County4x4

I do sell sample packs of briquettes if you want to try before you buy in bulk. I can send up to three packs wrapped together with UPS via Interparcel for £8.22, so a total of £20.22 will get three packs - 30 briquettes and approximately 30kg direct to your door. Sorry guys - but unlike the outfit at the top of this thread, I just can't bring myself to charge you over £9 per pack PLUS carriage - as I wouldn't sleep at night! So £4 a pack is as far as I'll go! My bulk pricing means that you can make more from them than I do. As I said, I've trialled most of the briquettes currently available, and I reckon we have the best of the bunch in our premium type. Our economy ones are more similar to most of the competition in terms of performance - though as with all briquettes from a piston type machine, they do the expanding and collapsing thing, which our premium ones don't do at all. Cheers, Andy

We use and sell briquettes, and have plenty of customers who now burn nothing else. Most of them find they don't have to "get up and down all night" putting briquettes in the stove as they last so long - we have several regulars who report that two or three of ours will last an entire evening in their stoves - and I always tell people to go steady with them. Of course there are briquettes and briquettes - some are frankly rubbish, and while appearing cheaper on paper, if they only last half as long they work out more expensive. Many customers also appreciate that they are always going to get exactly the same performance. We hear loads of stories along the lines of "well we had some good logs off this guy, but the second lot he bought were nowhere near as good" With briquettes they know that they will be dry, will light easily, will chuck a load of heat out, and will be clean burning. They also appreciate that they can get a whole winters worth of fuel stacked on one pallet - not taking up half the garden! And of course quite a few customers get a warm fuzzy feeling from the fact thatthey're a recycled product. Each to their own though I guess - and I have no arguments at all to pick with anyone selling decent quality woodfuel of whatever sort - it's all a damn sight better than coal or smokeless in my book, and that's the main thing! Cheers, Andy

Thanks to everyone who has shown an interest in selling briquettes! The "stock reply" is too long to send via pm on here and so I've emailed everyone. It seems that not everyone has received a reply when I've used the "send email" button here on arbtalk - so please let me know if you've not heard back from me, and include your email addy so I can contact you direct. It might be worth checking your spam box just in case, and making sure the email addy arbtalk has in your account details is the email you actually use. Cheers everyone, and thanks for all the interest! Andy

Hi Steve, Should be an email waiting for you mate - reply was too long to send via pm on here! Cheers for now, Andy

There was a thread on the Downsizer forum on this very subject a few weeks back - and the guy who actually invented that particular axe made quite an input into it. Thread is at: Simple solution to flying logs. Cheers, Andy

Hi all, As per the post really - is anyone out there interested in stocking probably the best firewood briquettes currently available on the UK market? My pricing is such that a re-seller can make more profit from selling a pallet of briquettes than I make on supplying it - I'm more motivated by getting people into woodfuels than the bottom line. I won't ramble on here about all the advantages briquettes have over logs - and I fully realise that there people out there who just don't like them on principle - but if you'd like to know more about them, and details of prices etc, please drop me a pm and I'll get back to you! Cheers all, Andy

From the BBC news site: BBC News - Rare smelly fungus found in Gower Andy

I've a good mind to post all his briquette prices on MY website!!! Rollers for instance - over £9 a pack for small quantities PLUS postage! I'm not sure if that's technically criminal - but it ain't far off!! Andy

They surely weren't selling melamine worktops for firewood were they???

People selling County Transits always set the price very high! County Tractors of Knighton, Powys did the conversions, and some parts are now very difficult to get hold of - and bloody expensive too! Spares are now handled by a company called M J Allen. The older model with a beam axle on the front tend to be more common on ebay and come up quite often - though usually vans rather than tippers. Many later ones with IFS instead of a solid axle have knackered 4WD due to being driven on hard surfaces with the 4WD engaged. There's no central diff on these so the system is for off road use only - it's like driving a Landy on the road with the diff lock engaged. Grand old machines though - I have a MK5 and have had a couple of Mk3's which really are like a tractor in comparison! Never driven anything that has turned so many heads though! Andy

Is there not a feeling that increased demand for firewood is possibly going to be a good thing for the woodlands of the UK? Increased earning potential leading to old neglected coppice woodland being put back into rotation, and more areas of land planted up with trees instead of just being left? I know that this won't have much effect in the short term, but a few years down the line things could be different. Andy

Whereabouts in the country are you mate? A mate of mine does a lot of work like this - and says a lot of installers find it too complicated so will try and put people off as they can't be bothered. You need someone HETAS registered who is experienced with this type of installation - it's not an uncommon setup by any means - you just need to find the right guy to sort it. Cheers, Andy

Friends of ours have had one in for about a year. Big problems to start with as the return stat was set too low by the installer, and the whole stove was coking up all the flueways within about a week of cleaning out. Also filled the lower oven with liquid tar! Turning up the return stat by five degrees helped no end - installer had said it was due to burning wet wood and as they only burn my briquettes and kiln dried stuff I knew damn well that wasn't the problem! Esse build quality isn't great - I have a mate who does their warranty work for them! Pretty big firebox and will eat a fair bit of wood if you're cooking and doing your central heating from it too. Cheers, Andy Edited to say they have the model with the water heating boiler

Morso and Jotul make some nice stuff I'll agree - we have a Morso ourselves at home. However, I've heard of a lot more people having troubles with Morso than with Clearview, which are admittedly more expensive. Every single comment I've read about Clearview has been positively glowing with praise - and a mate of mine who installs and maintains hundreds of stoves every year reckons they're the best on the market if you can afford them. Andy

