Yurt living and furniture. Blog for yurtheads.com

The General State of Things.

2011-11-14T10:08:00.000-08:00

The general state of the yurt after a year and more outside is as follows.

Inside: Absolutely tip top, no wood splits, no peeling paint (other than that which has blistered due to heat), averything holding out well. The horsehair string that holds the poles to the lattice walls also makes excellent bedding for fieldmice, as I found out after I caught two of them nesting in a drawer. Ingenious little beggars they are, they stole a variety of materials from around the yurt including a final layer of aluminium foil as a reflective surface. Quite how mice go to know about the thermal reflective properties of foil is beyond me.

Outside: The side of the yurt facing the trees and with least airflow has begun to go green and it looking grubby, the other side that catches the sun and wind is in excellent order. The time is coming for a major airing of all the layers and maybe a blast with a jetwash to get the green off.

The outriggers we made to make up for the incorrect measurement of the base are holding up well, but I fear they will not last as long as the rest of the base due to their being quite thin and closer to the elements than other parts of the structure.

All in all, I still love time spent in the fresh air, with good people and close to nature, all of which come with yurt life.

Robin Attack!!!

2011-11-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

Ok, so there I am round the back of the yurt fiddling with the leisure battery when I hear "donk, donk donk donk....donk donk....donk....." coming from inside. I knew full well that no one was in there so I tentatively went round the front to have a look though the open door and was rather taken aback by a robin coming at me, full pelt! Luckily the cheeky little chap swerved at the last minute and escaped.
He had left, how shall we say, a few messages to indicate his presence. Curious as to why he was in there in the first place, I sat quietly and waited. Within a couple of minutes there was a flutter at the door, followed by the "donk donk donk...." I heard earlier. This time I saw exactly what the robin was up to, he was attacking my toaster! He must have flown past the open door, seen his reflection in the chrome toaster and got all alpha male over the idea of another robin on his patch. The little bugger was furious, flapping and jumping around, showing his bum to the toaster and generally being a thug. I'll try and lure him back next week and get some footage.

Brrrr!!!!!

2011-10-14T17:34:00.001-07:00

After the crazy high temperatures of the last two weeks, we have finally settled into more seasonal weather, i.e. it's FREEZING by comparison. A good opportunity to try the paraffin heater in earnest and I must say it's superb. From about 6c, the heater brought the yurt up to t shirt temperature in about 10 minutes with no mad temperature spikes with the wood burner.

Time will tell whether it's up to the job when it gets really cold. Watch this space.

Winter Heating Rethink

2011-09-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

I'm switching to paraffin heating for this winter, the fire was nice but the cost of buying logs and finding suitable kindling was ridiculous. Obviously having a fire in the yurt transforms it totally, but the unpredictable nature of the temperature rises and falls with a large fire mean that it's a constant battle trying to keep a stable temperature going. In addition to that, I spend long periods of time in the workshop, tinkering, and in that time the fire normally fizzles.
Anyhoo, the Prity will probably be leaving the yurt this weekend and the space it took up will be utilised as a kitchen area for preparing and cooking nosh. It's an ideal spot, right under the lightest area of the yurt and near what will soon be a ventilation hole (where the chimney went).
Here's the heater (2.5kw technically), will run for about 17 hours on a 3.8l fill.

Obviously it's possible that it won't be up to the job, but the advantages of running something as stable and compact as this heater, outweigh the advantages of a fire, which are mostly aesthetic.

Been a while...

2011-08-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are, August already and I've spent pretty much every spare day I can in the yurt. It's been lovely not to have to faff around with the fire every day and be able to get up in the mornings without the desparate sprint to the fire to re-kindle it. The downside is that the kind of food I can eat has changed a little because of the lack of outside refrigeration services one finds in winter. Mainly it's been new potatoes from the garden, and tomatoes, pasta, stuff like that.

A new addition to the tech side of the yurt is a solar powered fan. I re-adapted the yurtcon to suck fresh air in from outside whenever there is enough light to power the fan. Solar panel is a £20 job from Maplins, tucked under one of the crown cover straps. This way there is a constant flow of fresh air coming into the yurt even when I'm away. Eventually it will become an extractor and mounted in a clear section of the crown, this will be to overcome the problem of condensation when cooking, or on hot days when there is something wet inside, like a towel.

I've gone back to the Squadron leisure batteries, doubled up and linked to the solar panel. The Elecsol batteries don't last that well and trying to get any empathy from the person who imports them is like getting blood from a stone. They are ok, but nothing more than that.

Wind turbine is next on the list, right after I have become Moped Overlord, keeper of all Velosolexes (that might take a while)

Z.

