Stacking wood and staying warm: The rhythms of domestic wood-based heating practices

EASST 2012

Jenny Rinkinen & Mikko Jalas

Aalto University School of Business

Outline

• Wood-based heating – Interesting?

• Conceptual framework: temporal order in everyday life

• Data• Temporal order of wood-based heating • Conclusions

Wood-based heating systems: interesting?• Dominant renewable energy source in detached houses

– 20-25% of detached houses use wood as primary energy source

– Increase in use of wood by 20% in last 15 years

• The backbone of new hybrid solutions

• Rich and deeply ingrained energy practice, an example of what it is to be ‘visible’

The technical aspects of wood-based heating• Volume&weights – typical annual consumption of 2000L

oil = 8000kg/20m3 of stacked, dry wood.

• In Finland, frequently sourced from ‘own’ forests.

• Tiled ovens, cast iron stoves, baking ovens and saunas are all in frequent use

• Dedicated central boiler room as a more recent innovation, pellets in Finland (still) marginal

• Not convenient and yet widely used

Temporal ordering of everyday life

• Sequence (flow) of related activities• Periodicity (rhythm) of reoccuring sequences• Synchronization (timing) of sequences in respect to

each other

• Tempo (rush/calm), the experience of time

(Lauer 1980, Zerubavel 1979&1985, Fine 1990, Southerton 2006)

Data

-30c

• Large set of diaries from 2.2.1999 and 2.2.2009 collected by Finnish ethnologists. – We have apprx. 100 excerpts that explicitly

describe wood-based heating practice

• Interviews and personal experience

Sequence

• The harvesting in the winter time– In remote locations; only couple of hours at the time; mornings

• Chopping soon after– Closer to the house/summer cottage – on ad hoc bases– Left outside to dry in loose piles

• In the summer wood is stacked indoors or under cover• Weekly/daily hauling of wood indoors

• Making the fire, stoking it, controlling the registers

• Removing the ashes

Periodicity − rhythm

• The annual cycle

• Daily rhythm fits to the hours of absence and hours of sleep; mornings starts with a fire, evening ends with a fire

• Buffers regulate rhythms and yield flexibility– Firewood reserves often cover the need for 1-2 years or more– ’Proper’ baking ovens manage two days even during cold spells– Central boilers are lighted once or twice a day, even more

frequently

• Longer periods of absence require alternative heat sources

Synchronization

• Coordination is needed to bring together helping hands, tractors and skidoos for harvesting

• Multitasking inside– Coffee brewing, baking, laundry and getting clean

• Multible benefits outside– Recreation, excercise, leisure travel, socialising

• Dedicated boiler room as a clear problemAt eleven o’clock I rise and lumber to the boiler room. I stop at the door: room is death silent and the air control is open. Didn’t the damn thing light in the morning? I gauge the thermometer and my head records the figure of 40c as I open the hatch. Few cinders glow in the empty boiler fire place. It has burned a full load wood in two hours. Molok mouth! … [Later during the day the same happens again ] I try to care for the heating, but after ironing and preparing batter for creps the fire has again used all wood. (SKS Diary 1999/42336.)

Tempo: time as a subjective experience

• Emerges in the diaries as, e.g., fluent flow, idleness of observing or as stress of falling behind the schedules

‘ I step out of the cow shed into the bright morning around 10.00 o’clock. I get a handful of firewood for the kitchen and a large bag of wood for the tiled ovens of the living rooms. The husband has brought in the logs for the baking oven. I clean up, change clothes and eat breakfast. I light up the fireplace and the tiled ovens in two living rooms. I call my mother-in-law and ask her when I should take her to the doctor. I notice that I have time to begin the cleaning of the house. There I go, carpets of living rooms and the bed linen to air outside, sheets to the washing machine, vacuum cleaning, wiping of dust and washing of the floors, and four rooms have been cleaned. I warm up the fish soup from yesterday and we eat. I take a quick shower, hop in the car and drive 7 km distance to the village center where the mother-in-law lives in a terrace house.’ (SKS Diary woman/2009)

Conclusions I: wood - based heating practices • Not convenient• Doable because of

– Buffers of heat and fuel and back-up systems offer flexibility– Spatial integration & multitasking– Orchestrated fluency, little need of planning

• Desirable because of– Rhytmicity&routine– Cultural embeddedness – e.g. the baking oven suggests menus– Social relations are enacted through heating (c.f labour of love)– Empowerment and autonomy

Conclusions II: lessons for disseminating new energy technologies

• Novelties often need to present themselves as convenient. Alternative logics only develop later.

• Yet also novelties imply temporal structures: – What kinds of procedures and rhythms are involved? – What kind of marks do new system leave on the calendar?

What kind of appointments does the technology require and produce?

– How are divisions such work/leisure and gender reproduced through the system?

Thanks for your attention!