County4x4

One or two there who I wouldn't be surprised if they'd paid for the inclusion. B&Q of course are noted for their years of experience in the quality stove market - surprised that Machine Mart weren't in there too!! Andy

I reckon that would be a Dark Giant Horsefly - Tabanus sudeticus - I've seen seen a few about this year. Heaviest two winged fly in Europe, and biggest fly in the UK! They don't suck blood - they chew lumps off you and fly off with them by all accounts!! Andy

Well I'd be very happy to have several of those in frames on my wall mate - very impressive. While I'm here, not having been schooled in Latin, I put your sig line into an online translator to see what it said. The translation it returned was......are you ready for this....... "Always inexcretiar to be ollum to pour forth veriat" ......so now I know! Andy

Opinions are varied on these products. An American manufacturer of a similar product was fined heavily and forced to change it's advertising as it was making claims that didn't stand up. The main thing to remember is that none of these type of products are intended to be a replacement for chimney sweeping - they are just supposed to make it easier. What sort of brush are you using with your rods? A proper chimney sweep should be able to sort you out without going up on the roof. Andy Edited to ask if your Esse heats the water as well? If you're having problems with the stove tarring up it might be worth looking at the temperature the return stat is set at - upping it by a few degrees could make a huge difference

Their website is working fine for me. Haven't heard any stories about them going under - they're only a couple of miles from here. Andy

I heard repairs can be pretty uncomfortable on the wallet as very little in the way of parts is available from anyone except dealers. Transit parts are ten a penny by comparison and usually available for peanuts on ebay. The only other thing I've heard about them is "It Vibrates Everything Comes Off", but then I've also heard "F**kin Out Right Disaster"!! Andy

I did ask David about wear rates with his screws, and he said that basically he had no real concerns in that area. I forget how often he said he had to change them, but it wasn't excessively often by any means. Power consumption is around 1kWh to produce 100kWh worth of briquettes by all accounts. I guess feedstock will have a bearing on this figure but his recipe remains fairly constant. A lot of the machines in developing countries will probably be briquetting much harsher materials than sawdust I suppose. On the camping side - it would be great to sign up a few local sites and provide fire baskets and logs or briquettes to burn on them. We stayed at another place in the Lakes last year and the local firewood guy came round with a trailer full of nets every tea time - the campers were queueing up to hand over their money! He did a package deal of a net of logs, plus a small plastic bag with a handful of kindling plus a cube of firelighter for about a fiver. I'd say the vast majority of the campers onsite had a fire every evening - viewed from the hill above, the site looked like a refugee camp with smoke from dozens of fires drifting across it - the wood guy must have been making a killing! Andy

I'm up near the Cumbrian border mate. I've met David a couple of times - very nice fella I reckon. Been away camping on a site that allowed camp fires this weekend - and of course just about EVERYONE has one when they're allowed. Watched an awful lot of people struggling with some very smoky fires - while we used briquettes, and had a blazing fire in no time with no smoke at all! Should have set up a stall I reckon but the farmer selling the nets of logs might not have approved! Andy

Treenergy all the way mate - I've tried most of the "big players" over the years, and I reckon these are the best. Andy

£7 a bag is expensive mate - I sell at £4.50 max for very small orders, £4 if you collect from me yourself, and the price comes down a load more if you have a pallet full off me. Andy

I priced up an Indian built piston machine along the lines of the SPM machines that John mentioned a few years back, and that would have come in around the £40k mark not including shipping, duty and so on, and which would have involved a couple of containers for the whole set up. The company also send a couple of their engineers over to commission the thing, and you have to provide them with accomodation, and, I quote, "clean drinking water"! Rather than cutting to a precise length, the briquettes are generally snapped off the end of the continuous "sausage" the machine produces, either by running it into an angled plate, or having some mechanism to simply knock the end off every so many seconds. Treenergy briquettes are produced using a screw extruder machine, where a tapered screw forces the material through a die - the hole down the middle is what the end of the screw leaves behind. In the third world, where material like rice husk is often used as a feedstock, plants have welders repairing these screws full time. The high silica content of the rice husk can wear them out in an hour or so of production! Briquettes from a piston machine tend to look like a bunch of discs stuck together - and these often expand when burning. They also tend to fall to bits if disturbed or if more briquettes are added on top. Screw extruded briquettes like Treenergy's keep their shape until completely burned away and are generally denser than most other types. 1 tonne of mine occupies only 0.9 cubic metres- and due to the shape they are much easier to stack than the cylindrical ones in sacks. Cheers, Andy