Ah! Almost forgot. Insect de jour is the earwig, omnipresent, indestructable, infinitely creepy, you can't even pick the blasted things up and throw them out, they have some sort of anti-human forcefield around them. I am in consultation with the ladybirds, I've told them the earwigs dissed the ladybirds big time. Hopefully this will result in some sort of turf war in which earwig numbers are decimated as a result of scuttle by shootings by gangs of ladybird yoofs. One can but hope.

Wonderful Annoyances

2011-03-16T13:03:00.000-07:00

It has to be said, one of the biggest differences between sleeping in a yurt and sleeping in a house is the connection you feel with what it on the other side of the wall. It's hard to beat the feeling of falling asleep to the sometimes comical hooting of owls, or waking to the dawn chorus of what sounds like several thousand songbirds tweeting their little heads off. The have also been a few mystery sounds, yips, barks, yelps, probably foxes or possibly Black Shuck!!! WooOOOOOOoooooOOOooo!!!

The next few weeks will see a slight interior re-design, things that have not been used in the last 6 months will be going, that includes a couple of the leather sofa chairs, and a very nice Bene office cabinet will be pepping up the storage situation.

Storing the duvet in the dragon box has proved to be a winner, it comes out on a Friday night dry as a bone and much easier to get warmed up.

The yurt structure is holding well, the paint on the uprights has bubbled due to the heat (and the heat has been a bit extreme sometimes, so no fault there) and the front door has swollen a little and sill need a bit skimming off the bottom soon. I am so looking forward to spring and summer, not so much looking forward to finding out which particular insect will be joining me though the warmer months.

Spring.

2011-02-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Spring is almost here and I'm sure it will bring a few challenges such as sticky tree buds and ladybirds. The most obvious potential problem will be cooking bread and tatties when the temperature outside is warm. Lighting a fire will be out of the question, maybe it's time to start looking at caravan ovens.
On the subject of cooking, the camping stove that the Welshman threw in with a campervan I bought, has performed beautifully. It's hard to imagine how a full size hob could improve things, so it's staying put for now.
Spring will also bring a furniture review, sumptuous leather chairs for 4 aren't really needed, so three will probably go and be replaced by a beanbag and some more storage. Storage hasn't been a massive problem, maybe it's just a case of living to your means but I dare say it would zoom up the scale of importance if this mini adventure went full time.
One handy tip for anyone thinking of spending time in a yurt, keep your duvet in a wooden box while you are away, despite the yurt being totally waterproof, duvets and bedding certainly "felt" a bit damp after being on the bed for a week. It might have just been the cold, but keeping the duvet in the dragon box means that it's out of the atmosphere and stays fresh and dry.

Update.

2011-02-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

Last week was the first time I've spent more than a weekend in the yurt, 10 days to be precise. What did I learn?
1) You HAVE to be tidy if you want to spend any time in a yurt. Not having corners means that you can't really get away from the socks you just threw across the floor.
2) Little things make live so much easier. Baby wipes for example are indispensible when you have a limited supply of water, I've used them for general cleaning, getting soot off the woodburner window, and more frequently wiping soot and ash from my hands.
3) Coal really sucks, even when you've stopped using it, the tar and filth lives in the chimney and fall out in lumps onto the nice clean canvas covering the yurt. There's a nasty brown stain on it now, entirely as a result of using cheap house coal.
4) Rugs are the way forward, by rugs I mean small rugs that can be taken outside and shaken out, not massive rugs that encompass the entire yurt floor. Another project for summer.
5) Wind can and will find any weaknesses in the cover and make it flap so furiously that it sounds like some kind of canvas armageddon. Easily cured by throwing big lumps of wood onto the roof to keep the join flat.

Well, That's Handy

2011-01-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

Been considering the options for cleaning the soot off the cover once spring arrives and hey presto! sail cleaners who have yurt cleaning experience, awesome.

Speaking of cleaning, Boxing Day was a bit of a disaster, I threw a few BIG chunks of house coal on the fire and shut it down before going out for a couple of hours. Unfortunately the coal didn't actually catch, it just smouldered, and smoked, leaking from the annoyingly leaky Prity fire (I suspect as it gets used more, it distorts more and leaks more). By the time I returned, the entire yurt was filled with acrid coal smoke, EVERTHING stank of coal, and it's not a nice countryside smell, it's the smell of pure nasty. Not a good position to be in, yurt full of smoke, one door, no extractor, think fast!!! Ah! leafblower! Zzzzingningningningning and we're off. After about 30 mins of pumping heaven knows how many thousands of cubic metres of fresh air in though the front door, the smoke was gone. The smell however, was not.
The remainder of the day was spent shampooing the carpet, emptying copious amounts of stink neutralising freshener in though the yurtcon and wiping down every single surface that had collected a sulphurous layer of soot.

