Grange Notes by Tim Swartz, Grange President (with everyone’s help), May 3, 2022
Grange meeting for May, after a busy April!
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/
Passcode: 191654
(this info is also posted on the Grange website Calendar listing for this meeting)
At this meeting, we’ll be reviewing the last (very busy) couple of months, which have included having a whole new heating season installed, a steady stream of rental events, the submittal of 3 funding requests for Hall projects by the Friends of the Capital City Grange Hall and a major loan from the VT State Grange for the new furnace. We’ll be discussing the best ways to repay that loan, based on our savings and resources. We’ll also be talking about organizing a serious cleanup of the Grange Hall, after a couple of years of less use. We plan to have a sing-along as our “program” for the June meeting, and we’ll talk about preparing for that.
As usual, all members of the community of Grange members and Hall users will be welcome; only members get to vote on the motions that will come up.
New pellet bin and furnace!
Our new pellet bin is big and obvious when you come up the driveway. In the top picture above, you can see the hoses that bring pellets into the furnace room to fill the “day tank” which is part of the furnace. The bin will hold about 3-1/2 tons of pellets; we expect to get it filled a couple of times per heating season, with the truck connecting to the vertical larger tubes on the side of the bin.
The new furnace was hard to get an overall picture of, tucked into the furnace room as it is. The gray box in the right foreground is the “day tank” for pellets; the green panels beyond it are the pellet combustion and heat-exchanger parts of the furnace. The “arrow-shaped” container at the right bottom of the furnace picture is the container that gets automatically filled with ashes from the pellets; it’s easy to dump those into a bag for disposal, using the box on the left, which contains any dust quite nicely.
The new heating system is a big investment for the Grange, but we feel it will pay off with lower fuel costs, and a more secure fuel supply than fossil-fuel alternatives.
For those who weren’t there…it was a big dance!
In the last Grange Notes, I spread the word about the resumption of the Montpelier Contra Dance on April 16th. The dance was a very successful re-start, after over 2 years of hiatus due to the pandemic. The final count of dancers, musicians, callers and the MCD organizing committee was 194 total people! All had vaccine records checked and wore masks the entire time. And no post-dance reports of anyone testing positive for COVID-19 have been received!This dance series has historically been the most-attended events, and has been an important part of our rental income stream, as well as spreading word about the wonderful facilities of the Grange Hall, so we are very happy to have it happening again. The MCD committee has been generously contributed (reduced) rent payments throughout the pandemic hiatus, which has helped the Grange to survive, and is much appreciated!