Preparing for Winter V

fuddle

Ouch at Applecross. That's a devil of a road to climb without snow!

I've never seen drifts like that in my lifetime mar. I know only of chaos with a covering or about waiting for about a foot to be snow ploughed, knowing that temps will increase soon and anything lingering won't cause problems for long. What might come could well push me out of my comfort zone and that's a bit scary.

mardatha

Nope, it's just snow and it melts. Eventually lol. Just chill oot (groan!) and sit tight, don't do any unnecessary running around, try and have plenty food in the house. Here we used to run out of silly things like bread and milk or tatties, the most obvious stuff seems to get forgotten. My one real worry with snow is a long power cut, the longest we had was 5 days and my freezer stuff was ruined.. that's the only thing that would seriously annoy me.

zeupater

kittie wrote: »

very interesting zeupater, I may be picking your brains re air to air in the future. At present I have an eco house PV, solar thermal, triple glazing, wood pellet stove. Impossible at present to get bags of pellets, european shortage so am temporarily using moveable electric heaters with thermostats.

What make of air to air do you have? I want to start keeping details in a notebook and I know you have done all the research

Hi

No problem, ask away when necessary - probably best on the G&E board of this forum as there are quite a few knowledgeable souls over there ....

Our heat pump is a Toshiba Daiseikai unit ... full reasoning & background is available in this G&E thread ... when you've got time make a big mug of coffee and be prepared to either be bored out of your skull -or- interested/curious ....

There's a basic article which quickly describes the idea behind leveraging PV generation by using small heat-pumps on the Vriconian website <here> .... independent information on heat-pumps on the EST site <here> ..... and information on the RHI scheme on the Ofgem site <here>

Anyway, that's all for future reference, in the meantime - good luck with the house hunting!

HTH
Z

fuddle

Potatoes! You don't know just how useful your post is mar.

I'm just wondering, if it came down to it, would jacket potatoes cook in foil in the/on top of the wood stove. Actually we would probably favour burning smokeless ovals next week. Would coals be appropriate for making a jacket potato... of course, if it came to it.

mardatha

I don't know, these smokeless eggs aren't like house coal, although if you covered the tatties with enough foil then they would cook and not touch the eggs. Maybe have a dry run before the cold hits? I got a Cannon full size calor gas cooker fuds because it just makes life so much easier, but when my son lived in an estate lodge house he used to do cracking big casseroles on top of his stove. Meat veg turnip and loads of thick gravy, eaten with HM bread. You could try bread in the stove too, even if only soda bread or damper.
Also rice pud cooks nice long and slow on a stove...

mardatha

My postcode has snow every day next week from Tues onwards, and some into the week afrer. Yeee HOOO! :j:j:j

[Deleted User]

FUDS a whole potato will take a very long time to cook and you'd have to keep turning it over about once every hour to get it to cook evenly. You'd stand a much better chance of something edible if you cut big potatoes into wedges and put those in foil, not all piled back into a potato shape but side by side and that should cook in a couple of hours. Have a trial run before you need to do it for real and see how you like the result. Has the added advantage that when they're nearly done you can open up the foil (carefully) pop in the filling you've chosen and fold the foil back over for half an hour or so and you've a whole meal in foil, no plate to wash up wasting precious water.

C_J

I'd be tempted to bake a couple of jacket potatoes now, while I still have power, and store them in the fridge wrapped in foil for the woodburner to just re-heat them as necessary.

zeupater

Hi

We often let the log-burner die down a little more than usual, move everything around and drop a couple of foil-wrapped potatoes into the ash-bed in one of the front corners ... I love the crispy skin ... yummmm!

I've seen wrapped potatoes baked in a dry cast-iron pot on a burner & when they were done use the residual heat in the pot to heat a tin of beans go with them .... we don't really have the room to do that because of the shape of the canopy! ..,

HTH
Z

[Deleted User]

DD1 has one of the cast iron potato cookers and it takes a great length of time to cook even a small potato whole but it works very well and takes less time if you cut a big one in half and cook it as two separate potatoes.