From Stillwater: 2015-10

This appears to be a collection of information from Jean Pickard of Brandon, Manitoba. She forwarded the material on to the Library of Medicine Hat. Thanks also to Kris Samraj from the Library who forwarded it to me./drf
English Writers in the Early West
By
BRUCE PEEL
Alberta Historical Review Volume 16, Number 2 SPRING, 1968
Mr. Peel is Librarian to the University of Alberta, Edmonton.
When our prairie region was a frontier, several Englishmen recognized its potentiality as a locale for stories of action and adventure. The stories these men wrote were juveniles and light fiction, but the books enjoyed a popularity among the reading public of Britain which enabled their writers to live by their pens. Most of these writers had two things in common: they had resided a few years in Western Canada, and they became professional writers after a first "western" revealed to them the saleability of frontier fiction.
The first writer I shall mention is R. M. Ballantyne, writer of some eighty books for boys. In 1841 at the age of sixteen Ballantyne became, apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company, and spent the next six years as a fur trader stationed at Norway House, York Factory, Fort Garry, and finally at Tadousac on the lower St. Lawrence. Ballantyne became a literary man almost by accident. When homesick he sat down and wrote long letters to his mother in Scotland, and it was to this apprenticeship that he later attributed his success as a professional writer.
The idea of a continuous narrative did not occur to him until he was stationed at Tadousac where he was without books, magazines, or amusement of any kind. But as he says he had ". . . pen and ink and by very good fortune was in possession of a blank paper book fully an inch thick." Knowing that his mother would read his narrative, he filled the notebook. Again quoting Ballantyne, "It was merely a free and easy record of personal adventure in everyday life, written like all else that I had penned solely for the uncritical eye of that long suffering and too indulgent mother."
When Ballantyne returned to Scotland his manuscript was handed about among relatives until it came to the attention of a cousin in the printing trade. The manuscript, first published by Blackwood's Magazine, appeared in 1850 in book form under the title Hudsons Bay. Ballantyne would probably never have written another book had not the publisher, William Nelson, suggested that he write a book for boys based on his adventures in the great lone land, and thus he wrote Snowflakes and Sunshine, or The Young Fur Traders. Since its appearance in 1856, this book has often been reprinted and still holds the interest of youth. His second book for boys was Ungava: A Tale of Eskimo Land, and thus R. M. Ballantyne was launched on his career as a writer of boys' action stories.
Two other writers of juveniles set on the Canadian prairies were a mother and son, the Saxbys. Mrs. Jessie Margaret Saxby, 1842-1940, was a native of the Shetland Islands off Scotland. When left a widow she took to writing to support her nine children. She wrote mostly history and folklore of the islands, and dabbled in fiction with a Scottish locale, but two of her books were juveniles set in the Canadian Northwest.
These latter books came about in this way. Two of her sons, Horace and Charles, had emigrated and settled in the Qu 'Appelle valley west of present day Lumsden. Mrs. Saxby, according to a Regina newspaper, visited her sons in the summer of 1888, and again in either 1889 or 1890. She came to the West commissioned by the Edinburgh Scotsman to report upon possibilities of the country for the emigration of British women. While in the West she gathered ideas for West-Nor-West published in 1890, and Brown Jack, a Tale of North West Canada which appeared six years later.
Her son Charles returned to Scotland within two or three years, but later used Northwestern Canada as the locale of five (and perhaps six) of the fifteen books to be found listed under the name C. F. Argyll Saxby in the Catalogue of the British Museum. The juveniles with the western locale were Braves, White and Red (1907), Taming of a Rancher (1909), Comrades Three (1910), The Call of Honour (1912), and The Fiery Totem (1913); as a subtitle each had a reference to adventure in the North-West or Prairies. The Settler of Serpent Creek (1921) probably had a Western Canadian locale also. Other of C. F. Argyll Saxby's stories had the Arctic, the Syrian desert, and Australia as settings. It was in the latter country that he finally settled as a congregational minister.
