A bit of a cold

I've been walking around with a slight headache all day yesterday and today. I have pain behind my eyes, so I think my frontal sinuses are slightly inflamed. Whenever I catch a cold, it always goes to those sinuses first. I am taking acetaminophen, drinking raspberry tea with honey and keeping myself warm. I hope it will go away in one or two days.

The past week has been a bit warmer, never below OC/32F, and I haven't switched on the central heating even once. I keep using my tile stove instead. The French door between the room with the stove and my bedroom remains open. If I start the fire in the afternoon, by late evening, after two or three loads of wood, my bedroom gets reasonably warm. By which I mean 14C/57F. I cover myself with several woolen and cotton blankets, as well as wear woolen an cotton socks, and I have no problem staying warm throughout the night.

Whenever the temperature outside falls below freezing, though, I do switch on the central heating because the apartment gets really cold. I try to warm it up for the evening by having the heat on for about 60-90 minutes, when I sit at the PC or watch TV. The temperature in the room raises to 16C/60F. Then I switch the heat off and go to bed. The temperature remains in mid 50s when I wake up.

My present cold has nothing to do with the relatively low temps around my house, by the way, I caught it outside while planting tulips.

The stove isn't helping much

So I woke up and checked the temperature in my bedroom. It's identical as in another totally unheated room. I have now placed the thermometer a couple of feet from the stove to see how far its warmth actually reaches. The stove is still nice and warm. Even if it doeasn't heat the room much, it will still be good to dry the laundry or to warm myself up. But I will have to sit quite close to it to do so. I'll have to rearrange some furniture and lighting to make a cozy nest there.

Lit up an old tile stove

I am trying to economize and save on the cost of fuel (gas) this year. Right now I am trying to heat my bedroom with an old tile stove. It's the only one of three stoves that were originally built for the apartment. The previous owner got rid of the two remaining ones. The stove has not been used in over twenty years, I think.

Surprisingly, it seems to be working all right, at least the smoke is not getting out from between the tiles - it seems to be going up the chimney. I've been adding wood for the past two and a half hours trying to heat it up enough to raise the temperature in the room. The tiles have gotten quite warm but the temperature in the room is rising very slowly. I wonder how much wood it will take to raise it up by three degrees.. I suspect I might not be able to do it at all.

The problem is, the stove is not even in my bedroom but in an adjacent room. Which I've used as a "cold room" because it's the coldest room in the apartment. That's why the previous owner left the stove there in the first place. Normally, in the winter I lock this room away and barely heat it because it would consume most energy. Sometimes I overwinter plants there.

Today, however, I opened the French door between the "cold room" and my bedroom, I am burning this large fire and I am trying to see if ultimately my bedroom warms up from the stove or cools down from being opened onto the cold room.

In case you are wondering about the technique, you first load the stove with rolled up newspaper pages and wood on top of them, then you light the newspaper up. When the wood lights up from the newspaper, you close the stove door but not completely. Some air needs to be getting in there constantly to keep the fire burning, otherwise it will choke itself out. In this manner you burn a good couple of loads of wood. Your aim is to produce a nice heap of embers which will continue to heat up the stove even after the fire burns out. When you accumulate this heap, you close the top stove door completely, and open the bottom door sligtly, to let air reach the embers from the bottom so that thay continue burning. After a while you also close the bottom door. You now have a well heated stove which is heating up the room until it cools down. This may last as long as overnight! So there's no need to get up every two hours at night to add wood. Yippee!

So far I'm having a bit of a problem with smoke which I can't actually see but which I smell in the entire apartment. There seems to be a bit too much of it.