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Martin Jenkins

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Everything posted by Martin Jenkins

  1. Thanks for the kind words! Al's pellet boiler replaced his oil fired Aga in his kitchen, and it looks nice. Palazetti, something like that. 15 kW. He gets the RHI regardless of whether he turns it on or off, so he always has it set on "1" or "2" - low! As for the amount of time - I might be considered slow...! I have a 56cc chainsaw (so cannot use the Oregon PowerSharp, which maxes at 42cc unfortunately, meaning I have to sharpen it manually), tractor, and Gransfors Bruks splitting maul. I use about a wheelbarrow of wood per day at the moment - burning from 08:00 to about 20:00.
  2. I get through about 4 wood bays full in a year with a fairly conservative use of wood; each wood bay is 1.2m deep, 2.4m wide, and about 2m high. Three rows of logs, with lots of space in between. When my wife was sick, I was running 24 hours a day, near as; got through double the amount of wood then, AND had a heater in the bedroom. A pellet boiler will indeed run on a timer, and my friend who has one gets paid £2500 per year in RHI, regardless of how much he uses it. So he buys all his pellets and uses it as minimally as possible! It is fairly attractive looking, and there are flames that you can see. The biggest disadvantage is that it has broken down a couple of times as I stated - but each time as far as I can see, I myself would be able to sort it out, given the bits. As for how long spent coppicing etc. - I reckon for me, probably 2 or 3 days per wood bay. I have to have somebody to help me, as now I am on my own since my wife died, if I had an accident I would be stuffed! So this weekend for instance I have a load of friends coming over, so while I fell and log up, they will be carting back to base, splitting, stacking. Or that is the idea anyway!
  3. Impressive indeed. For me, I have the 5 acres just about, and have, for seven years, been coppicing, and whole house is heated by wood - although cooking is electric. When my wife got sick with cancer - winter of 2012 - 2013, probably the worst winter I have seen - that was a real struggle, and it really showed how much effort is required. I do plan on going to wood pellet stove this year... however others that I know with wood pellet have had their stoves fail, with igniters needing replacement (at £50 + per time, and these things come from Italy, and there was a strike, and it took 4 weeks, no heating for him) - so I am thinking about moving my boiler stove into a different room, and using that as a backup, feeding a same buffer tank, and have the pellet baby bypass the buffer and go straight to thermal stove and rads.
  4. I got one, for my wood boiler stove, and unless the stove is going full whack, it does not spin. The water steals too much of the heat. I imagine it would work nicely if it was just a plain wood burner, with no water heating.
  5. The billets are the same size pretty much, all about 14 to 16 inches long in triangles maybe 4 or 5 inches on the thick end. Going through wood cut at the same time about 14 months ago, max of ash and alder, the ash nearly always needs to be skipped over until next year - heavy and when burnt, hisses, whereas the alder is dry and light. Really clear difference. All stacked for seasoning together, pallets on the ground, open sides with sheep netting, polythene sheeting on the roof to reduce rain impact. Stacked three log deep, with big gaps between the layers.
  6. Me too on both hazel and ash - with absolutely tons of alder as well, in my coppice area. I have ended up with a patch of land which really old maps have "Alder bed" written on them - so seems good. The person from whom I bought the land scoffed at the alders, when I asked him about their firewood utility - useless he said - but I have found that it seasons really quickly and burns really nicely. Ash takes flipping ages!
  7. Agreed - with the tyre on the block, I split double the amount when no tyre is on the block.
  8. Hi Jon, I am at Benter, near Oakhill - when I moved in 7 years ago, I saw your advert on a telegraph post, and bought a load of logs from you. Then I started cutting my own - sorry!
  9. Mine is a Gransfors Bruks, which is fab - nice and light enough for one handed if I need to, but really really good. I use the lazy tyre solution - have a tyre sitting on top of a wide splitting round, lazy because I have not screwed the tyre to the splitting round. Splitting logs is really quick; I noticed a MASSIVE difference when I just split a load of rounds which have been sitting since March (my wife died in April so I did not get to them) - and the ones which were in a pile in the open (on pallets) were easy peasy, and the ones which had rolled into the cover of the wood bays were rock hard - that little bit more dried out, and tightened up into a load of rocks. My view: * use a standard splitting maul; * if you have £75 to spend, use a Gransfors Bruks because it feels lovely; * if you have more than that, just give the rest to me; * split your logs wet, or at least do not let them dry out until you have split them * if the log is too tough to split, chunk off the easy bits, and leave the rest, and use that as a large piece to put on at the end of the evening
  10. I forgot to say that my stove is a central heating model, about 14kW output
  11. Last winter I got through 4 wood bays which were 1.2m deep, about 1.5m high by 2.8m wide packed with three rows of logs (gaps between).
  12. Be careful about pallets as they are usually treated, and it is not legal to burn treated wood, and not particularly healthy either!
  13. We have a Dunsley Highlander 10CH which is rated to 20kW, with anthracite; we only ever use wood on it. This is our only heating, and we have had it for five years or so. HOWEVER I do expect to change at some point to a wood pellet stove, as: 1) Although the stoves cost an arm and a leg (£4,500 for the kit, probably couple of K to install), there is an immediate subsidy payment (maybe £1,500) to help, and each year, about 3 x the cost of the year's pellets are paid as an RHI benefit 2) You can load it up with pellets and then set it like an oil boiler to come on and off at set times of the day. My wife was not able to cope with the wood stove when she got ill, which is why I will go this way. Some time.
