Wood Stove in an A-Frame Trailer - Part 1

Well hello folks! Guess what? It's starting to get to be winter and I'm happy about that. I'm kind of excited. I've been waiting quite a few months for this this moment to happen and I know a lot of people are saying no way in hell they don't want anything to do with cold and snow and they all head south and good luck to them. I know they're going to be happy and I do that sometimes but this time I was just waiting to get somewhere really cold and this is about it. Now as far as I'm concerned it's cold but I call it wussy cold because let me just show you it is zero degrees celsius which is 32 degrees fahrenheit. I'll get that a little closer there so hopefully you can see that. Now that's not really cold. I mean I don't even need a a toque or a hat or anything like that and these gloves are kind of overkill but tonight it'll be a little colder. The sun's going to go down it's probably going to be a clear sky. Anyway one of the reasons I'm out here is pretty obvious because if anybody has seen my videos on making a wood stove part one to part two and part three there was one thing missing and that's when I said that I was going to use that stove to heat up my trailer and it was pretty obvious why I couldn't do that video before is because I did it in the summertime and so the trailer was already hot. There was nothing I could prove but now that it's actually going to be below freezing during the day and during the night then I have reason to try to heat up the trailer. Now I haven't been able to test this. I haven't actually used the stove since I think August so it's going to be a first time for me as well but I think I've got it all together. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed. I don't know if you can see it in the gloves but I've got my fingers crossed and we'll see how it goes. Good or bad it's going to be on the videos but I've got to do a few modifications to the stove itself before I can do that and one is intake. The original air intake I only put three holes in not enough airflow. I'm going to put two more in here and here and that'll help on that but I also have to put a can on the door and I'll show you why later on but before I get any further I got to get this out of the way. Anybody that tries to put a wood stove in a trailer that's not supposed to have a wood stove is taking a humongous risk. It's a dumb thing to do if you don't know what you're doing. You could get hurt. You could die. You could burn your trailer down. There's a multitude of reasons why you should not do it. It's probably illegal in some places and even if it does work chances are there's a lot of campsites that won't let you do it. So we got that out of the way. No more whining and complaining. Can I carry on? Yeah carry on Slim. Okay let's go for it. So first things first let's go inside the trailer. Now one thing you'll probably notice is that there are no signs of a stove. What are you doing to us Slim? That's because my trailer folds down. There's no way I'd be putting a stove in place because there's no room for it. So first thing is is to take it out of storage. I figure the best place to put it is where my shower is. So there it is. Where's the wood stove going to be? Same place as my old stove except I bring that up. I've got an end support because there's nothing in this corner. An oven tray and the stove. For me the biggest challenge of putting a wood stove in a fold-up trailer was where does the stove pipe go? Where does it exit? And some people thought about using the window or the door or something like that. But for me it was always pretty obvious. I wanted to use the vent. Unfortunately the original vent that came with the trailer would not accommodate a stove pipe. So what did I do? I totally redesigned the vent and you'll be seeing a lot more about this in the future. But let me show you how this works. Vent's out and this is my new vent. So I've just made a very temporary device to hold the metal vent on. I'll improve on this later on but we're only in the testing stage. But here's my stove pipe. I've already unrolled it and braced it. So first step is in it goes. And I got to make sure I don't lose any of the rings as I bring it up. Okay and then put it on the stove. Okay and just make sure everything is even. What I'm trying to do is I think by now the titanium stove pipe has formed well. And so what I'm hoping at least is there's going to be minimal amount of smoke. But only testing is going to tell. So I pulled the stove back just a little bit because the stove pipe was too close to this plastic rim. I think that should be okay but we're going to see. The next step is I've got this big area of metal which is going to suck all my heat out. So I need insulation. And what I've come up with it kind of looks like a travel pillow like the ones you see on flights. But what it is is fiberglass with aluminum foil. It's not perfect. I would probably prefer like rock wool or something like that. But we're in testing stage don't forget. So let's see how this will work first and then I can improve on it later on. Now I've got to take this off in order to get it in. So it might be a challenge getting this to fit. But let's see if I can do it. Yeah it's a little bit awkward but I've got to start somewhere. That'll at least trap some of the heat that would escape out that metal vent. Now this is Dennis the hopper and in my last video I had him at that height and I just used a cap. But what I'm going to try later on, not right now, is I've just got a little bit of an extension which I can put on there. And I'm hoping that gives me maybe three hours at least before I have to put more pellets in. Sun's going down. It's going to be dark. I've got to do a primary test first. So I'm only going to put a small amount of pellets at first just to see how it performs. I've got a fire extinguisher by the door. If there's any issues I've got a clean path to get out of here. But right now I'm just going to check out what the temperature is inside so we have a basis. And right now if you can read that okay it says 29.1 degrees. That's the temperature inside right now. So it's below freezing. But I'm going to take this and we're just going to do one scoop and that's all. Well that's not a lot. Let's do two scoops. There. That's enough to to fill up the cage. So if there's any issues I can stop the whole experiment. But that's what I'll start off with. And I don't know where I'm going to have my bed. I don't know how hot this is going to be. So I might be sleeping here or I might be sleeping over there. That's why I haven't set up the desk or anything. Let's just wait and see what happens. Well here we go folks. It's the live test.