John Mackie, 1862-1939, was a Scotchman who left his homeland for Australia. Several years later, still seeking adventure, he came to Canada, and from 1888 to 1893 was a member of the North-West Mounted Police. While in the force, he wrote his first novel, The Devil’s Playground, a Story of the Wild North West took place in an area of southwestern Alberta so called because boulders left by receding glaciers suggested to the Indians that the Manitou had been playing a ball game of sorts. Mackie, encouraged by the success of this first novel, which went through several printings, wrote five other novels with a prairie setting between 1895 and 1905. Back in Scotland he became a distiller, and lost his interest in writing.
About the same time as Mackie, two other young men left Britain in search of adventure. These were Harold Bindloss and Ridgewell Cullum. The lives of Bindloss and Cullum closely parallel each other in that both spent some years in Africa, and then several in Western Canada; and both returned to Britain where they turned out great quantities of light fiction.
Harold Bindloss, 1866-1945, left Western Canada for Britain in 1896 to devote himself full-time to literature. More than a dozen of the three or four dozen novels he wrote have a prairie background for the plots, as titles such as the following suggest: A Sower of Wheat, Winston of the Prairie, Masters oj the Wheallands, Prescott of Saskatchewan. Most of his books with Canadian settings were written during, and about, the settlement of the Prairie Provinces. In southern Alberta a town, which never developed to more than a whistle-stop, was named in his honour. Of Bindloss' work, Kunitz in Twentieth Century Authors wrote: "His books have no particular depth, but they are lively and entertaining, and he has the gift of racy narrative and convincing background".
His contemporary was Ridgwell Cullum, 1867-1943. Reading his biography in Who’s Who one wonders if Cullum did not tend to over-dramatize his life in Africa and America. He is said to have been present when diamonds were found in the Transvaal, to have traded in darkest Africa, and have seen service in the Kaffir wars. He then shifted the scene of his activities to the Yukon and Alaska where he hunted and trapped, and once narrowly escaped death from starvation. Finally, before returning to England in 1904 Cullum spent some years in Montana as a rancher, during which period he participated in the suppression of the later Indian uprisings.
With such an adventurous life to draw upon for material, it is perhaps not surprising that his first literary effort was a huge success. This encouraged him, and he became a professional writer publishing over thirty novels. Several of his novels had a Western Canadian locale. Among these might be mentioned such titles as The Story of Foss River Ranch, The Night Riders, and The Mystery of the Barren Lands. After World War I, despite the popularity in England of Zane Grey as a writer of westerns, Cullum more than held his own.
Again quoting Kunitz, Twentieth Century Authors, of Cullum it was said that he was "neither a creator of ageless personalities nor a stickler for literary niceties. But within his own frame of reference — technicolored fast moving tales with plot mechanisms that are practically foolproof — he has romanticized portions of history which might otherwise have wanted an audience."
Henry H. Bashford, later to become a distinguished British physician, lived in Manitoba for a time shortly after the turn of the century. His first two books were novels set in that province. The Manitoban was published in 1904, The Trail Together in 1906. Of the former it can be said that there is authenticity in the description of the landscape and the people in a Manitoba farming community of that period. The story tells of the slow disintegration of a remittance man, son of a London financier, and of the remittance man's neglected son. Inasmuch as the plot takes place partly in Manitoba, partly in England, one cannot but be reminded of another English doctor, who gave up the scalpel for the pen, Somerset Maugham; an early play of Maugham's published in 1913, was set partly in Manitoba and partly in Britain. It was called The Land of Promise.
A writer of westerns who, though Canadian, may be grouped with the English writers is
William Lacey Amy. The justification for including him is that he was an expatriate for much of his most productive writing life, the years between the two World Wars, and certainly he wrote for the British literary market. He went overseas in 1916 as the London correspondent for a Canadian newspaper. He lived seven years in England, and then travelled extensively in Europe and Africa for another seven years. His forty-seven books, the last one published as late as 1954, were about equally divided between detective stories and Canadian westerns; it is the latter, his Blue Pete stories, written under the pseudonym Luke Allan which are of concern to us here.