Seriously, I've got the proper hump with coal, ok so you could say that if the fire didn't leak, that the smoke would have gone up the flue, but even so, the chunks of soot and smut that fluttered down from the flue like some sort of black snow would have still stained the roof cover. In addition to that, the smoke actually wrecked my carbon monoxide detector which was comically flashing it's "Service" light, as if anything electronic from China could ever be serviced.

Lesson learnt I guess, stay away from the cheap coal and start looking for a less leaky fire though 2011.

Fire Musings

2010-12-20T10:18:00.000-08:00

This week I've tried an alternative to loading up the fire before hitting the sack, now the fire is given a bowl of coal and a couple of pallet chunks about an hour before bedtime, that way the temperature has peaked and is on a gradual decline by bedtime. The upside is that the 3am sweatfest whereby the front door has to be opened to let the heat out is now over. The downside is that the temperature inside the yurt drops to about 6c by the morning. Now that sounds a bit on the chilly side, but it's not so cold as to give you a numb nose or cause any obvious discomfort, it's just a bit fresh and to be honest, once the duvet releases it's python-like hold, you're pretty much wide awake in .001 seconds. Although the compressed woodchip logs performed very well indeed, they still proved to be a little on the pricey side, so for now the yurt is heated using hardwood offcuts from a local beehive maker, much cheaper and it's nice to support people who care for bees, bees are nice.

The butane tank was swapped for propane this weekend, butane being the poor winter performer and propane being good for temperatures down to -30 or something. This means that the menu at cafe yurt has now grown from things that can be roasted (which was starting to get a bit tedious), into things that can be boiled like pasta, noodles, peas, tea, coffee and so on. In addition to that, it serves as a handy source of instant heat until the woodburner is warmed up nicely.

As a footnote to anyone planning on using a yurt at weekends though winter, bring your own water from home! mine was frozen solid from a week of sub-zero temperatures, there's a bodywarmer over the container now, but whether it can fend off the expected -6c this week is to be confirmed. Unfortunately it's now too late to deepen the cool box hole outside to below the frost line, it's frozen solid, meh.

Compressed Wood Blocks Conclusion

2010-12-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

In glorious iPhoneColour!

I've Got the Flue

2010-12-06T11:07:00.001-08:00

Saturday was flue extension day, various bits were sawn off new spiral duct, the crown cover was untied and the flue was disconnected from the fire and with a push-tilt, cleared the crown and flopped onto the roof of the (dust sheeted) yurt. The filth that was sitting in the flue was spectacular, oily black soot, just longing to find a pristine white shirt or something really expensive to soil. All in there must have been a good ice cream container full. So, long story short everything was stuck together with rivets and hoisted back into position, whereupon it was discovered to have developed a bizarre ability to look crooked from every angle. No matter.

The effect of the flue extension on the woodburner has been a bit odd, getting a fire going is a little harder than previously, and to stop it going into full on furnace mode, the flue damper needs closing off. In addition to this, the nasty stick goo that was previously lining the inside of the flue is now melting and seeping between the joins on the spiral. It's not all bad though, now that the damper can be closed without smoke leaking from every gap in the fire, the fuel inside is burnt more slowly and completely, logs are lasting twice as long.

Conclusion: There is an optimum length for flues, a meeting point between maximum draw and minimum restriction. Obviously I need to know what it is!!!

Yurtcon.

2010-12-02T16:34:00.000-08:00

Ok so not strictly speaking, but I was getting a bit sick of waking up at 2am in order to open the door to let heat out of the yurt in order to breathe again, sooooo, being a bit of a Maplins nerd, I popped in and purchased a thermostat kit and a silent PC fan, and the result is what you see in the video. The idea is that when it gets above a pre-set temperature, the fan (which will be mounted in the perspex window to one side of the door) kicks in and introduces cool air into the yurt. Once it gets comfortably cool again, the fan cuts out, leaving the yurt at a nice temperature again. Clever eh?

Might make these as kits if there are any other yurt dwellers interested.

-6c

2010-11-29T10:02:00.000-08:00

That's how cold it was Saturday night, well more to the point it was -6c OUTSIDE, inside it was anywhere between 20c and 37c. The lack of a proper length flue is making the loading of the woodburner a bit of a chore, every time the door is opened, smoke pours into the yurt and I have to dump the wood or coal into it and slam the door shut. Usually this is more inconvenient than unpleasant, but with the newly purchased cheapo house coal, the smoke is actually rather nasty. Needless to say, until the flue is extended and has a better draw on it, the house coal will stay in it's bag. The Taybrite smokes much less, well it is classified as smokeless so hardly surprising. The flue extension will be taking primo, number 1 precedence over everything next weekend, it's the one thing that is proving to be rather pesky and unpleasant.

