This evenings work has be split up between two tasks, getting the forest road ready for use and making more firewood. Setting up LED spot lights its not so bad working in the dark, I feel like our productivity is not affected much at night. If anything working at night is preferable when the weather is bad during the day. Not so much in the winter here, if anything its usually below freezing outside at night. But dressing up for the work, and then taking off layers as I get hot seems to be key to cold work outside.
Using a car battery, a 600w DC to AC inverter and two spotlights it can provide quite a lot of illumination.
The UTV has head lights we could use, but that would require us leaving on the vehicle. So instead we bring our own power source and lights and just recharge the battery after we are done working.
As we work our way down the forest road ahead of us is a creek. Some trees were downed blocking our way, we quickly cleared them and made our way to the creek side.
Looks like a heavy rain washed some wood down stream. We can tell by how the leaves are all bunched up by logs we got some heavy rains back here. Makes sense, we got some days with many inches so I am sure this whole creek area swells.
Making firewood:
With the central wood boiler up and running, it is consuming wood at a high rate on cold nights. So we find ourselves spending part of our time outside just collecting large tree trunks that have been cut down, and processing them into smaller pieces that will fit into the boiler.
Using the tractor we can load the large trunks into the bucket and move them to a better place to cut up with the chainsaw.
Some of the logs are stuck under others, so we use the bucket to move them around.
We try not to move these by hand, they are mostly over ten feet long so using the tractor works best.
Sometimes we find a few cut pieces under bigger logs, so we pull those out and save those to burn.
The tractor handles firewood well, as long as you are going forward. Seems it does not have the same power in reverse, something I learned backing it up in a spot. Had to turn it around to get out of a steep area.
After cutting the wood we bring it over to the wood furnace to be stacked under the carport.
We after dropping off a load we go back and find some more, usually doing a few loads in a night. That will provide us with around a week of firewood. And then we go back to find more as the pile starts to get low. We need to work on seasoning them better, as we are flying through all our wood now.
Maybe one of these days we will just spend the whole day cutting up firewood, instead of doing half the work in one area and then the other. But for now we are keeping up and that is what is important.