, and the other heats water which in turn heats our floors. Both of our woodstoves are located on the center-line of our house [20 feet from the nearest exterior wall].
I made a vertical barrel stove for my house in Vermont. The ceiling thimble was one I made out of sheet metal, the attic pipe was the asbestos filled stainless steel popular at the time, and the roof thimble was similarly metal. My rule for any nearby combustible surface was that I had to be able to rest my hand on it comfortably while the stove was at full blast.
I did have a chimney fire once, but it was a non-event because of my precautions. After that, I bought a sweep brush and had no further problems - other than heating the house to above 90 degrees on sub-zero days and having to open the doors to cool it. (The draft on the coldest days can be extraordinary)
A regular fireplace is about 12% efficient, IIRC. Nice for atmosphere, not great otherwise unless you like the exercise of cutting wood.
I bet the next popular thing to have in Texas will be a wood burning fireplace. It's the easiest thing to add to any existing home and cheap to run.
Oil is easier to find in Texas than wood... especially west Texas.
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