I know exactly what you mean John! We bought a brand new 50 ton paper baler a few years back when I was at Envirofirst. It was late arriving for starters and after a number of excuses like they wanted to upgrade the hyrdaulic power pack on it and so on, this machine arrived on a low loader. It took us about two minutes to see that it wasn't new at all, as there were remnants of paper and cardboard inside it, plus evidence of wear on the wire guides and so on. Some of the debris inside the machine had actually been spray painted over the top! First thing I did was stop the cheque that had been handed over too soon by the finance company, and then we got the MD of the company along to explain why he'd sold us a second hand machine as new. He said it was brand new and so we started pointing out all the evidence against - at which point he said it was brand new but had been used for factory demos. "Ah - so it's second hand then?" He insisted it was still brand new and after an exchange which looked like getting unpleasant, he left us to sort it out with the sales exec. I told him I'd already cancelled the cheque and said we'd pay him the original price less £10k. At first he said no way so I told him he'd better arrange collection sharpish then, as the machine was going to get dragged out in the yard in about ten minutes and was unlikely to still be there the following morning!! That was when we got the discount!! Couldn't believe the front of the guys though trying to pull a stunt like that. I may be interested in some samples and pricing etc when you are back in action John - I'm currently selling screw extruded briquettes which are the best I've ever had to be honest, but always interested to check the others out. Cheers, Andy

Many many years ago I was looking after a group of "bad lads" on community service or whatever they called it back then. We had a job burning a load of wet brash from a thinning job, and set out on a drizzly November morning to get on with it. When we arrived and unloaded them all, I told them what we were supposed to be doing and told them I'd go and get a can of diesel or something to help things along if they liked. One of these great hulking lads looked at me with a certain professional pride and said with a wink, "Nah mate - don't believe in it meself! I went off for half an hour to get on with something else and when I came back they had a right blaze going - this lad looked very smug. Turned out he was there for burning things down - but nice to see someone with faith in their own ability and pride in their work!! No idea how he did it though. We used to use what we called Foresters brew - a mix of diesel, bit of petrol, old oil out the tractor and whatever else we could find - worked a treat unless you soaked a fire with it and then had to leave off lighting it until next day. If you did this, the petrol in it would evaporate but get trapped in the mass of the heap, so when the YTS boy went to light it next day, he was quite convincingly blown up!! Possibly the funniest thing I ever saw while working in the woods! On brash fires - an old boy we used to work with now and again swore by "butt ends t'the wind youth" Andy

John - are you doing briquettes for domestic use now then? I remember last time I asked you were only doing stuff suitable for WID plant? Ben - would this happen to be UK Heatlogs by any chance - I had a chat with them last night as it happens - they seem to be doing the rounds at the moment. The thing to remember about briquettes is that they are far from being "all the same". Different types of machines will produce different types of briquettes - some which expand and then collapse into a pile of hot sawdust, and others which don't expand and form proper embers. Others are made by small operators using machinery adapted from other industries - and these often produce what I call "garden centre specials" - little chunks which according to one of my regular briquette customers are, and I quote - "rubbish - just like you said they'd be"!! cslogs - yes they are really dry - mine average less than 9%. However, they are also extremely dense and so long lasting. Other softer types I've trialled have burned far too fast as you suggested, and while they may have been cheaper per tonne - if they only last half as long they actually work out more expensive than top quality ones. I suppose the other things to bear in mind are that quite a lot of blokes these days are into male grooming products and moisturiser, and not so many relish the thought of getting dirty hands these days - so briquettes offer a very clean and high energy alternative to logs that won't leave bark and crap all over the place, and with which you can store an awful lot of energy in a very small space. Not everyone has room for a massive woodpile out the back. You can also push the green aspect - it's a 100% natural (or should be) product which is also diverting valuable waste from landfill, so you can have nice fuzzy warm feelings about saving the planet while the briquettes are keeping your tootsies warm! Cheers, Andy

Haha - don't think I will either!! I tend to be a "just get it sorted" sort of chap! Andy

The company I work for (non-arb) actually hands out prizes for the staff reporting the most "quality near miss reports". Our site which deals with toxic waste re-processing, apparently puts in more NMR's than any other company in the group, and this is actively encouraged by the management. They operate a "no blame policy" and I guess that they reckon the more things that get reported, the more they can do something about, and the better the safety record becomes. Andy

And me! Andy

Very smart mate - and do I spy an ex RAC 330 in the background as well? Hope the venture goes well for you! Cheers, Andy

If the website is your main advert for your business, then it's not a bad idea to have someone proof read it before you unleash it on the world. If you'd done that you wouldn't be advising people "Don't cutt your own tree's down", and nor would you be calling yourselves "tree surgeon's". Might seem like small things, but they stick out a mile and say a lot about your business! I also didn't quite see where all the DIY tools and printer catridges etc in your "store" fitted in with your business?? Andy Oh - and you have copied and pasted from Wikipedia - that's pretty poor style

I reckon it would get pretty tireseome feeding that machine one handful at a time pretty quickly! Andy

blazer it sounds like you're definitely over-firing that stove! If it's going like a blast furnace and glowing red, then you need to look at the way you're controlling it or the door seals and so on, as it sounds like there's way too much air getting in there. Wood prefers air from above - the bottom air intakes should be closed right down once the fire is established, and the fire controlled with the upper air inlets. However, if the door and/or ashpan seals are knackered, then it will go like a train and use way more fuel than it should. Andy

And I don't think he ever got in touch with anyone who responded the first time around! Andy