Hey d, you may be aware of some of my crustier views on "prairie restoration" from elsewhere on GW, but truth be told, I am involved in a great deal of prairie maintenance, including burns. We contract much of our maint. work out and to a very good firm I might add. FWIW-and this could be a regional specificity-spring is when the vast majority of prairie burns take place for us here in the north. One of our goals with these burns is to inhibit cool-season grasses, many of which are non-native, and therefore on our bad list. It's always a balancing act between getting conditions suitable for these burns, not having valuable native forbs coming up yet (nearly impossible, I'm afraid) and hopefully having a good stand of the cool-season junk present to get nipped by the flames. I'd be interested in hearing your-or anyone's really-account of what objectives are met by fall burning. And to be complete, some fall burning can and does take place up here. I've never requested it personally in our system but I came close this year, with a big "flood storage area" that is exhibiting poor plant community make-up at present. We've since come up with another plan, so no fall burn there-otherwise we'd have done so. If you have the time, would you lay out your objectives with a fall burn? I know woody "invaders"-a highly nuanced term in my book!-are likely one of your targets. anything else at this time of year? Thanks, +oM

There is much debate on the longevity of both CD-R's and CD-RW's. The technology of burning a CD-RW is not magnetic, like a hard drive, but based on melting a dye layer, and re-melting it each time you burn to it. My opinion is that, if you are re-melting this layer many times, eventually some areas may degrade and affect your data/pictures. For stuff that's important to me, like pictures, I burn once to a CD-R. I think it's false economy to keep re-using rewritable discs, given how cheap discs are.

We are adding on a 20x20 which will run int a great room; same story. Having done the research and purchase, we've learned quite a bit. How much are you willing to spend? Will the unit be placed on an external wall? How large will the hearth area be?

How high is your solar installation? 30 GPM seems a bit low if the panels are elevated. If the panels do not fully prime, the flow rate calculation could be thrown off by the change in head loss. What is the filter PSI when the panels are on? How many sq-ft are the panels? Most manufactures recommend 1 GPM for every 10 sq-ft of panels.