What was Luke Amy’s association with the West? In 1903 he founded the Medicine Hat Times and edited it for some three years. He would seem to have returned to Eastern Canada, but to have remained the proprietor of the paper until about 1909. It was this experience which afforded the basis for his Western novels.
In the opening of one of his books, The Tenderfoot, Amy writing tongue-in-cheek, has the proprietor of the Alberta Hotel extol the editor of The Medicine Hat Times.
“Editor, proprietor, proof-reader, copywriter, reporter, book-keeper, and advertising solicitor. I believe he runs the presses on occasion, and he can sling type when necessary. Got a wife almost as useful, and a damned sight more ornamental. But the thing is he is running a real newspaper with emphasis on the news. Lord, we needed one. Say, that boy's put new life in the old town. He got us even interested in the doings of the town council, and in the way the money is spent. And we don't need to go out on the street to pick up the gossip. The Times runs it in cold print."
Amy's first western, published in 1913, was The Blue Wolf, a Story of the Cypress Hills. There was a long silence, no doubt due to World War I, and then in 1921, Blue Pete, Half-Breed; a Story of the Cowboy West. And this began a series of good westerns full of cattle rustling and gun play on the windswept prairies and in the hills beyond. Each story featured that incomparable cowboy-detective, Blue Pete and his favourite horse Whiskers. The last of the nineteen books in the series. Blue Pete in the Badlands, appeared in 1954.
As a writer Amy had strong descriptive powers and the art of sustaining suspense through his rapidly moving plots. Anyone who has travelled on a west-bound continental train toward the Hat, will recognize this dreary stretch of country described in The Tenderfoot.
"Later everything changed for the worse. Vast stretches of dead grass waving limply in the breeze. Bunches of weird tumble-weed rolling along, with nothing to stay their course─moving from nowhere to nowhere, on and on. Alkali pools with blanched borders, tiny lakes swarming with wild fowl betrayed the nameless waste. Then groups and herds of cattle appeared.”
The opening setting for most of Amy's stories is Medicine Hat before the action fans out to the ranch land. And here is The Tenderfoot stepping off the train at the Hat, circa 1912.
"Now he stood on the station platform, a suitcase in either hand, a camera over one shoulder, his binoculars over the other. The scurry of alighting had set his bowler hat awry and a sudden gust of dusty wind added to the blazing harshness of the sun making him close his eyes and mutter a curse.”
A friendly cowboy gives him some advice on headgear.
“An' say, if I was you I'd skeddadle to the fust men's shop an' get a lid we understand."
As for the plot of The Tenderfoot, a sheep herder has been found dead in his lonely camp. "Suicide", say the Mounties. "Murder", whisper the cowboys, and soon our tenderfoot is involved in a heap of trouble and a first-rate mystery.
People Who Do Things
A TRIPLE NOVELIST
Interview by Adele Gianelli, Saturday Night magazine in Canada, 27 July 1934
A GOOD many Canadians know that Lacey Amy, the novelist, is also Luke Allan, the novelist, but none of them knew that both Luke Allan and Lacey Amy are also a third author, prolific and popular, whoso identity, in Mr. Amy’s words, "no one knows but myself and my agent.” How he gets time to do the work of three writers and also to run about the world as he does—he has literally “lived in trunks” ever since 1923—is a mystery to less competent authors.
Son of a Methodist minister, Mr. Amy was educated wherever his father happened to be stationed in those good old migratory days, but chiefly at Guelph Collegiate and Victoria University—where he studied classics and athletics. After a year or two on trade papers and three years of owning and editing a paper at Medicine Hat, he began the freelancing career which he has followed since, and for some time was a frequent contributor to Saturday Night, usually writing from some out-of-the-way and little known corner of Canada. After a period of war correspondence for a Canadian syndicate, he returned in 1919 to free-lancing and novel-writing, and became well known in England for his articles and sketches in the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard. Something like thirty books have been published under one or other of his signatures, several of them having been translated into six or seven European languages. He has lived in England, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and North Africa, and now winters fairly regularly in Florida. He is a member of the Savage Club and an honorary member of the Institut Litteraire et Artistique de France.
