Back in 2004 which unbeknownst to me was during the spike in natural gas prices, I moved a big old house in Northfield Minnesota to an even bigger old house in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin.  We moved in January and so the first gas bill we got was the February bill.  It was just over nine hundred dollars.  I almost needed to call in the paramedics when The Wife opened up that bill.  She told me, you have to find a cheaper way to heat this barn, or we are going to have to move.   I was motivated, because I never want to move with this woman again.

I did some looking around for more efficent gas boilers but everything was super expensive.  And, maybe not that much better than we already had.  It wasn't until Easter, when I was at my nephew's house that I saw the solution.  There sitting in his 75 degree living room was a corn burning stove!  He was burning the corn he raised and paying nothing for heating fuel.

I did a little bit of research and purchased and had installed a Traeger TPB-150 boiler to sit in series with my gas burning boiler.  I bought some corn.  Some lighter fluid and a bag of pellets to start the fire.  I read the owner's manual.  I think there was a whole page on starting the fire and fine tuning and running the boiler.  I thought I was ready.  I wasn't.

My day job is building and maintaining computer systems and web sites.  So when I was sitting down in my basement lighting those first fires, with The Wife standing over my shoulder saying "Is it supposed to do that?".  I was coming to realize my manual wasn't cutting it, I took to the net to find answers.  What I found was nothing.  There was no good information about running a corn burner in the way I was doing it.  The term Blog hadn't really been invented yet, but when a frustrated writer can't find information, he begins to write it.  I started a web site.