Half-way home? Pile status?

[Sting]

I got it

Had to click on custom and fill in the start and stop date

yeah maybe its a "cheesy" thing!

but I found joy

 

[Nofossil]

Howdy all. I've been reading the site for a few weeks absorbing the collected wisdom. The degree day calculation caught my eye as a good way to partially judge the raw amount of heating that needs to be planned for.

According to Wunderground the last year here in Tok Alaska had right around 15,000 degree days. I'm going to need a really big boiler aren't I?

I'm just buying a log cabin here, with the plan to put in a heated garage with a wood boiler soon.

Also.. if you go to the custom tab, you can enter any date range you want up to a year long and get a total of the degree days if you're looking for a quick and dirty number that you won't be correlating with actual wood burned on a given day.

Welcome to the forum and to the boiler room, Jason. Here in Vermont, we had just over 6000 degree days during the period that I consider to be the heating season. My wood consumption was about 1600 degree days per cord, or about 5/8 cord per 1000 degree days. I use a boiler that's rated for 80,000 BTU per hour and it actually delivers more like 60,000 BTU/hr. My peak heat load is about half that.

At 15,000 degree days with my house, I would need a boiler of about 200,000 BTU/hr and I'd burn about 11 cords of wood. Of course, not all houses are created equal. There are some people around here with half the hat load that I have, and some with twice,

 

[wdc1160]

Jason the great thing about heating degree days is it allows you to do awesome on the spot calculations about wood consumption and boiler sizing. But check to see if HDD will be accurate up there. I have never seen a demand for 15k HDD's, but I thought one of the weaknesses of HDD calcuations is if you had extreme cold. I would think 15K HDD may be considered extreme.

They better have awesome hunting and fishing up there for 15k HDD.

GL Bill

 

[Jason_in_AK]

They better have awesome hunting and fishing up there for 15k HDD.

Oh, we definitely do! It's apparently been a really mild winter so far... it's stayed around 20 below most of the time, and only gotten down to -45 for a few days.

I'll be back bugging you guys for ideas when I get to the point where I'm actually ready to start designing the detached garage/boiler area.

 

[wdc1160]

I haven't seen -45 for a couple of years.

 

[jebatty]

Just returned from Jamaica and avoided the -30'sF last week. Found that cooling degree days in Jamaica had increased my wood pile by nearly a cord while gone. If I go back, I can start selling the extra wood to pay for the trip.

 

[atlarge54]

They better have awesome hunting and fishing up there for 15k HDD.

Oh, we definitely do! It's apparently been a really mild winter so far... it's stayed around 20 below most of the time, and only gotten down to -45 for a few days.

I'll be back bugging you guys for ideas when I get to the point where I'm actually ready to start designing the detached garage/boiler area.

Wow Brrrrrrr. Do any of the locals use boilers? Danger of freezing would be a little spooky to me. Even a pump failure could be dangerous to linesets etc. Drove to Alaska when the highway was still dirt in the 70's and the name "Tok Junction" rings a bell. Is that where you're from? Have you lived in Alaska long, beautiful country for sure?