Mrs. Amy was the first Canadian woman to be made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, the model of which was pinned upon her by the King himself, in recognition of her work in connection with the Massey-Harris Hospital at Dulwich and later as Lady Superintendent of one of the largest munition factories in England, in charge of more than three thousand girls.
AMY, W(illiam) Lacey, 1878-1962.
From Canadian Crime Fiction by David Skene-Melvin, 1996
Wrote as “Luke ALLAN”, (q.v.). One of Canada’s finest delineators of her own land, an indefatigable traveller who began his peregrinations at home before venturing constantly abroad, and Canada’s first home-grown war correspondent whose dispatches on the home front in Britain during World War I still stand as some of the most perceptive commentary on that period, William Lacey Amy, who eschewed the use of his praenomen, was also from the 1920s for 30 years until his death one of Canada’s most prolific writers of crime fiction with his immensely popular “Blue Pete” series that appeared pseudonomously as by “Luke Allan.”
Although one can understand the disappearance of his crime fiction, written as it was for lending libraries and before the academic respectability of popular culture, and “Luke Allan”’s consequent obscurity, it is a matter of regret that Lacey Amy the social commentator is not better remembered.
Lacey Amy was born at Sydenham, Ontario, in 1878; he died on the 26th of November, 1962, in St Petersburg, Florida, where he spent his retirement winters. He was the eldest son of the Reverend Thomas Amy, a Methodist minister who held several callings around Ontario. Amy was educated here and there, but chiefly at Guelph Collegiate. In 1896, he entered Victoria College, University of Toronto, and took his B.A.
Graduating in 1899, he married as his first wife Lillian Eva Payne. Mrs Amy was a personality in her own right. During World War I, she was the first Canadian woman ever to be made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, an honour awarded to her in connection with her work with the Massey-Harris Hospital at Dulwich and later as Lady Superintendent of one of the largest munitions factories in England, where she was in charge of more than 3,000 women.
After his marriage, Amy took to journalism. He worked for various trade papers for a spell, then moved to Medicine Hat, Alberta, and a position with the Medicine Hat Times. Subsequently, he purchased this paper and edited it for three years.
This period of Amy’s life was of great influence on his later writing, for it was here he developed his love for the West that later led to his becoming a “Mountie” novelist. In the January 1911 issue of The Canadian Magazine he published a short story, “Blue Pete”, the sentimental half breed, which adumbrated his 20 adventure novels about this character. Two years later, Amy published under his real name his first novel, The Blue Wolf; a Tale of the Cypress Hills, (1913), a mystery story featuring the North West Mounted Police,
In November 1909, an enthusiastic portrait by Amy of Medicine Hat appeared in The Canadian Magazine, (vol. 34: no. 1), inaugurating his long career as a travel reporter. Fifteen more articles followed between February 1910 and May 1915 covering Canada from the Labrador, the Magdalen Islands, and the Maritime provinces back to the West and the Rocky Mountains. As Claudio Murri has remarked, Amy’s articles, “... are not simple descriptions of the places he visited, seen with the eye of a tourist and rendered more interesting with a touch of local colour and folklore. They are deep and thoughtful insights into the life of the local populations, their social and economical organization and their complex relationship with nature. These articles, as well as his later ones on the First World War, are real short essays of social analysis. They constitute a valuable contribution to modern Canadian journalism and historiography, and they should not be ignored by whoever intends to study the small isolated communities of early twentieth-century Canada.”
In 1916, the Medicine Hat Times surrendered to its competition, the Medicine Hat News. Amy and his wife moved to London, England, where he settled in as a war correspondent. From September of that year onward, his articles appeared in both The Canadian Magazine and Saturday Night on how the war was affecting daily life and about Canada’s contribution to the war effort.
In 1919, Amy turned to freelance writing, remaining in England.
Then, in 1921, he re-published his first novel, The Blue Wolf, as by “Luke Allan”, followed by 43 more criminous novels until Blue Pete in the Badlands in 1954.
As “Luke Allan”, Amy created two series characters: Gordon Muldrew, and the more famous “Blue Pete”, a reformed cattle rustler who worked as an agent for the North West Mounted Police. “Blue Pete” made his first full-length-novel debut in Blue Pete; half-breed in 1920 and continued thrilling readers in 19 more stories.
