Heating The Cabin

Winter is an odd duck this far south.

It comes to us in short bursts. Kind of like touching the trigger on a fully automatic weapon to produce a 3-Round burst.

Our cold bursts, what we call our cold snaps, generally last 3 days. A short spray of days.

The wind blew briskly out of the North yesterday and the daytime temperature topped out at 50 degrees. The mercury thickened to the freezing mark last night. They are talking about lower 20’s for the bottom numbers in our area tonight.

These numbers don’t sound like hard winter weather for folks in the cold snow country where once it’s cold it stays cold. Shirli and I have both lived in the cold snow country and have experienced acclimating to the steady cold winter temperatures. 

There is no acclimating to winter here. We can be walking around in shorts, T’s, and flops on Tuesday. On Thursday we can be layering on everything we’ve got to stave off the cold. On most days, during our winter months, the daytime and nighttime temperatures fall somewhere between the two extremes.

The wind blows cold out of the North with its frigid 3-Day bursts. It warms up to nice springlike weather. It rains. Then here comes the cold air. Repeat. Again and again. This is winter in Lower Alabama.

Our primary source of heat in the cabin is an oil filled radiating heater. We don’t have a lot of space to heat and, apart from the cold snaps, the thing does a good job of creating an atmosphere that is warm enough for our temperature preference. The primary downside to it is that it takes time for it to heat the oil so it is far from something that can be considered an instant heat source. Another downside to it is that it does not put off enough heat to keep the cabin at a comfortable temperature for us during these cold snaps.

Most nights, except during these cold snaps, we run it on either low or medium to keep the frost off our noses. Last night was the first time we ran it on high overnight. The cabin stayed comfortable enough that it wasn’t a shocking experience for us to crawl out from under the down filled comforter this morning to fire up the Big Buddy and get the coffee going.

We ordered the adapter hose and the wall plug transformer for the Big Buddy. The hose allows us to attach the heater to a tank outside the cabin. The transformer allows us to plug it into an electrical outlet. The outside tank saves quite a chunk of dollars when compared to fueling the heater with the 1 Pound disposable canisters. The transformer gets us away from having to use batteries to run the fan on the heater.

We also bought a Carbon Monoxide Detector to add to our sense of physical safety using this propane burner as supplemental heat inside our small cabin.

We generally fire it up in the evening long enough to raise the cabin temperature to our comfort preference and again in the morning after we awake. I’m not sure how long the first two small canisters lasted before the heater flamed out this morning. They lasted longer than I thought they would and, after using the heater a good number of times since it arrived on the delivery truck, got us through the coldest part of the morning this morning.

The propane heater has three temperature settings. Low, medium, and high.

Low and medium heat utilizes only the left panel. High utilizes both panels.

We’ve kicked it up on high only a couple times. Those times have been in the evening when we returned after a day without any heat going in the cabin. The low setting, as a supplement to the oil filled radiator, is generally adequate for our needs here.

We picked up the propane cylinder today while out and about taking care of a few things. It’s handy how gas stations and dollar stores provide these. Purchase one for the purchase price. Bring it back 

when it’s empty and for 2/5^th of the purchase cost exchange it for a refill. The convenience of it (my personal opinion here) far outweighs the hassle of hauling the tank somewhere to have it refilled. We will, at some point before this first one runs out, purchase a second tank to have in reserve.

We are kind of out here. It wouldn’t do to have a tank run empty at 4 in the morning with nothing open locally to exchange it.

Yes.

We are, more often than not, both awake, drinking coffee, and watching for the break of day.

Attaching the hose is a simple deal. One end screws onto the bottle outside the cabin. The other end attaches to the heater with a quick-connect coupler.

It is only necessary to drill one hole in the floor.

Me?

Two.

My first attempt was off-center of a floor joist.

The cabin sits on piers and, considering the floor is not insulated, the floor is cold.

The next cabin improvement project will involve skirting the cabin. Skirting will greatly improve the cold floor situation.