Sunday morning was rather special, we had about 4 inches of snow outside :o)

Problem is that the snow now makes the canvas cover look particularly grubby because of the soot and smoke that the too short flue has deposited on the roof. Look and learn kiddies, if you have a yurt, get a good long flue on it. A standard canvas cleaner should get most of the grot off, that will be done (assuming temperatures go above freezing) once the flue is sorted, no point doing it before.

Chestnut Catastrophe.

2010-11-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

It's the chestnut season n'est pas? so I thought it would be nice to buy a bag from the local chestnut shop and try them in the woodburner oven. So far so good. In they go while I toddle off and help a friend with some screeding. Half an hour later the oven looks like a chestnut apocalypse, not a single chestnut survived, they looked like each one had been seeded by Alien and exploded violently before spraying the inside of the oven with it's mushy guts. The smoke filled the yurt from crown to floor and didn't smell very nice at all. Still, all it took was a good clean out of the oven, a quick hoover and a fistful of joss sticks and it was acceptable, if a not entirely pristinely fragranced place to be.

Maybe chestnuts are roasted within the confines of iron roasters for a reason, maybe for the same reason that popcorn is best cooked in a pan with a lid and not thrown into a chip pan full of boiling oil (don't ask).

Stove Fuels.

2010-11-25T10:53:00.000-08:00

For anyone who may be interested, here are my thoughts on the three types of heating fuel I'm using at the moment.

1) Old pallets.
Two large pallet sized boxes of these (chopped up into handy sized bits) cost me £30 locally and have proven to be essential for getting things started on a Friday night when it's freezing cold. They have the advantage of lighting up very easily and providing a shedload of heat in very little time. Unfortunately that is also their weakness, their fast and very hot burn makes them unsuitable for use through the day or night, but I wouldn't be without a big pile of them next to the fire.

2) "Seasoned" logs.
Note "Seasoned" logs, mainly because different people have different opinions on whether a log is ready for burning or not. Three large builders bags of big chunky "seasoned" logs were purchased locally for £140. In retrospect this may have been a little steep, mostly this was due to me not knowing the difference between a one tonne builders bag full of logs, and one tonne of logs. Many logs are delivered in those big cubic hessian bags that did indeed hold one tonne of SAND at some point, this does not mean that "tonne bags" of logs weigh one tonne. My mistake.
It transpired that despite there not being the classic signs of a well seasoned log, light weight, cracks radiating from the centre etc, that they do burn rather well, the split logs being fine to burn on their own once the coal has faded, and the larger logs do perfectly well when combined with split logs or on a bed of coal. They do need more air than coal so the bottom vent is cracked open a tad to help them along. One good thing is that the logs and pallets leave very little in the way of ash, the combustion is almost total.

3) Coal.
The least environmentally sound of all three fuels is annoyingly, the one that is most coveted, predominantly because it's the coal that keeps me from freezing solid through the night and is responsible for keeping things going till morning. I don't feel overly guilty about it's use though, a bag of Taybrite will last three weekends, possibly more if logs are used through the day and for cooking. Down side is that even though it lights quite easily, it takes a fair while to release it's glowy goodness so it's off the list of quick hit fuels. Maybe the cheaper house coal in little nuggets will prove a little more willing to heat up faster. As the owner of the Tyrell Corporation said, "The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long Roy..." so like the logs and pallets, the coal has an essential part to play in the well regulated heating of my yurt. Coal does tend to leave rather a lot of ash though, can't be helped and I suspect it's the ash covering that keeps the little beauties glowing till morning, and I can't complain about that.

I'll be giving compressed waste wood briquettes a go in the near future, but reports suggest a fast burn with high heat output, not really something suited to the situation. Time will tell.

Winter Cometh

2010-11-24T10:03:00.001-08:00

Ok, now the real test of the softie southerner office worker, winter! Last week was about 2c outside, positively tropical if you happen to be Mongolian, but a tad nippy for an Essex lad. Nevertheless, the yurt did a cracking job of keeping the heat in, the fire was fed a diet of wood lumps and Taybrite coal to keep things going though the day and performed beautifully.
The morning routine is to contemplate leaving the haven of the duvet for about 20 minutes, followed by a graceful commando roll over to the log basket, grab a log, poke the stove, chuck the log on and retreat to the duvet again in one fell swoop. So far the fire hasn't failed to come back to life yet, something I am very pleased with indeed.

All is not entirely perfect though, the spiral ducting that has been used as a chimney is doing well enough, but the little top hat and grille that stops the rain and small mammals getting in is starting to clog with soot and needs clearing every weekend. I intend to fit a longer flue to increase the amount of draw, and also cut away some of the grille in the top hat, it's not really needed. This time the silicon flue held out fine, the knack being to totally ignore the instructions and do what you think is correct, a concept most men will not have any problems with at all.