There is another way of looking at this of course, and that's the possibility that customers may not return to buy another load of soft briquettes, so while the product price may not be much different, the number of retained customers could justify the better machinery? I've trialled briquettes made in an adapted waste paper briquetter that was originally designed for compacting scrap bank notes. They looked okay but were pretty soft in comparison, burned very quickly and left a pile of sawdust in the bottom of every bag. A 15kg sack would be lucky to last an evening. Yeah - nice idea to utilise the waste - but I never bought any to sell and wouldn't use them again, or recommend them to anyone else. The ones I sell now aren't even sealed in a bag - they don't need to be as there's no shovelful of waste and dust to contain. Being so hard they last much longer and a 10 kilo bag (not 15kg) will last more than one evening in the Squirrel. This makes them cheaper in real terms than the poorer quality competition As John pointed out there is not a huge difference in price across the different makes. There is however, a huge difference in quality. My briquettes are not the cheapest, or the most expensive, but they are better quality than most, and far better than some. It's quality that gets a customer to come back to you next time. If my supplier can sell them at a reasonable price given that he is operating in the UK with the far higher production cost which that entails, and given that his repeat sales have increased hugely then the investment would seem to be justified. Some of the guys selling at a slightly lower price are barely scraping by, and are praying that diesel costs don't go up, as the increased cost of trucking them from Eastern Europe would eat up what little profit they are making. Cheers, Andy

We are in agreement then mate! Andy

Hello mate, No I only sell them - though I always seem to refer to them as "my briquettes"!! I've tried all sorts of them over the years and I reckon I now have the best there is - AND they're made right here in the UK and not imported like much of the competition. I know a lot of small local outfits have jumped into the market using their own waste wood - but many of them are using machines adapted from other industries, and they produce much softer and smaller briquettes that burn too fast for my liking. I still think these are a better result than sending the stuff to landfill by the way - but I reckon "mine" are better! Cheers, Andy

Arbgirl, If your stove is getting that hot, then it's likely that you have some issues with the air control by the sounds of it. This is often a problem with the cheap Chinese stoves sold by Machine Mart and the like, where the castings are so poor that there are gaps between the pieces of the stove body which allow air in. This has pretty much the same effect as holding a sheet of newspaper over the front of an open fire to get it going hard. If the stove is decent quality then chances are that the rope seals in the door and ashpan cover are ready for replacement - these are classed as disposable items and only have a limited life before they harden and shrink and start allowing air to pass. Friends of ours have a half decent stove in their living room, and when we visited in the winter you couldn't get near the stove as it was roaring like a jet engine almost. Uncontrollable heat like this isn't relaxing to sit by - it almost knocks you out - and of course they were getting through a hell of a lot of wood. A new set of rope seals transformed the stove back to what it should be and now they are able to control the heat output again. I sell briquettes myself, and mine will burn happily once they're alight with both primary and secondary air controls almost completely closed down. I tend to run our stove with the secondary air just cracked open most of the time. You shouldn't really have a situation where you can't burn something because it burns too hot - you should be able to control the stove so it burns at the rate you want. Cheers, Andy

Tom2020 - just wondering if you know my old man actually?! Just come back from his place at Old Bilsthorpe this afternoon and he has a G scale garden railway - our two kids have been running American F7A's with sound systems round it most of the day! Apparently the company who made them went bust in the States and transferred manufacturing to China and the F7's are over £600 each now, with the sound chips about another £200 on top! He's also the secretary of the Narrow Gauge Society and has written quite a few books on steam railways and engine builders etc. I wouldn't be at all surprised if you'd met him somewhere! Andy

5 grand? For a domain in the multi million pound kindling market? Sounds like cobblers to me - and of course - don't know about anyone else, but I've never searched for "kindling wood" as a phrase. Kindling maybe - kindling sticks maybe - but kindling wood? You can do well with Google places if you have a local business - and that won't cost you a bean. Their results are always right near the top of the page too. If you want a kindling related domain - kindlingsticks.co.uk is available for a grand total of £5.38 for two years! Andy

I raced a Scag for many years! Top machine! Andy

Don't know if there are any arb guys on the Transit forum - but there are loads on there who have had their vans re-mapped by Martyn who runs Van Tuner - Transit Van Tuning and I've never heard anything but praise for his work. Don't go for the ebay "tuning boxes" which are basically an overpriced resistor in a box that fools the system into constant over-fuelling. Martyn will do you a proper re-map which is a whole different ball game. Not sure what chaffey meant by a gross weight of 5 tonnes incidentally? All the tippers are 3.5 tonne gross AFAIK. A couple of the bigger van models are plated at 4.6 tonne. If he meant gross train weight - that's a different matter - a 5 tonne train weight doesn't mean you can load the vehicle up to 5 tonnes! Andy

