Heat

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Let's talk about baseboard, gas stove, wood stove, insulation, and fire extinguisher.

Heat raises the temperature. When heat is put into the mass of a house, the temperature of the house will raise. While heaters produce heat for the house, the house is constantly losing heat from the openings, windows, doors, roofs, walls, and floors. Preventing heat loss is equal to generate more heat.

The cottage has insulations installed on the roof, in the walls, and underneath the floor. Insulations slow down the heat loss. Hardwood floor is a good insulator, additionally, you can put on a layer of area carpet to further slow down the heat loss from the floor.

The amount of heat loss from convection is dependent upon the airflow. In order to further prevent heat loss, pay attention to these important details to prevent airflow. Take off the window mount air conditioner. Put on the glass panels for the windows, storm doors, and the sunroom outside the sliding door. Block the openings in the craw space. Put energy-saving films on the windows. Apply the plumbing pipes insulation and seal the gaps when they enter the house.
If the cottage is well insulated, you only need to generate little heat to raise the temperature. It is like dressing yourself with thick cloths. If you wear a thin cloth and have your naked feet exposed in the winter wind, you will be cold.

The main heat source for the cottage is the electric baseboards in the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, second bedroom, and the bathroom. The heaters use 220 volt AC, the switches are located on the switchboard. One 20 amp 220v switch can handle about 4000-watt total load (A typical electric oven runs on 2,500 to 5,000 watts). Whenever overloaded, the switch will automatically switch off. These baseboards in the bedroom and bathroom have Baseboard Thermostat installed, which controls the room temperature -- whenever the temperature is higher than the set level, the baseboard is switched off until the temperature is lower than the set level again.

The second heat source is an empire hot air gas stove located in the kitchen. You need to hire a plumber to lit up the fire for the gas stove for the winter. Don't forget about the propane gas oven in the kitchen. The heat released during cooking is exactly the same as the gas stove. You can use it as your heater if you like, the heat BTU released per gallon propane is the same, no matter you burn it with a gas stove or cooking oven. 

A little bit of information about the propane tank setup. There are a few options for propane supply. For basic cooking setup. You can call a propane company to have a 50 lb tank hook up. The company in the URL, for example, will send a technician to have the tank hook up. In the year 2020, the cost of installation and one-time tank rental fee is $69. The first full tank has 50 lb propane, which cost $6.10 per gallon. So between the time your first call to the propane company and the time you start cooking with propane gas, it is about 1 to 2 weeks away and cost $374 dollars. Propane Stove Ranges typically use 35 gallons per year, you probably only have to refill each year. If you buy your own propane tank, the cost of refilling for cooking is $5.85 per gallon. If you buy lots of propane for both heating and cook, the cost per gallon could be as low as ~$2, the price depends on the supplier and your negotiations.

As an emergency backup, when the house lost power, you can use the woodstove at the backyard to warm up the crawl space and the house, so that the plumbing system won't be damaged by the expanding ice in the pipes. Lit up campfires to cook waters and bring them into the bedroom, fill up the 5-gallon drinking water bottles, have them release heat slowly into the house.

Keep safety in mind, don't bring charcoal into the house, which releases CO, brings water into the house instead. The fire extinguisher is located in the kitchen. Also, don't forget to regularly check the CO and smoke detectors at the door of the two bedrooms.

The hidden heat sources are the cooking wares, the hot water tank, and light fixtures. When you cook with an induction stove, gas stove, microwaves, slow cookers, rice cookers, they all released heat. The hot water tank in the bathroom is also releasing heat into the house all the time. Even the lighting fixtures, computers, and fans in the house are producing heat. In short, any form of energy eventually reduces into heat. Check your electric meter outside of the master bedroom, that is the total amount of heat eventually input into your house from electricity -- it includes heaters, ovens, cookers, refrigerators, fans, pumps, lights, whatever using electricity as power source produced heat for the house.

Beyond the heat produced by electricity, the heat can also come from the gas stove's burning, wood stoves burning and heat released from your and your pets' body after digesting food. This heat came from chemical reactions.

Finally, the heat can be input from the environment even during cold winter. The sun's radiation entering the windows and sliding doors can warm the house up. The heat from the inner earth is pumped into the pipes in the house from the well water. As a matter of fact, your well pump is also a Geothermal Heat Pump. Don't under-estimate the heat from well water, water has a very high heat capacity -- it needs 1 BTU to heat 1 pound of water 1F up (0.156 for cement, 0.3 for wood). For 50F well water, before it freezes at 32F, it releases 18 BTU per pound, the same amount of BTU needed to heat 1 square foot of floor for an hour!