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Stove - I woke up this morning to a request from Michelle. "The stove didn't start," she called up from downstairs as I was checking the morning email. "Be right there," I replied. It was about 20 minutes before the kids get up so I hurried downstairs.

I knew what the problem was. Overall the stoves are pretty simple to care for, but they do require regular interaction compared to a natural gas, heating oil, or propane based furnace. Once a day you have to fuel them up. If they were turned off at the time, it's also usually a good time to push aside the ashes. Pellet stoves make remarkably little ash. After a full day of use there's about half a cup of ash. It still amazes me.

But there are other less frequent things to be done. About once a week you should brush down the cast iron that it burns against to promote better heat transfer. About once a week you need to remove the carbon buildup from the burn pot. That's what I had neglected. If you don't do that, the stove has a difficult time igniting because the carbon buildup (which looks like charcoal) actually insulates the ignitor from the wood, preventing it from starting.

About once a month you need to throw out the ashes from the ash collection tray. Dad tells me wood ashes are a good source of potash, aka potassium. The problem is that in the middle of winter you aren't thinking much about next years plants. I'd like to bag the ashes until spring but Michelle usually just wants to toss them in the conservation area.

Lastly, about once per ton of wood, you need to clean out the heat exchanger. While most of the above items are pretty trivial, cleaning out the heat exchanger is a bit more daunting and dirty. It requires partial disassembly of the front of the stove to get at the accordion like baffles where the air flows to pick up the heat from the fire.

When you write about it, it all seems like a lot of work, but it's not. It's usually just five minutes a day. I actually enjoy it a bit, but I'm not sure why. In a way it reminds me of boyhood days when I would watch my dad do routine maintenance of his car. Nowadays one can do much less under the automobile hood. So now I maintain my tractor, clean the stove, and overall fix the things the boys break routinely. I think the fix-it/maintenance trait must just be a tendency built into the Y chromosome.

Gasoline - Did you notice that in most places, gas is at or below where it was six months ago? This is well before Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Click the graphic below to enlarge it.

I'm waiting for a big Senate investigation about the recent price plummeting! Just kidding... Everyone wants to grill the "Big Oil" companies when prices rise, but no one wants to do anything real to assure a better buffer against transient supply shortages. It's more politically expedient to blame greedy executives rather than accept market realities and keep supply and demand better balanced. Economics: it's like gravity. It's always there, get used to it.

I predict that now that we are getting into seriously cold winter weather, the demand for home heating fuel will compete with gasoline refining and cause the gasoline price curve to swing back up a bit, at least for a while.