Nosh, mmmmm, yurt fare so far has been lovely jacket spuds, baguette pizza and an interesting stew consisting of sprouts, swede, potato and carrot. I ate most of it, the chickens had the rest.
The practicialities of washing up plates and the like are still something to be dealt with, at the moment it's a case of using my friend's kitchen sink to do the plates, for which I am grateful. One option would be to use the alsations to clear the bulk of the plate grot, then follow with a quick rinse in the stream. Kidding!

I'm still working out the correct place for everything, what's needed, what's superflous, what's just sitting there and never used and what's become indispensible. One most excellent feature has been the addition of a rain diverter just above the doorframe. Most houses will have one of these, but the yurt didn't have one, which meant that every time it rained, water settled on the top of the door and dribbled onto my head when it was opened. The diverter now makes the water drip clear of the door, thus keeping my wipe clean bonce, dry.

I made a short vid of the Friday ritual of getting some heat into the yurt, a ritual which will no doubt become a little more frantic as the temperature drops below zero, (this weekend is due to drop to -3) in all honesty, I'm quite looking forward to it, not as much as waking up to find it's been snowing though, that will be a special moment :o).

Siberia to Syria, yurt heating solved.

2010-10-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

Picture the scene, it's Friday, midnight, I've just arrived after a 100 mile drive from London and am looking forward to a weekend in the yurt and some fresh air and creativity, it's pretty nippy so as soon as I get into the yurt, a fire is started, loads of wood, big handfuls of coal, sorted, it's getting nice and warm.

30 mins later it's hit 50c, I'm outside, in the rain, in my pants, desperate to stop the sweat pouring off me, longing for a freezing cold duvet. It wasn't happening. 4am, the temperature inside the yurt drops to 30c and the door can be closed to keep the rain out and FINALLY I can get some kip.

Ok, so maybe wood isn't the way forward in temperatures above -15c, so I toddle off to the local manshop that sells coal, gas, paraffin, spuds, stuff like that, and buy 50kg of Taybrite coal nuggets (smokeless). The result? awesome, it takes a lot longer to get up to temperature, but once the coals are lit and glowing, they are utterly controllable and last for ages. Fantastic for a slow tickover though the day and though the night till morning. It's currently 5c outside the yurt and 25c inside, a nice cosy difference :)

I'm not totally sure what to do with the tonne of logs bought last month, maybe the weather will turn all Mongolian and the logs will be needed, who knows.

So, in a nutshell, if you're heating a yurt with a Prity FG15, use coal, it rocks!

The crown cover is holding out very nicely, no unravelling or fraying, the Toyota sewing machine did a fine job. For some reason, all the earwigs have abandoned yurt, there used to be loads of them under the bands that go round the outside to hold the covers in place, now there are none. Are earwigs migratory?

Rebuilding the crown cover.

2010-10-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Unfotunately, Mongolian webbing is crap, not a well known fact but there it is, it's pants. After less than 4 months outside, it has copped some UV damage from hell and has turned to powder, literally powder, you can pinch it with your fingers and it will crumble. Given that a large part of the structure of the crown cover depends heavily on nylon webbing, this is rather a big deal. The trim that stiffens the edges and stops the cover flapping had gone, and more importantly, the loops that held the ropes to keep the cover on the crown and the rain OUT of the yurt were beginning to snap.
Not being one to dwell on such things, I decided to buy some pukka UK sourced webbing from http://www.acesupplies.co.uk and spent a good few hours replacing every single bit of crumbling webbing on the crown cover. I hope no one reading this ever has to do the same, but if you are in the same situation, leave a message or email me and I can take you though the steps. It can be done with a standard home sewing machine and medium thread, no industrial machine is needed.
It all looks great now, lovely white cover with a black webbing trim. Sorted.

Next stop, the hunt for a decent leisure battery to power the smaller yurt appliances.

First nights.

2010-10-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Finally, last weekend and this weekend I got the spend a couple of nights in the yurt, and what a difference a week makes. Last week I made the MASSIVE mistake of lighting a fire in the woodburner before checking that it was actually cold enough outside to warrant a fire. In under 30 minutes the inside temperature was 40c and I was going mad with heat. Ended up sitting on the porch at 1am in my pants just trying to cool off and wait till the fire died off a bit.

This weekend was a little colder, so another fire was lit, and was going nicely (had jacket spuds in the woodburner oven, they were yummy!) so I shut it down to keep it going while a few other jobs were taken care of. Couple of hours later a friend tell me that she can hear the carbon monoxode detector going off in the yurt, this isn't good. The detector was indeed beeping like mad, I noticed that the smoke coming from the chimney had a strange plastic smell to it, so I inspected the wood and found that the offcuts that had been going on the fire were tannalised, the likely cuplrit for the fumes that freaked the detector out. Those bits will be outside use only from now on.