  14. Mine goes to chicken bedding, hamster bedding, and mulch.
  15. ...as I said though, to be sure that your immediate problem is to do with the temperature of the water in the boiler, run the system until the water is hot, then see how it performs. If it is STILL not performing, look elsewhere (as well). The recommendation is still to get a load valve (or charger, whatever it is called), but worth knowing what the actual issue is.
  16. I tried the laddomat, but sent it back because it was not really good for my situation. I have a buffer tank almost directly above my stove, and the laddomat (about £400) comes with a pump, driven off a thermostat, and it basically did not work, and the pump was too loud for the room it is in (which is my office!). So I got rid of that and got a non-pumped ESBE load valve (about £100) which is just the valve, and it will use gravity to move the water around.
  17. I have a Dunsley Highlander 10CH - smaller than yours. I do get a good amount of heat out of it, but have not used a thermometer. It is our only heat source like you, with solar hot water not doing an AWFUL lot this summer! It does have a sweet spot. What I am told, is that the optimal temperature for burning will really only be hit when the wraparound back boiler is actually hot. Otherwise the fire is always struggling with heating up the boiler. In order to make this happen, a load valve is required, that joins the flow and return, so when the water is cold to start with, then it does not take very long to heat up just the water in the boiler; once it is up to temperature, it will let hot water through to the thermal store. I have bought one, but not yet got it fitted. You might already have one though! You can tell if this is a real issue by waiting until the whole system is hot, and then seeing if that makes any difference to the temp. The other possibility is the draw. Adding an external air supply to the Dunsley made a pretty big difference; although my bro-in-law is going to go further and use a double lined flue for his air supply, and thereby get pre-warmed air.
  18. I second that; I jammed in a whole load of willow (cut myself, no paying wads for shoots), and nearly every bit was munched, either by rabbits or deer. The alder that I coppiced, really low down (about 12" - 18" stump left) has not been touched - and it has shot up. To add to that - the willow that I HAVE cut down is taking forever to get down to a good moisture content - think two years seasoning will be good - but the alder seems to be light and moisture free within a few months. With respect to the larger picture... well... notwithstanding the detrimental comments about UK wood producers, I think all imaginative new entrants can only grow the market - and if putting cartoony pictures on the website actually gains sales, then go for it! Looking at their other web site, I get the feeling that this is a farm where the owners are trying to do a good little business, but are a little, shall we say, hopeful.
  19. For our small-in-dimensions 4 bed cottage, we have a Dunsley Highlander 10 CH boiler, which takes about 4 weeks to get through a wood bay worth - which is 1.2m x 2.4m x 1.6m worth of wood. In daily terms, we use a wheelbarrow loaded with wood per day maximum, with mild conditions seeing a wheelbarrow load last two or more days. The Dunsley heats the domestic hot water, and when that is hot, the water goes around the radiators to keep us from being (too) cold. We do have solar thermal flat panels to work the domestic hot water during the summer, and sometimes we get some heat from that in the winter, but the majority is from the stove.
  20. I use my welding gloves for all the ground work - great for not getting thorns stuck in you 25p is pretty good - they normally cost about £6 or so from screwfix
  21. I find that alder seasons very quickly, much more quickly than ash. I fell the alders, leave the cord stacked in the wood for about a year, bring it to the chopping up area, round and split it, and it is ready to burn very quickly after that - couple of months max. Same advice as davetaz otherwise - I have built a simple set of wood bays, each 2.4m wide by 1.2m deep by about 1.8m high, with a wooden pallet on the ground, old sheep fencing around three sides, and a tarpaulin on the top - the wind whips through it and seasons it nicely.
  22. Jon Perry (who is on here as mendip logs) did us a big load for £120 a little while back, pretty much all ash, good and dry. I was at somebody's house near Shepton Mallet just before Christmas, and he was taking delivery of a hilux load - £70 I think it was - and his wife had asked on the phone "is it seasoned?" and the answer was "it'll be fine love", and it turned out he'd cut it one week ago. Because it was for an open fire, didn't matter too much - but for anybody with a woodburner, that's not good.
  23. I was at a friend's house, while he was having wood delivered. When he answered the ad, he said "it is seasoned?" and the man said "don't worry, it'll be fine." It was pretty clear from the wood that it wasn't seasoned - I carefully asked about how long it had been seasoned, in a nice way, and the answer came: "I cut this last week mate - don't want stuff to be too dry, it'll disappear straight away then, and my mum puts this in her rayburn, and it gets too hot to stand near" It was about £65 I think, for a bit under a level pick up truck full
  24. Hi, We got rid of the LPG heating that was in our cottage when we moved in. Replaced with a Dunsley Highlander 10CH. It heated up most of the house just fine; this year however we have extended into the roof, and taken the opportunity to add in solar thermal panels, and we will change the open fire in the sitting room for an old morso squirrel. I go through about 12 cubes of wood a year I think.
  25. I asked the same question here a couple of years ago, after the previous person that owned my house told me "those alder trees are worthless, not worth cutting for firewood". I did anyway, they seasoned really quickly, and are great. Not as great as ash, but definitely worth having.

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