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My next door neighbor has an OWB which may not be what I wanted to see, but he doesn't bother me, and I don't bother him. The one that complains in this rural township is the lady who moved here from a large city two years ago. She calls the County Sheriff (township is too small to have a police dept.) and complained about the dirt the tractor left on the road after the farmer neighbor came off of his field. Then she calls about the horse manure on the road from the neighbor's horses. The sheriff asked her what she expected when she moved in across from a farm??? 8 of the 12 homes on our one mile long road burn wood. You see wood piled up everywhere. I'm just waiting for the day they complain about that.
What might seem strange to those who live in the city or a subdivision, is just a way of life around here. We burn a lot of wood. Stoves, OWB, campfires and furnaces. Any time you walk out side in the winter you can smell wood. Reminds me of campfires around the lake when I was a kid or the stove at the old man's place. To me what seems strange is the need to lock the house when you're gone. We couldn't even find the keys the last time we wanted to lock the doors. I guess we live more by treating people the way we want to be treated.
In the state of Maine we have a right to farm act, or something of that wording. It helps take care of the complaints of dirt on the road, etc. Unless its excessive. For instance, years ago one of my farmers left his yard with the liquid manure tank behind his tractor. Started up the big hill and, by mistake, opened the gate to the tank. (He later admitted noticing the tractor pulling a lot better at the top of the hill than the bottom ) He didn't clean it up immediatly, and got a good fine for unsecured load. Also got a bill for the state to run the road grader scraping the road clean. The most vocal complaint was from a new arrival relocated from the city. She was always complaining to the authorities about him spreading manure in his fields, never once contacted him directly. Only by the way of a uniform officer. She was informed of the "right to farm act"
Needless to say, if she was having an out door barbeque, or gathering of some sort, just by coincedence, he was spreading liquid manure up wind. Seem to recall that she had a clothesline, but never used it much. :coolsmile:
Problems with neighbours and OWB's are only going to get worse imo. Part of it is the perception that what's going out of the owb is somewhow more toxic than it is.
Our story: The big OWB (Empyre 650- 1/2 full cord at a time) we have attached to the big building DOES smoke at times but the prevailing winds take it no where close to the nearby homes. We still got complaints though and we are VERY rural. Neither my Dad nor I could figure out why there would be a problem. Then one night, I was working late (2:00am) changing a piece of 2 1/2" copper pipe that had broken on the hydronics (rubbed against concrete - bad install 50 years ago) when I heard the door slam on the boiler out in the yard. I went outside and here's one of the guys down the road looking like a deer in the headlights. I at first assumed he had been trying to do us a favour and had loaded some wood in the boiler. I asked him what he was doing and then *I* opened the boiler door. Inside on top of the flames was a piece of crusher grate and on it was rolls of household wire (extension cords, christmas lights and so on). This idiot had been using our boiler in the dead of night to burn the cover off electrical wire so he could salvage the copper scrap. To make matters worse, we found out he was one of the rotten SOB's that had the gall to complain about the boiler.
Had he been a younger man I might have fed him his teeth, as it was I used the big poker and pulled the flaming mass of burning plastic out of the stove and dumped the ash barell on it. I just pointed to the gate at the front of the yard and turned my back and walked away. He had the nerve to ask my Dad my for the crusher grate back the next day. I just shook my head no and today that grate is the ramp on the back of my dad's little trailer.
I actually chipped a tooth from grinding them that night. We've never gotten another complaint and it's been a year and a half or so.
Problems with neighbours and OWB's are only going to get worse imo. Part of it is the perception that what's going out of the owb is somewhow more toxic than it is.
Our story: The big OWB (Empyre 650- 1/2 full cord at a time) we have attached to the big building DOES smoke at times but the prevailing winds take it no where close to the nearby homes. We still got complaints though and we are VERY rural. Neither my Dad nor I could figure out why there would be a problem. Then one night, I was working late (2:00am) changing a piece of 2 1/2" copper pipe that had broken on the hydronics (rubbed against concrete - bad install 50 years ago) when I heard the door slam on the boiler out in the yard. I went outside and here's one of the guys down the road looking like a deer in the headlights. I at first assumed he had been trying to do us a favour and had loaded some wood in the boiler. I asked him what he was doing and then *I* opened the boiler door. Inside on top of the flames was a piece of crusher grate and on it was rolls of household wire (extension cords, christmas lights and so on). This idiot had been using our boiler in the dead of night to burn the cover off electrical wire so he could salvage the copper scrap. To make matters worse, we found out he was one of the rotten SOB's that had the gall to complain about the boiler.