Anyhoo, once the fire had died, I felt safe to get some kip, except that it was still too hot, so I waited, then it got too cold, then it rained. It was like trying to sleep in a plastic cup.

I'm going to try some anthracite on the fire to see if it's any better at ticking over nicely and keeping the yurt warm over night.

Hot or cold, it soon pales into insignificance when you can fall asleep in your little round room that's lit by the moon.

New stove, all is well.

2010-10-04T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Prity arrived on Thursday, I only got my grubbies on it Saturday and I am quite impressed so far. Weighing in at 132kg, the Prity isn't light, or small, in fact it kind of dominates the yurt a bit with it's 93sm height, but I'm fine with that, the requirements were control, heat and cooking, not aesthetics, and the Prity has all three and doesn't look too bad. It fired up in no time with a couple of pound shop firelighters and some bits of pallet. The instructions state that the paint has to cure during the first use of the fire, so I opened the crown cover to let the no doubt toxic paint fumes out. Once that was over, a couple of MASSIVE chunks of wood went on and it was time to see how it dealt with slow burn. It dealt very well in fact, after shutting off the air and leaving the fire to smoulder over night, the Prity totally consumed about a cubic foot of decent quality seasoned wood by morning, just fine ash was left.
The oven part got to 200c according to the internal dial, plenty hot enough to do pizza or spuds. The top of the fire is quite large, it would be nice if it all got hot enough to cook on because it could easily accomodate three or four big pans. Time will tell I guess.
Yet AGAIN the silicon flue that mounts in the crown cover, split. That's the second one now, I'm starting to suspect that the markings on the silicon should be ignored and that it would be better to merely cut the collar to 1" smaller than the flue and leave it at that. For now I have just pumped a whole tube of clear silicon into the gap to seal it against rain till next weekend. I'll see how it deals with heat later.
You really can't beat a night in a yurt, the owls hooting and a beautiful fire flickering away in front of you, it's mesmerising.

Mongol Logic.

2010-09-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

After stumbling onto this site, I saw that the author mentioned thermos flasks (or "flarks" as they are called in North London) and their use in Mongolian yurts, thinking about it, it makes perfect sense really, rather than boil a bit of water every time someone pops in for tea and something make from horse milk, you boil a batch in the morning and store it, ready for use, in the flask. Maybe we have become so used to instant hot water all the time, that we fail to see the common sense in simpler solutions. anyone who has boiled water on a woodburner will appreciate the massive amount of energy needed to boil just one litre of water.
Anyhoo, this is my chosen flask, the Thermos Venice...
Obviously I filled it with boiling water immediately (after pre heating first) to see how it did. The answer is pretty damned good, it was filled with boiling water at 3pm, I dropped the thermopile into it at 10:30pm and it showed 76c, highly respectable, and that was after pulling enough water for 2 mugs of coffee from it. I'll do another temp check in the morning to see how it's doing.

*Morning*

10am and it's managed to hold 56c, that's about the same temperature as a cuppa that's been left for 15 minutes. Add in the chill factor of the mug, 56c isn't really enough unless I use plastic mugs from now on. Either way, 17 hours later and still steaming is very respectable.

New Stove AHOY!

2010-09-28T03:01:00.000-07:00

After much faffing and research, I decided to buy a Prity FG W15 with boiler and stove for £500. Here's a picture.

It doesn't seem to have the kind of burn control features that some of the more expensive, non oven, types of stoves have, but then again, you can't do jacket spuds or pizza on them unless you splash out £1800 on a Clearview (and that's simply not going to happen). Anyway, the Prity has a dial, and I'm a bloke, blokes are suckers for dials. End of.

Hopefully the weather at the weekend will hold out, the crown cover will need removing to open up the silicon flue seal a bit to accomodate the 1" bigger pipe and some jiggery pokery will need to take place to get the stove in a nice position, the Mongol stove flue exits on the right rear corner, conveniently exiting though one of the gaps in the crown, this stove exits in the middle, so it will need a couple of bends put in to get the flue leaving the yurt in the right place while at the same time, placing the stove right in front of the comfy chair so I can watch bread cook.

Hopefully arriving Friday, yaay!

The Hunt for a New Stove

2010-09-24T03:23:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong at all with the stove supplied (free I may add) with my yurt, that is assuming that it's -40c outside. It fires up instantly, has a great draw and chucks out more heat than a nuclear reactor, therein lies the rub, it's too hot, too soon, too fast. I'm on the lookout for something more controllable, something that will tick over though the night and prevent the hilarious problem of dead arms, a phenomenon whereby you subconsciously put your arms outside of the duvet while it's warm, then fall asleep in the ever diminishing warmth, only to discover the next morning that both your arms are freezing cold and have no feeling in them for the first 10 minutes of the day, essentially leaving you with the feeling of having 2 damp baguettes hanging from your shoulders.
Ideally, the new stove should have some sort of pizza or jacket potato making facility, contenders for this are:

Windy Smithy Louis or Ranger
Clearview Pioneer
Something from Prity

Admittedly, the Prity does tick all the boxes, and then some, but is 2mm steel going to hack it in the long run? Biggest concern here is build quality.