Amy’s “Luke Allan” novels were published only in England. Notwithstanding his lack of publication in North America, as “Luke Allan” Amy made a significant contribution to Canadian popular culture and myth. Two Ph.D. theses have been written on the popular image of the Mounted Police; Amy features markedly in both.
As befits a writer of mysteries, there is a real-life mystery about Amy. As “Luke Allan”, he published 44 novels, one of which he had originally published under his real name. Eleven of these novels appeared between 1945 and 1954. Yet in a letter dated 21 March 1944 to William Arthur Deacon, Amy claimed that he had written 40 novels.
An author whose career had by then spanned 31 years merely forgetting the quantity of his output? Perhaps. After all, 33 novels could be called “something like 40”.
However, in the issue of Saturday Night for 27 July 1934, an interview of Amy by Adele Gianelli appeared in her column “People who do things” sub-headed “A triple novelist”. In it Gianelli prefaces her squib with: “A good many Canadians know that Lacey Amy, the novelist, is also Luke Allan, the novelist, but none of them know that both Luke Allan and Lacey Amy are also a third author, prolific and popular, whose identity, in Mr. Amy’s words, ‘no one knows but myself and my agent.’ ... Something like thirty books have been published under one or other of his signatures ... ”. This is still the accepted wisdom a decade later as is evidenced by the his biographical entry in Clara Thomas’s Canadian novelists 1920-1943, (Toronto: Longmans Green; 1946), “He has published forty odd novels under three names, most of them under the pseudonym, Luke Allan; some under his own name; and still others under a third which none but his agent knows.”
“Something like thirty books” by 1934; “forty odd” by 1945.
Either Amy was taking the mickey out of Gianelli and Ms Thomas merely parrotted his hoax, or, his other pseudonym, while not beyond conjecture, is lost to the ages.
It was stated that Amy was an indefatigable traveller. From 1923 to 1940 he proved it, literally “living in trunks” while he bucketed around the world, mostly by bus, in between sojourns in Toronto.
During this time, in addition to his novels, he was a syndicated columnist for 13 publications. In his prime, Amy’s productivity was prodigious.
In 1939, he set off around the world, only to be stranded in Tahiti in 1940 by the fall of France. Eventually, he made his way back to Toronto, where from 1940 until his death he settled permanently, save for latterly wintering in Florida, and devoted much of his time, when he wasn’t writing, to the Arts & Letters Club, of which he’d been a member earlier in his life.
On 22 October 1941, Amy, then 63, married his second wife: Mrs Gladys Burston Miller.
Amy continued writing, sometimes publishing at least two books a year, (who knows how many more under that unknown pseudonym), until the mid-fifties. At 76, he published his last tale; eight years later at 84 this fluent raconteur, collector of ancient clocks, popular novelist, and journalist par excellence died peacefully at his winter home.
Typical of Amy’s detective stories, apart from his “Blue Pete” series, is The Black Opal, (1935), an entertaining, non-series, thriller in the Edgar Wallace mode. A trifle dated, yet if one approaches it from the viewpoint of its time and reads it as if one were coming to it new, it stands up very well.
To the perceptive and cosmopolitan reader, it seems to begin in London, but then becomes American in its flavour and locale. Yet not quite American. Then the penny drops — it is CANADIAN! And not just written by a Canadian, but set in Canada, albeit anonymously. This is proved by the appearance of a “Provincial Policeman” at the denouement. Although this means a choice of setting amongst Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, (for the latter had its own provincial police at one time), the general feeling is for Ontario, especially in context in relation to references to Boston, etc. This is reinforced by the author’s in-joke at the start. For those who intimately know the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto, especially in the antediluvian days when its membership was restricted to men, the Ladies’ Night dinner at a club that begins the action is indubitably a Ladies’ Night at the ALC, of which Amy was a member over a fifty-year span.
But there is more that shows the novel’s Canadianism. It is written in Canadian English. The syntax reflects the rhythms of Canadian spoken English. The style is muted Canadian journalese.
