MGH

We usually keep the blog restricted to boating matters only but in this case the circumstances are a little outstanding and I just wanted to post a picture.



Jenny is in the hospital and has been for 2 days now. She checked in tothe ER at Mt. Auburn Hospital 14 days ago for very bad flu like symptoms but was sent home with some meds. It seemed to work and she got better for a couple days (one of those days was Halloween when she was dressed as the pirate posted below). Then on this past Sunday night/ Monday morning her head started hurting extremely bad and she became sensitive to light and sound. Seems kinda migraine-ish, except that she had a fever of 102 which isn't normally migraine related. Tuesday morning it got so bad that I took her into Mass General Hospital. Her temp got to 104.5 during the day in the ER. They checked her into a real room and have been pumping various fluids and antibiotics into her. They did a spinal tap which is the only thing that has proved useful so far, as it turned up to show a virus in her spinal fluid. Other than that, she has seen umteen doctors and even some infectious disease specialists. As yet, they can't tell what it is and it won't go away. She is feeling a bit better at least because the headache has resided to a dull throb and her temp is staying down below 100 and sometimes even down to the normal 98.6 range. So she seems to be on the mend, but it is slow and the disease is persistant and confounding. MGH seems to be treating her well though, and we are happy she went there. Hopefully she will be home soon. Willie misses her, and it is tough on a dog being alone all day.

flue the coop

Yes. It is finally here.


As the above picture shows, we have a bulkhead in our main salon with a full length mirror on it. This is pretty much right as in the center of the room/boat as one can get, so I hung the heater on some crossbars on brackets to either side of the mirror. I think that tomorrow I am going to get an extra piece of steel to go between the heater and the wood hanging brackets I made. These pics are just of the quick-fix setup I have so that we can test the thing out.


The cat seemed impressed during the install phase


This picture is of me lighting it for the first time. Unfortunately all did not go splendidly well. As it turns out the flue (aka: chimney stack) is way too tall and straight for such a little woodstove. In other words our boat is too tall for it. What it caused was a gigantic roaring fire with massive amounts of suction pulling the flame about 2 feet up into the chimney. There are no pictures of this incident because we were too busy freaking out and trying to put the huge fire out. Haha, silly boaters in their floating tinder box. Well, luckily it seems to be an issue I can fix pretty easily. We just have to go to a woodstove store tomorrow and buy a flue damper so that we can close down the updraft a bit and keep the fire from taking in so much air. I certainly hope that this does the trick. We'll be awfully bummed if it doesn't. If not though, there are a couple tricks I have up my sleeve to make it calm down a bit. Lesson learned: less air flow = slower burning, more manageable fire that can get nice and toasty; more air flow = giant raging mad fire that burns all our pellets away instantly and never gives much real heat.

In the meantime though (it was Sunday so woodstove shops were all closed) we were able to make some little bitty fires in it just to play with it. It would burn up all the wood in a matter of minutes, but still fun to play with while we can't do much else.

In the meantime though, we found this amazing thing called an ecofan. Basically it is a fan that is entirely metal, not electric or anything, but runs off of the heat generated from a woodstove. You set it on your stove and the heat causes the two different metals in the fan to create an electric current and thus powering itself. We've found great reviews on them and will likely be purchasing one to help push our stove heat around the boat. Of course, we have to get the stove working properly first.

So overall, we are happy with the stove, just needing to do some chimney work to get it tweaked a bit better first.



Oh, and just in case you wanted one, here is a picture of our pumpkin from Halloween :)

We'll update more as we get along in the heater proper-install phase, hehe. Also I'll try to get some pics of the shrinkwrap frame etc up. Going to try to shrink it up next weekend or perhaps the one after. Depends when we can borrow a heat gun and some labor help.

-Justin