Mate of mine has a County Transit tipper for sale in Ireland at the minute - thats the 4x4 version. It's a '98 I think but can check. Belting motor and I'd have had his arm off for it if I'd not bought a Mk6 van a week ago as I'm taking my County van off the road for a while - off the road as in parking it up, not going offroad! I've had nothing but Transits for years including two 4x4's and honestly can't see myself ever buying anything else. Andy

Don't think you can change your user name through the control panel - just stuff like passwords and contact details etc. If you don't want to have to type it in every time, you can set the forum to log you in automatically each time you visit. Andy

Hope you used different computers! "If a participant's computer is believed to be being used to circumvent this term by, for example, the use of 'script' or 'brute force', that person's application will be disqualified and the person will also be banned from any future participation in similar activities by the promoter." It won't take a lot of doing to check IP addresses and so on - or their system may even flag up cases where a single IP has submitted more than one application. Having said that it also says one application per household - so you may be okay! Andy

An outfit called Mycorrhizal Systems who produce saplings inoculated to produce truffles have a programme providing free trees to schools (not inoculated ones though) I had them send some trees to our kids school as they've been doing a lot of stuff about woodlands and growing vegetables and have a Woodland Trust Green Tree Schools gold award, and a RHS Benchmark Scheme Level 4 award. It's only a small local primary school, so they're pretty chuffed with their results! Anyway, they were very pleased with the trees from the truffle people, and have planted them in their expanding woodland area. They also got their pics in the Mycorrhizal newsletter - fame at last! If you have young kids and their school does this sort of stuff I'd recommend looking them up! Here you go - http://www.mycorrhizalsystems.com/trees-schools-update Our daughter is in charge by the looks of the pic! Andy

Fine words butter no parsnips It's allus the quiet bull as gets ya! Andy

I've started trialling these already as it happens. There's no wood in them - they're produced from waste from the olive oil industry plus peanut shell. The calorific value is much higher than wood briquettes per kilo according to lab tests. I can see the argument about importers getting rich - however, another way of looking at it is that these guys are making use of a product that has historically been difficult to get rid of and is polluting in landfill. The price is actually much lower than that of some similar non-wood based briquettes made in the UK, which may still be great products, but the price is always going to put them out of most people's budgets. I've had quotes of around £400/ton at trade for some of these. At that level they are only ever going to be a rich persons talking point over dinner, and never a mainstream energy source. As far as their ethics go - I know they've already refused to deal with one MAJOR outfit in the UK because of their trading policies, in spite of being offered a huge commitment to order volume. That didn't strike me as indicating an outfit driven purely by profit to be honest. I also think I'm a pretty good judge of character and not easily taken in by sales patter, and having met these people they seem like a pretty genuine bunch to me. They are also looking at setting up their production in Spain to cut the distance to market. I totally agree with lindisfarnecharcoal's comments about imported charcoal by the way. I sell locally produced charcoal from a couple of guys, and it's streets apart in terms of quality, and produced as a by product of woodland management and ancient coppice restoration. That puts it in a whole different ball park to most of the imported stuff both in terms of background and quality. Personally I won't use briquettes at all, and especially not imported ones due to all the other crap they throw in to make them stick together. I also know for a fact that a fair bit of nasty imported stuff gets re-packaged and re-branded once it's in the UK! The difference with these olivebars is that they're produced from a waste material rather than from destroying anything. They are also diverting waste from landfill in just the same way that our home grown wood based briquettes are. Having said that though - most of the wood briquettes on sale in the UK are imported - mostly from eastern Europe. There are a couple of UK manufacturers - I sell briquettes from one of them - but quite a lot of small outfits too who briquette their own waste wood, often in machines not designed specifically for the job. These briquettes tend to be small and soft and give pretty poor performance in comparison. I also have to say that I think one of the big attractions of properly made briquettes is their consistent performance. Joe Public is generally pretty ignorant when it comes to solid fuels, and there's no getting away from the fact that there's an awful lot of rubbish being sold as firewood these days - though hopefully not by anyone on here. I've tested no end of loads of "seasoned firewood" which has proved to be anything but. As a result - Joe ends up disappointed with his stove, and disillusioned about wood generally. With briquettes, he'll get good results every time due to their very nature - if the feedstock isn't right they just won't work. Also of course, many briquettes offer significantly higher energy values than natural wood. Anyway - just my two penneth. I don't actually work for the olivebars outfit in spite of how it sounds, but I think we need to look at the whole picture here instead of making our minds up and then looking at the full story. Cheers, Andy