More Wood Works Dear Bill, Your "Wood Heating News" in the August/September issue of RAIN was indeed welcome, particularly the remarks on. chimney maintenance and on the poor qµali,ty of the ·copies of the Scandinavian stoves. These copies have got to be one of the biggest ripoffs around-they are a waste of money at any price. You mentioned two new stoves from Washin'gton Stove Works, but did not mention three new airtight cast iron stoves being made on the East Coast which in our opinion are far superior to those being made by Washington Stove Works. The first cast iron airtight stov~·to come on the market was the Defiant, which is assembled in Randolph, Vermont. The Crest by Washington Stove Works is merely a poor copy of the Defiant-Vermont Castings'brought suit against Washington Stove Works about a year ago and the two finally reached - an out-of-court settlement. The second truly airtight cast iron stove made in America was the Cawley/LeMay. Assembled in Pennsylvania, the Cawleys are very large, Americanized versions of the Scandinavians-the large Cawley weighs in at 385 pounds versus the J<t>tul 118's 231 pounds. Cawley and LeMay tried to ring a few improvements on the Scandinavians to make their stoves more appealing t9 Americans-like bigger fireboxes and two cooking rings in the top. The Comforter came on the market last winter aµd has proveri to be a well-made and popular airtight version of the. American parlor stove. The Comforter was designed and marketed by Abundant Life Farm, one of New Hampshire's biggest stove dealers. The Comforter uses a baffle with a·Ven-: turi slot, has a pre-hea~ing chamber like the Scandinavians and has a flue outlet low enough to fit into most fireplace openings. The castings are 1/4-inch thick and malleable iron is used at all the stress points. From all indications there will be a few more airtight cast irons on the market this winter, with a few of them being American-made. It has taken several years for high qualitycast iron airtight stoves made in America to hit the market, because it takes at least two years to design·, build and market• a good stove. Steel stoves, on the other hand, hit the market· almost overnight, and die almost as fast. It is encouraging that a few American-made ·airtight cast iron stoves are now availaable, but only time will tell whether they will last over the long haul. Sincerely, Carl English Homestead Stove Co. Camas, Washington 98607 Pushing Passive Dear Rain: -October 1978 RAIN Page 21 I want to make sure you know ahout David Wright's book, Natural Solar Architecture, a passive primer, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978., 250 pp., $7.95. I'm impressed by it- it's a comprehensive introduction to techniques and consid~rations. Passive solar needs plenty of support and education. It seems to have a way of falling between the cracks of Americ_an consciousness and organization. It's difficult to measure the impact-of use of passive design, ,but it's easy to count the number of square feet of active _collectors, so energy analysts in their studies and forecasts usually don't bother with passive (after all, the purpose of any study is to come up with hard numbers, right?). Business,_looking for what it can sell, labor, looking_fpr what it can make, and consumer, looking for what he can buy, all relate immediately to active hardware. Passive, being an approach, rather than a tangible, visual thing, can't even _be advertised on TV and magazines (or shown to neighbors) like collectors can. And after all, anything truly decentralist and self-reliant almost by pefinition serves no organized interest group (except architects, I guess). I'm bothered that we seem to be headed toward a great cop~out: "Buy this fancy solar system and you'll never have to think about energy and you can keep doing every.thing exactly like you're used to." Sincerely, Walter Epp San Francisco You Can't Take the Suburbs with You Dear Rain: Judy Gordon's letter in your June issue hit a nerve. As a professional land use planner, I sometimes spend my mornings figuring out how to keep productive land i~ agriculture and my afternoons figuring out what to do about fertilizer in the drinking water. The in_consistency of doing this does not escape me ... But, lest Ms. Gordon and others among your readers brand me (and my professional colleagues) as insensitive to appropriate technologies and the sanity of deceD:tralization, let me say this. We can't plan for a rural society of Jeffersonian yeomen with composting privies, solar collectors and organic gardens when what we get is a rural society of motorbike cowboys who poison their 1-10 acre tracts far more i_ntensively than a wo.rking farmer could afford to do. The conventional wisdom of trying to increase density by preserving agricultural land or other means m·ay weigh heavily against the would-be homesteader. It, also, keeps a lot of sewage out of the groundwater, a lot of tax dollars out of school busses, snow plows and farranging water lines, and a 1qt of energy out of sprawling power: lines and long-distance commuting. The low density of settlement that is, perhaps, prerequisite tq the society id~alized by Jefferson (and later agrarian decentralists) is, unfortunately, just as well suited to highly consumptive lifestyles. The issue is not as simple as a choice between organic gardens and agribusiness (or a "nice cover crop of we.eds"). Until the things I see in RAIN are common practice, not just corhmon sense, land use planning is going to have to make the best of a bad situation. I don't think we do that by spreading our problems out. Yours for the best we can do today and a little bit better tomorrow, . Lee Nellis Basin, Wyoming
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