Had he been a younger man I might have fed him his teeth, as it was I used the big poker and pulled the flaming mass of burning plastic out of the stove and dumped the ash barell on it. I just pointed to the gate at the front of the yard and turned my back and walked away. He had the nerve to ask my Dad my for the crusher grate back the next day. I just shook my head no and today that grate is the ramp on the back of my dad's little trailer.
I actually chipped a tooth from grinding them that night. We've never gotten another complaint and it's been a year and a half or so.
That is classic LOL I can relate to all of these stories and have many myself. I used to get volitile at the "suburbannites gone country" till I decided it was more fun gettin' "one up" on them. Cheap entertainment at it's finest !
There are ways to deal with people like that. The TD's as some of the locals refer to "Town Dinks" that move here from the cities thinking that their little world is all that matters.
A good friend of mine that happens to have a 600 cow dairy herd found a 40+ foot Class A motor home parked in one of his fields that borders state land the day before deer season a couple years ago. He drove up to the guys, who had a big campfire burning in his hay field, and politely asked them to remove their motor home and themselves from his property. The hunting party from downstate flatly rejected the idea and cussed him up one side and down the other. My friend then informed the mighty hunters that along about noon he was going to start spreading manure on that field and they would be wise to relocate. Long story short, he showed up with 6,000 gallons of liquid poop about an hour later and told them they had about 15 minutes to pack their junk and get out of the way. They didn't and he began to unload the spreader at the far end of the field working his way toward them with each pass and giving ample notice of his intentions. They stupid TD's decided to play a game of chicken with him and they lost. When he got to the end of the field they occupied he simply kept unloding right past their RV and completely hosed the entire thing. Of course the TD's called the cops who after hearing the story kindly offered to write them a ticket for trespassing instead of taking the farmer to task. The fact that the county sheriff was raised on a local farm didn't hurt matters at all. Moral of the story........Don't mess with country folk.
As to the topic of wood burning laws being passed around various parts of the country, all I can say is that we as wood burning people have brought a lot of it on ourselves. Using wood burners that are horribly inefficient, smoke like a coal fired steam engine and then burning trash, rubber, carpet and the occasional dead animal does nothing but give ammunition to people who are looking for a reason to get in our hair. Everyone who burns wood should adopt a "best practices" type mentality toward the use of alternative fuels or we will find ourselves with way more expensive problems on our hands than chit on the side of an RV.
I live on sixty acres somewhere between Armpit and Belly Button Colorado. I have a neighbor who moved out here who wanted to bring the city with her. She typically complains about calfs bawling when they are weaned from their mothers, jack donkeys that bray when Jennies go into season etc. My favorite is when she called me to complain that she had bees in her hot tub. She was aware that I was keeping bees and wanted to know what I was going to do about the situation. I told her that they could not be my bees because we had trained ours to stay in our pasture and that each of our bees had been branded. Turns out she had no sense of humor and she does not speak to me. If she does ever decide to reconnect, I will apologize and tell her all of our bees will be on leashes from that point forward. :ahhh:
Reminds me of a true tale of my friend's grandmother, who ran the family farm all on her own, with a hired man, from the Depression (the first one) through the late 1980s.
Some people moved down the road from some urban area- and let their dog run loose, and it was chasing the cows and heifers all over the place.
She called them, asked them to keep their dog from harassing her cows and heifers, as it put a risk to her livelihood.
They said that it could not possibly be _their_ dog.
She said that she hoped not, because whatever dog it was, if it continued, she'd shoot it.
The dog kept on harassing the cows for a week.
She handed a Savage 99 to the hired man, and said "shoot it."
And then called the folks down the road and said, "Glad that wasn't your dog, since we had to shoot it; it's dead on the lawn."