The plot is the well-worked theme of the ostensibly upright wealthy citizen who secretly leads the gang plundering his home metropolis. It was a fresher ploy then, and Amy handles it adequately. His characters are cut of a little thicker cardboard than the norm. It is obvious that Amy’s crime novels were written and published to be purchased at a railway newsstand or to be borrowed from a private lending library. They are “entertainments”, pure and simple, designed to while away an otherwise boring few hours. In an era of cheap production and low wages, the clothbound hardcover novels of Amy and many, many others were what have been published as original paperbacks since the 1950s.
To students of popular culture, it is for his “Blue Pete” “Mountie” novels that Amy will remain known. They are peculiarly Canadian, accurate in detail. The atmosphere of Southern Alberta at the beginning of the Twentieth Century is captured and reconstructed with the precision he brought to his travel articles in The Canadian Magazine between 1909 and 1915. Amy’s descriptions of landscape abound in detail that creates a very clear historical and geographical picture, precise as a map. In our imagination, we are there amongst the coulees, rivers, the mazes of the Cypress Hills, and alone on the vast prairie. In his ability to evoke a sense of place, at his best Amy approaches John Buchan. It is this definitiveness of his settings that contributes so decisively to the “Canadian-ness” of his novels. It is not just the place where they are laid, nor the presence of purely Canadian institutions, but the particular time in which they are set. They are a saga about the civilization of the Canadian West, circa 1910. Despite the lack of precise dating, internal evidence allows the period to be identified.
Amy’s best period, both for his “Blue Pete” series and his other crime fiction, was during the 1920s. In the 1930s, he turned more to detective and mystery stories in the style of Edgar Wallace, melodramatic thrillers set in a vaguely described unidentified and unidentifiable North American city that is most likely meant to be Toronto. There is a sense of in-jokery about Amy’s thrillers, a taste of disguised reality whereby he is gently either ribbing his friends or deflating his enemies.
On his return to Canada at the outbreak of World War Two, Amy devoted himself exclusively to producing “Blue Pete” stories as by “Luke Allan”, (assuming he abandoned the use of his other, unknown pseudonym, if he ever had actually used another), publishing 17 of the 20 stories that comprise the saga. What had begun well, petered out. Picturesque they are, but Amy’s imagination was flagging. By the end, “Blue Pete” had become repetitive and cliche-ed. Despite this, the first three “Blue Pete” novels: Blue Pete: Half-Breed, (1920), The Return of Blue Pete, (1922), and, Blue Pete, detective, (1928), along with Amy’s other three Western novels, The Lone Trail, (1921), The Westerner, (1923), and, The Beast, (1924), deserve a place as regional novels in the development of Canadian literature.
Even if he had never written any novels, Amy would still deserve a place in Canadian writing for bringing to urban and literate Canada such an evocative and telling description of the lives of residents of the country’s small towns and outports as he did with his pre-World War One travel articles, articles that fully deserve re-publication.
+ The Blue Wolf; a Tale of the Cypress Hills. London: Hodder & Stoughton/Toronto: Musson; 1913. Re-issued as by “Luke Allan”, London: Herbert Jenkins; 1921.
1921
634 ALLAN, Luke, pseud, of William Lacey Amy.
BLUE PETE:/HALF-BREED/A STORY OF THE/COWBOY WEST/BY/LUKE
ALLAN/HERBERT JENKINS, LIMITED/3 YORK STREET, SAINT JAMES'S/
LONDON S.W. I [printer's marks] MCMXXI/ [all within a dbl. border].
Half-title.
Pr. Love & Malcomson, Ltd., Redhill, Aug. 1920. [A]8, B-C12, D-E8, F-N12/8 1-256 pp. 184x119 mm.
Light blue coarse diaper cloth. Front board bears title, subtitle & pict. ornament within a dbl. border, all stamped in dark blue; back bears publ. device in dark blue; spine bears title, sub-title, author, publ. & rules, all in dark blue. Original dustj acket.
F.f.l. 1921 [1920] (BM, Watters); 1920 (EC).
William Lacey Amy, born at Sydenham, Ontario, was a journalist and author who travelled extensively in many parts of the world. He chiefly used the pen name, Luke Allan. In 1921 he began a series for which he created a half-breed ex-cattle rustler, Blue Pete, who became an undercover agent for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The last of the series was published in 1950. (OCCHL). Blue Pete: half-breed, the first of the series, begins in the Cypress Hills just north of the Montana border with a confrontation between Constable Mahon of the Mounted Police and Blue Pete, fleeing for safety to Canada. He becomes the Mountie's friend. On page 2, the printer states that 21,500 copies of the book have been printed. The 'Publisher's Foreword' is dated 1920.