The Windy Smithy, while undoubtedly well made by all accounts, is quite pricey (well it's not Chinese so it's bound to be) but I'd like to know if the little fire box can actually put out enough heat over a long enough period of time to cook my spuds.

The Clearview looks perfect, but at £1800 new, it's almost 2/3 of a yurt!!

I have to admit that option paralysis appears to be setting in.

Finally, we have a yurt in it's rightful place.

2010-09-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

Well, after the veritable disaster of realising that we had built the base too small for the yurt (my fault) and after putting extensions and reinforcements on to the base to accomodate the sudden dawning of the laws of scale, we have success, the yurt is up!!!

It seems much harder to dress a raised yurt than one that is at ground level, the felt layers were particularly pesky, but it's all up and once the fire is blazing away, it's easily the cosiest place I've ever been. The woodburner that was included with the yurt is rough and ready (hardly surprising given the lack of TIG welders in Mongolia) but is ferociously efficient. a handful of broken pallet and a few pine cones to get things going will bring the temperature from 15c to 30c in 15 mins, and will keep the inside cosy warm for a good three hours. Hardly surprising when you consider that none of the covers are particularly good conductors of heat and that each one has a layer of air next to it.

Weatherproofing the bottom of the door has been tricky, but was finally sorted by using a baton of wood and some thick PVC sheet/silicone, to create a slope away from the door.

The steps up to the door are just half round posts hammered into the ground with what appears to be reclaimed hardwood for the platform, the first step is made from a couple of bits of telegraph pole that were left over from making the base and a lovely lump of wood left over from the joist we chopped up to reinforce the base extension. It's solid as a rock and really adds to the vibe of the yurt, it's somewhere to sit and just watch the rabbits or listen to the owls (you can hear them from inside too). It's real quality time, a couple of storm lamps for light, a lovely warm fire and good company, you can't beat it.

Yay! Yurt's up!

2010-06-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

Temoporarily though, it will be stripped and rebuilt soon, when the base is finished.

Useful advice from Mr Scarlett, yurtmaster.

2010-04-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

Good news from the chap who runs the company that made my yurt, a bit of camel hide stretch shouldn't wreck things too much, I'll just shore up the numbers with leather laces or paracord and hopefully it'll all be fine. I'm intending to cover the inside of the walls to some extent, being a veggie, the idea of what is basically camel bacon holding my walls together is a bit icky. Also out of the window is the idea of a side exit fire, Tim (who knows his yurts) says that it's not a good idea in the long run and can lead to cold spots around the yurt. Looking at it logically, I have to agree. The fire will go in the middle and the crown will be adapted to offer ventilation, a flue AND weather proofing at the same time. I was thinking that 12v PC fans mounted into the perspex windows and running off the solar panel would do the job of constantly moving air though the yurt, even on overcast days, the draw on PC fans is minimal. In addition to that, it may have a mega-turbo extractor (12v) taken from an old ambulance to evacuate wood smoke and chilli smoke.
Might set up a dry run this weekend with all 4 khana and the door, just to get an approximate circle size before we take the router to the wooden base. It's all very exciting!

2010-04-19T15:01:00.001-07:00

More pictures...

Yurt holiday photos.

2010-04-19T14:56:00.001-07:00

One of the girls at work has been kind enough to forward me some photos of her Easter yurt holiday with www.wowo.co.uk. The yurt shown is the Alice Yurt (no felt lining, hence reports of cold noses in the night) but it looks lovely nonetheless. I am particularly taken by the boot racks and the wood burner off to one side, freeing up LOADS of interior space.

2010-04-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

Dave has been slogging away while I plant runner beans and glue the windows into my yurt crown. The decision to buy cheap floor boards is one that will bug me for some time to come. The boards to the front and rear of the base are solid, the ones to either side have very little support and will need shoring up and strengthening. I'll take some pics when the supports are done.

The khana walls came out of storage today, unfortunately, I had them stored on their sides and not upright, this resulted in some of the camel hide strips holding the lattice batons together stretching and popping their knots off. I'm hoping that stretched strips doesn't mess things up too muich when it comes to putting the walls up. for the record, they SHOULD be stored up against a wall, with the bend facing inwards to the wall. The camel hide strips are also succeptible to some kind of mad camel pinhead mould if kept in damp conditions (like the back of my truck). No damage was done by the mould though, time will tell if my stupidity in the incorrect storage of the walls has done any damage. I'll email Tim (Yurtsdirect) and seek his advice.

