All is well here in NH

I went out on a customer issue the other day, I had to meet a locksmith at a customer’s house. After the job was done the locksmith who I have done business with for years and is a friend came back to the shop for a check and a beer. Naturally I showed him my home built boiler. He rent’s so he wasn’t particularly interested but mentioned he buys a 5 gallon can of off road diesel to bring home to heat his house every day. The price is about $3.77 per gallon which is about what the local oil company would charge to deliver. So if it’s the same price why not have it delivered? Because he doesn’t want to, or can’t tie up the $471.25 the fuel company would want for a minimum sale. That amount of fuel would last him about 25 days at his 5 gallon a day rate, maybe less time if the 10 gallon nights are accounted in as well. Since it was quite cold he was planning on buying two cans that night. He said the normal 5 gallons cost him $19/day. Rounding this to $20 for ease of math and multiplying by 30 days per month this is approx. $600 per month for fuel oil. We bought our third ton of of pellets for the heating season for $209 at Tractor supply last week. So our total fuel costs for the year are approx. $800 from November to mid February. What a difference! Not to mention I can’t imagine going to the gas station every day for fuel. What a pain. Having diesel trucks and fueling up at the same pumps I see many different people filling five gallon cans every time I fuel my trucks. I’m not the best at budgeting in the world, but I realize my blessings when I witness first hand how the paycheck to paycheck underemployed crowd deals with winter.

I’ve started calculating the Heating degree days with the Arduino program. It’s a pretty accurate look at the day’s heating requirements. I want to correlate those temperatures to fuel usage. I also have updated the CNC plasma cutter to the 5 start lead screw. Before I made the upgrades I needed to limit the cutter to a linear travel rate of 13 inches per minute to avoid vibration issues. After reassembly I tested the machine to 40 inches per minute with no problems. It may be even better than that I just got so giddy I quit testing. I am hoping this will significantly reduce the slag produced by the plasma cut. Not much motivation to take anything apart at this point. It’s just too damn cold out. It was -5°F this morning here, the HDD days yesterday was 65.5. Stay warm out there. I could back the tractor out of the shop and do some woodworking, maybe build the chip dryer…..