Wednesday, April 22nd 2020
Day Thirty-Seven, Earth Day:
I got up at 5, made a Cuppa Joe, and posted my audio prologue for A New Frontier on the site. Today will be a patio mechanical project day. I need a break from the inside of the house.
Erin and I did our 2 1/2 mile walk…
When we got home Erin started sorting Photos, which can be a daunting task, it took hours.
I started to retro-fit of our pellet stove on the patio. I didn’t intend it to be an Earth-Day project, but it is actually. We bought this stove a couple of years ago, it burns wood pellets. It’s fourteen inches across and made of steel, the round kettle is very efficient using wood pellets, but it burns hot and we sometimes worry about it’s safety. We are not supposed to have any fire pits where we live, but because this one puts off very little smoke we figured it would be okay. We worried about it burning the umbrella that it sits under, so basically we put a piece of wood on top of it and started using it as a table.
Erin has wanted one of those flame pits that you see on patios outside of pubs and restaurants that has flames magically coming out of rocks or glass beads. When I started looking at them online I realized that most of then were too big for the space we had, or just too frilly for our tastes. The other thing is that they are expensive, they ranged from about three-hundred to over a thousand dollars. The three hundred dollars one were ugly.
So I got the Idea to Retro-fit the pellet stove to propane gas. I ordered all of the components on Amazon. I started with a burner ring that goes where the pellets lay, a regulator with stainless hose, all of the fittings to connect the burner to the regulator, drilled and cut on the stove , and built a wooden box to house the regulator and propane bottle. I put it all together and topped it off with lava rock to cover the burner. Amazingly it worked!
We had taco’s for dinner and watched two episodes of The Ranch on Netflix.
Then Erin knitted and I watched an old war movie on YouTube.
Time for bed…