2010-04-13T01:08:00.000-07:00

Just a short vid of the base so far, a quick walk around showing the construction and the beautiful location.

2010-04-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

Getting there with the floor. With hindsight, maybe I should have spent more on proper floorboards instead of buying 10mm pine cladding. Still, they are going on reasonably well and Dave (my woodworker chum) is doing a sterling job of working with wood that is warped on more than one plane in some cases. The floorboards have been in the back of s truck over winter, I dare say that didn't help much.

Anyway, more pics.

2010-04-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

This is the foreman keeping everyone on their toes (just pointing out which screw has to go in next)

2010-04-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

Getting there.

2010-04-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

More pics. Got the outriggers done today and just put in the first floorboard. The problem of the base being too big in the corners has been overcome by dint of some creative engineering and BFO turbo bolts.

Base update.

2010-04-08T11:16:00.000-07:00

Finally, some decent weather meant the tarp came off and we could start again. All is not well, however, after finding the centre of the main joist and connecting an 8ft string (well chain actually) is turns out that the overall size of the current base is larger than the flooring will be. This is a problem because the yurt's waterproof layer is meant to drop over the edge of the floor to stop rain entering. It's causing a slight delay because we are having to cut the corners off the base, corners which are essential to the stability of the yurt because they are sitting on posts, and put in cross members to rest on the posts.

Will Renner.

2010-04-01T02:16:00.000-07:00

Friend of mine at work gave me this a while back, it's a short article on Will Renner's battle to stay in his yurt, quite rightly, he won.

It's covered in detail here too (BBC link) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/8317435.stm

I intend to look into the legalities of yurt living and post up info here. Personally I think councils should actively encourage low impact living, maybe the best for of defence, is attack.

The adventure begins :o)

2010-03-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

You know how it is, you wake up one day, check your emails, casually browse the internet and decide that you NEED a yurt. So I bought one. Right, that's the reason out of the way, now for the interesting part.

I bought my yurt from http://www.yurtsdirect.com/ , it's a 16 footer in orange with lovely windowed doors and beautifully decorated woodwork. I must stress that it's not up yet, I started the raised base a couple of months before winter and it's been on hold since.

Just for the record, this ^ is the yurt I bought, same colour, same size.

...and this ^ is how I got it home. Ok, so it's not a yak and a wooden wheeled trailer, but it's as close as I could get at the time.

The Base.
I wanted a raised base because the land it's on is a little boggy sometimes and a space under the floor would provide a handy storage area for wood and the like. It's on 9 piles made from a single ex British Telecom telegraph pole that I bought from a very helpful and intersting chap in Lincoln. The reason I went with a telegraph pole is that a) It was £30. and b) They are dripping in creosote, right to the middle, and will withstand many years of being half buried.
It's actually not that easy to position 9 poles, in the ground, an equal distance away from each other and the centre pole AND have them all level, but after a day of messing around and much confusion, they were all whacked into place and the gaps round them filled with earth. That was it for about 2 months while it rained, and rained, and rained. The poles look like they are leaning out, it's just an illusion, no really, they're fine.

Here is the discussion with the UK's top mathematicians that was needed in order to discover the secret angle hidden in the outrigger posts.

http://www.therevcounter.com/general-mayhem/42766-basic-mathematical-laws-circles-needed.html

It's worth pointing out that Mongolians would probably have a cow if they saw me digging great big holes in mother earth for the piles to go in, they have a great deal more respect for the planet than many (myself included), but they live on the permafrost of Mongolia, not the swamps of East Anglia. My apologies to any outraged Mongolians, I'm not a bad person really.

While it was raining, I manged to pick up a bargain in the joist department, all the 9x2 needed for the base for £100. I forget how many it was, it was enough anyway. Getting the joists all sorted took a few weekends. Luckily help was at hand in the form of a friend who has been in the quality building trade for years, otherwise I'd still be staring at 9 lumps of telegraph pole and a spade.
Main joists were put down, outriggers bolted on, many many noggins screwed in place and we now have what must be the most solid yurt base in the world.

This is a plan of the base, the circle (red) is 16ft (to scale) and each oblong represents a 2440mm by 1220mm sheet of plywood, the noggins are not in this drawing, it was only later that my friend suggested they would be needed. I found it useful to plan how much I'd need to cover the floor before the pine planks go on the floor. It might not even need plywood because the spans on the joists are so small, the 12mm pine planks might be on their own, just screwed in. Time will tell I guess.

And that's as far as we have got. Hopefully with the improving weather, the base will be finished this week and MAYBE the yurt can go up. Might have to make a few calls to get some friends in though, it's a big job for a first timer.