Barb has put another of her famous and eagerly awaited posts into the blog so I won't try to gild the lilly about the progress on the kitchen renovations.

It has been a little colder for a brief period here and I am finding out what the heating bill is going to be for our place during the winters. I figure that it will be in the order of $800/month for mid December to mid March which isn't too bad but I'd like to improve on that even, especially for when we are back sailing for the winter down south. I don't want to drain the water etc totally as we have apartments that we are renting out in the back yard that are tied into our water system. We will likely turn the water off that flows up into our living quarters but we will still have to have the heat on to some extent so that the pipes won't freeze through our place and back to the apartments.

I figure that if we keep the thermostat set at about 5 degrees C that should do it. My only concern is what if there is a power outage when we are away and the furnace goes out. To that end I have been investigating solar air heating panels. There is an engineer here that has one in their property and they tell me that it makes an excellent augmentation to their heating system. In effect it provides enough heat that during a sunny day the furnace only occasionally comes on. There are a couple of commercially available models out there but it seem that this is one of the things that lend themselves to do it yourselfers as there is no chemistry and no moving parts involved. Essentially you have a black absorption panel backed by an equally black collector with air in and air out driven by a small reliable fan and (this is a vital part) two thermostats placed inside the unit and one outside which will detect when the air is warmer inside the unit than is the air in the house when it turns on the fan. The engineering makes sense to me and the construction would appear to be fairly simple. I just have to figure out when I am going to put is and how I am going to route the warmed air into the house. From the empirical evidence from some experimentation that I have found on the internet it would seem to make sense that we bring the air from the house out through the panel and then back in. Most data shows that by the time that the sun is fully or has maximum isolation on the panel it is enough to raise the air temperature by five degrees which is plenty for us. That would mean that the furnace would only be used alone at night or on cloudy days. That would give me a little peace of mind. If I could make one or two versions of these things this summer we could try them out next winter and see.