OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS by Peter Jakey
Beat the heat bill? A corn furnace may be the answer
A cold January wind blew hard outside of the 102-year-old Moltke Township farmhouse of Marlowe and Sue Paul, but you couldn?t tell inside because it was so toasty warm. No extra layer of clothing was needed here. With a 3,000 square foot home, it would be safe to say that their home heating bills would have already gone through the roof. People who are serviced by natural gas were fall-off-the-chair shocked when bills arrived in the mail last month, and with December being extremely cold, pocketbooks could take a bigger hit this month. The Pauls may have found an answer with the installation of a clean-burning corn furnace, which is costing them about $82 a month to operate. The Pauls burn about a ton of corn a month. A hopper filled with dried corn is funneled into the device by an auger. The shelled corn is burned, supplying the heat to a furnace, where the warm air is distributed to the main floor of the house.
?When Underwriter?s Laboratories did the testing, they said it was the safest furnace they have ever tested, because when the power goes out, there is no more air going to the corn, so the fire just dies out,? said Paul. Paul, who has been heating his home with the corn furnace for the last three years and has become a franchise dealer, learned about them from family friend Scott Brege, who has had a corn furnace for eight years.
?I had to go and look because I was a skeptic,? said Paul, who was sold on the device. The corn furnace burns about two bushels a day, he said. An acre and a half of corn will cover the Pauls for the winter. The winter supply is being stored in a barn on their property. While Marlowe owns a farm, he doesn?t have the equipment to grow the corn for use in his furnace. He buys the corn from a local dealer. The only problem he has had is the refilling of the hopper. He plans on solving that by putting up a larger hopper next to his home, which will feed the corn right into the basement, making the device relatively maintenance free. While the price of natural gas has gone up the last two years, the price of corn went down in a year.
?Last year I paid $90,? said Paul. ?The yield was just phenomenal this year, so that brought the price of corn down. With what was going on in New Orleans they couldn?t ship the corn out, Canada banned our corn from going over there, so they aren?t taking our corn.? Paul talked with a farmer downstate who is selling the corn for $54 a ton. ?So I could heat my home for $54 a month,? said Paul. ?Corn will always be cheaper than fuel.? Paul is preside
?Speaking of fuel prices, the cost of unleaded fuel dipped to $2.28 a gallon in the area, and then shot up to $2.39 before the New Year?s weekend. Maybe it?s time for oil executives to appear before Congress again, because it?s about the only time the price seems to go down. OPEC increased its output during the hurricane crisis last year, but it did little to bring prices down. Bring oil executives to Capitol Hill to ask them why their profits are in the billions, and the price will probably inch downward again.
?From my file of dumb criminals come these dandies: Police in Portsmouth, Rhode Island charged Gregory Rosa, 25, with a string of vending machine robberies in January when he: 1. fled from police inexplicably when they spotted him loitering around a vending machine and 2. later tried to post his $400 bail in coins. An unidentified man in Buenos Aires pushed his wife out of an eighth-floor window but his plan to kill her failed when she became entangled in some power cables below. Seeing she was still alive, the man jumped and tried to land on top of her. He missed…