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anyone ever write a rebuttal to kiln drying


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I'm just saying that strictly speaking, and objectively speaking, using heat from burning wood to dry wood for burning (speeding up a process that would occur naturally given time) is silly. It's the fact that people need to make money that causes it to make sense sometimes.

 

 

Pragmatically commerce drives the economy and I'm with you.better to dispose your waste in this manner than on a bonfire in the absence of other markets.

 

Why do we need to be so partisan about this what's wrong with doing both? I wouldn't dream of drying my log supply other than in a stack built by May but if I were in the firewood market (and to my mind lumps of firewood are a luxury good rather than a fuel in my part of Surrey, maybe less so in a remote rural community).

 

Given the cash flow problems with sourcing, processing and warehousing all the logs I expect to sell in a fairly short window of opportunity (in the past my log sales were September to Xmas and very little after)it would make sense to top up supplies or even only dry that last bit of moisture out of a late cut batch in order to hit the market. Bear in mind in the past the now extinct big sawmills would cut timber and sticker it to air dry and only use a kiln to remove the last few percent of moisture when there was an order for it.

 

Also air drying nearly all takes place in the summer months but in winter waste heat from a kiln can be utilised for space heating as a co product.

 

 

Somewhere in this thread someone mentioned kiln drying of firewood kicked off 15 years ago but even that was initially to utilise a waste product which wouldn't have happened if my associate and later part time boss hadn't pushed my idea for a high speed dryer forward.

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there's an article off the Multitek website about someone who started kiln drying logs in the 70's in the states yet certainly wood claim to have invented it whenever they started and it wasn't uncommon for people to dry logs in the rayburn oven certainly round here.

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Do a bit of research in to Said company?????

 

I have better things to do than try to look that up that's why I said whenever they started, but seem to remember one of the videos on youtube saying something about 20 or 25years ago, point I was making was that it's been around a fair bit longer than 15 years.

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Letting it rot is time release so the tree or trees planted are keeping pace in the absorption to the release where as burning is instant.

your still not answering the question this isn't a justify kiln drying thread it's a how to promote air dried.

 

As has been suggested use naturalness and lower carbon footprint compared with kiln dried

 

in the long run you want to keep those customers that you hook with the advertising for as long as possible with a good product and service. Churn, or rapid turnover of customers, is a problem when you are limited by delivery radius.

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there's an article off the Multitek website about someone who started kiln drying logs in the 70's in the states yet certainly wood claim to have invented it whenever they started and it wasn't uncommon for people to dry logs in the rayburn oven certainly round here.

 

I wasn't commenting on the use of kilns but rather the one specific use by a company that started wholesaling boxed poplar kindling using our prototype high speed dryer in around 2000. Later the dryer was used for logs as the focus of the business changed. It was subsequently replaced by a bigger device using the same principal. To the best of my knowledge the full dryer with heat recovery was never built. We liquidated our company in around 2006, with no liabilities, as we were not commercially competent to make a successful business.

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I have had some kiln dried ash in from the Baltic area this summer, most was 3% or below. I split and tested about 12 bits at random, one was 15%, a couple were 5%, the rest were 3% or under.

 

Stored in an open barn currently the outsides are about 8%, not tested any centers but would expect around 3% or so.

 

Best I have ever done with air dried was about 5% external in Sept, that was in bags under cover for 2 years prior to sale. Currently I am at about about 12%-14% external.

 

The reason KD is taking off in the UK is mainly one of money, at £55 a ton for hard cord to make 1.6 cube or so against a shade over £80 for a nice stacked crate of KD ready to sell and making 1.6 cube loose and no time and money spent processing it. Half my logs this time will be imported KD, I just cant make the maths stack to invest 30K in a bigger processor set up unless its going to be heavy grant aided. At present grant levels are likely to be 40% max next year.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi all, I sell kiln dried logs and the common mis conception I have with clients is that the word 'kiln' implies the log has gone though a prosses involving some sort of electrical or forced heated prosses.

 

The word 'kiln' should imply a state of moisture content. Some air dried logs do get bellow that 20% mark so if you can garentee that all of the logs are bellow that 20% mark then sell them as kiln dried.

 

Some of my logs don't even register any moisture (mainly the sycamore) and the ash, beach and oak are around the 6-12% moisture. I don't put my logs in a unenviromently friendly electric powered kiln they are stacked and dried out properly in a greenhouse. Supper environmentaly friendly.

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