building a small functional cabin for full time living

Creating a simple shelter - and living with it!

Heating and cooling.

We use wood to fuel a high quality small stove.

Cooling is facilitated by shading, color choices and capturing nighttime lows.

Read on:


Cabin Intro Cabin Images Building the Cabin Brief Building Story Heating Floorplan FAQ Construction Diary Pre-Building Notes

Quality built, yet bargain stove from Vermont castings.

Wood heat is polluting the air of our valley, especially during periods of stagnant metrological conditions. Not good. It is also messy, and potentially dangerous. Good friends and neighbors lost the home they lived in for 30 years, due to a cracked masonry chimney. Getting firewood is back breaking work, loathed and procrastinated. So why choose that option?

Well, what are the options?
- Warmth based on electricity, such as baseboards and whatnot, is not for off-the-grid' ers.
- Pellets, those little doodads looking like dog food? Nonsense. The stoves required needs electricity, are prone to failure, and then the fuel.. what are those little turds made off?
- Gas and various liquid fuels? Availability and cost of these commodities are based on wars and money hungry corporations, and they are nonrenewable. Still a reasonable choice, if you are not a complete die-hard self reliance freak. Like me..
- Passive solar heating? Wonderful option, but less suitable for our lightweight structures, lacking the essential thermal mass. And here in the Pacific Northwest a persistent wintertime cloud cover also throws a cog in the wheel.
There are probably other fuels and methods but I don't know of them.

That brings us back to wood. Where we will stay.

Installation is simple, yet proper execution is crucial to the safety of the building and its occupants. You must follow clearance recommendation to the teeth, and then add a little more distance, a few more bricks, one more sheet of cement board. Pay extra attention to the stovepipe where it goes through floors and ceilings (or in our case, the wall).

The operating cost is nil, here at CoyoteCottage. Up the creek a few miles is a Forest Service road, tucked away behind Private Property signs, where we go in the spring with the pickup. Windblown trees block the progress so we clear the way with the chainsaw, throwing the bits and pieces in the bed of the truck. One trip per year will do since: Small cabin + Super insulation = less than one cord.

Why the stove pipe thru the wall? Yes, it does hurt the draft quite considerably, causing soot built-up in the inside elbow, and once or twice during strange wind conditions there was a most undesirable back draft while trying to light the stove. Well, one of the guiding principles in designing this cabin was to avoid holes in the roof. Makes a lot of sense in snow country, with the many unforeseen problems of intense freeze-thaw cycles, which are further exacerbated around an alternating hot-cold stovepipe. So, that's why.

Also, I'm for sure not a carpenter. To some extent I can call myself a boat builder, and my roofs are built like the underside of boats, like they should be. The socalled through-hulls, valves and exhausts under the waterline, sink boats when they fail. The solution is to eliminate them, which also gets rid of clutter like sinks, heads and motors. Starting to sound like our cabin?

Another considerable advantage of the thru-the-wall flue is the ease with which one can inspect and clean all parts of the system. Not an advantage realized in the planning stage, this benefit leads to much higher fire safety margins.

Worriying about chimney fires (you should!)? No need to grab a rickity 28' extension ladder, lean it on a teetering chimney and gingerly ascend the resulting house of cards, with chains, sectional cleaning rods and brushes. Despite being a life long devotee to rock climbing I still wouldn't trust above scenario. In the thru-the-wall set up the indoor section of flue easily slips apart to be scrubbed outside in the snow. The long vertical run of triple wall stainless chimney, all exterior, is cleaned from below, through the access port on the underside of the elbow and while standing on the deck. A little vacuuming finishes of a 20-30 minute project. The low hassle aspect of this dreaded chore motivates me to do it at least 3 times per burning season, which in my opinion greatly reduces the risk of devastating chimney fires.