Price? cubic feet against Tonnes?

[MarieJames]

Help??

We sell hardwood at £60 a ton

But if I was to sell at per cubic meter (stacked wood) what would the price be?

 

I've got so confused by the ton to cubic meter conversions!!!

 

Marie xx

[Tim Stobart Tree Surgery]

Selling wood by the ton is one of the things that pisses me off most. How wet is it? If the moisture content is 25%, then a ton of wood has 250 liters of water in it, if it's 50%, 500 liters (a liter weighs 1kg). So do you weigh each load, subtracting the moisture content from the load to get the mythical ton of wood, or do you, like most people call it a ton because it's a ton bag (which is a bag that has a maximum load of a ton, if you fill it with lead, you'll break it, if you fill it with feathers, it won't be a ton).

 

If it's seasoned delivered logs (?), and you're selling a ton bag (either 0.8 m3 or 1m3 depending on the bag) then you're under charging.

 

Wood weight varies so much by species, moisture content and piece size that using a weight is just a joke.

 

Sorry if that's a bit of a rant, but you know, a customer phones me up and asks for a ton of logs, I bite my tongue all the time!

[Stubby]

Selling wood by the ton is one of the things that pisses me off most. How wet is it? If the moisture content is 25%, then a ton of wood has 250 liters of water in it, if it's 50%, 500 liters (a liter weighs 1kg). So do you weigh each load, subtracting the moisture content from the load to get the mythical ton of wood, or do you, like most people call it a ton because it's a ton bag (which is a bag that has a maximum load of a ton, if you fill it with lead, you'll break it, if you fill it with feathers, it won't be a ton).

 

If it's seasoned delivered logs (?), and you're selling a ton bag (either 0.8 m3 or 1m3 depending on the bag) then you're under charging.

 

Wood weight varies so much by species, moisture content and piece size that using a weight is just a joke.

 

Sorry if that's a bit of a rant, but you know, a customer phones me up and asks for a ton of logs, I bite my tongue all the time!

 

All this is true Tim . Thats why people of your experience will know whats about right for what species of wood and what condition . You use all this knowledge to haggle the price surely ?

[Chris Sheppard]

Help??

We sell hardwood at £60 a ton

But if I was to sell at per cubic meter (stacked wood) what would the price be?

 

I've got so confused by the ton to cubic meter conversions!!!

 

Marie xx

 

Are you talking stacked roundwood at roadside or as cut and split logs?

[Tim Stobart Tree Surgery]

I do use it to give customers confidence in me/my product, but it still gets me every time, in forestry/arb we should replace the question 'how longs a piece of rope?' with 'how heavy's a ton of logs?'.

[TimberCutterDartmoor]

Are you talking stacked roundwood at roadside or as cut and split logs?

 

I reckon they mean roadside as the OP aka TF/CFW has advertised roundwood roadside at £60 before.

[farmer rod]

Help??

We sell hardwood at £60 a ton

But if I was to sell at per cubic meter (stacked wood) what would the price be?

 

I've got so confused by the ton to cubic meter conversions!!!

 

Marie xx

At 13% moisture the density for example

Birch 650 kg/cu m

Ash 720

Beech 750

to get from density to loose piled logs 1000 kg/ 720 = 1.38 cu metres of roundwood

You get 2 cu m of logs from 1 cu m roundwood, so 1.38 x 2 = 2.78 cu m

 

for birch its just a shave over 3 cu m

[farmer rod]

Answered the wrong question then:001_rolleyes:

 

Density of fresh cut wood varies from 509 to 1200, average 880 kg/cu m

 

to convert to stacked longwoods with bark

 

Beech 1.7

Spruce 1.5

 

So 1000/880 = 1.14

1.14 x 1.6 = 1.82 cu m

 

dont use this a gospel, Ive already answered the wrong question:001_rolleyes:

but I make that £33 per cube stacked,

[Chris Sheppard]

in forestry/arb we should replace the question 'how longs a piece of rope?' with 'how heavy's a ton of logs?'.

 

Why try to reinvent the wheel? processed logs, yes, all day by volume, but roundwood - weight is weight, you can't argue quite as easily with a weigh ticket. Volume can be easily manipulated to suit either party when stacking. Maybe we're just stuck in our ways round here, but I can't see it changing anytime soon (mill grade hardwood excepted maybe)

 

I reckon they mean roadside as the OP aka TF/CFW has advertised roundwood roadside at £60 before.

 

I was leaning towards roadside too

[MonsterMonster]

Tim, I share your concerns about people asking for a price per tonne but here's partly the reason why.

 

We're in the process of installing a log gasification boiler linked to the RHI. All of the figures provided by heat engineers\installers\RHI calculations all show fuel usage in tonnes. So it's not surprising that people are asking for a price per tonne when they've been told "you need x tonnes of fuel per year".

 

I've always bought my wood by the cubic metre; usually 4 cubes per year to run two stoves. But now we're told 10 tonnes for a biomass boiler. Correct me if I'm wrong but I've worked this out at roughly 25 cubes of stacked seasoned hardwood or 43 cubes of loose. When I call firewood suppliers and ask of a price for 43 cubic metres it seems to throw them at that level of volume and THEY then ask for tonnage figures!