A New Heat Pump

24 Grant Line, Stillwater Lake, NS

1 October 2015

For probably five years we have been looking at getting a heat pump for our home. We even got a quote about five years ago—the quote was for $5750 for a single 12,000 btu system.

This year we decided to complete the process, a little late in the season, but at least completed.

About our home - We live on a 200 acre 'woodlot'. Our home is just less than 2000 sq ft, designed as open concept so that heat circulates well between the two levels. We enjoy heating with wood and supply is endless. We only use wood heat when we are home; backup, when we are away is electric baseboard. We live in the Maritimes where humidity, in the summer, is high, and with global climate change the summer temperatures are rising beyond comfort levels.

So our plan is to use the heat pump primarily for dehumidification and cooling throughout.

Quotes - We eventually got three quotes from three recommended installers:

G-Force was recommended by Hammonds Plains Service Centre. They quoted on a single system in the master bedroom of 12,000 btu, Mitsubishi, $4888 taxes inc.

Modern Mechanical was recommended by Milt Larsen, they quoted on a double ductless installation; Daikin 24,000 btu, $7935, taxes incl. Modern Mechanical proposed to have Target core drill the hole through the foundation; this was probably the best proposal regarding the hole in the cement. They also highly recommended not having a separate pump for the dehumidifier.

Costco and Shines Energy. Costco always seems to have excellent product and warranty. This was our last quote but it also ended up that we knew Dan MacKay from our 'solar home tours'. We've been interested in SolarNS for many years, even completing a solar builders course years ago. Dan had the advantage of going last. The quote was for a dual ductless system of 18,000 btu, Lennox at $5949, all in with rebate. I did not recall meeting Dan before, but Gail did and liked him very much from the SolarNS socials. Dan answered all the questions and added that Lennox has a Burnside warehouse so all parts are immediately available, installation now, and full Costco warrantee.

Installation - We discussed the quotes after the bids were all in and went with Dan's. Installation was started just days afterwards, and completed within the day. The biggest difficulties were ram-drilling a hole through the foundation, and, still not resolved, a new twenty ampere circuit breaker for our old ITE panel.

After all is said and done, I do recommend all of the three companies that we did get quotes from. They all listened to my 'not primarily for heating' statement, and quoted fair prices.

Saturday, 24 October 2015

Lacey Amy researches

Friday, 23 October 2015

More about Lacey Amy

Friday, 2 October 2015

A New Heat Pump

Blog Archive

Countries we have visited

About Me

frizzle(at)hfx.eastlink.ca

Doug's Bookstore

You should see this.

Lacey Amy aka 'Luke Allan'

PDF Documents

Recent photo additions

Followers

Central America 2008

IF YOU WANT TO PRINT A STORY

Personal Links

Outboard Boys - 1933 - Roger Garis

Verrill Bookcase

A. Hyatt Verrill 1929

Hyatt Verrill Links are now all in the Master List

Laurie York Erskine links