djbobbins

New house is super well insulated, no heating on yet. Just put the winter tyres on the car though, just in case...

At risk of stating the obvious, I think you can sell it as firewood, and there will be a market for it. It just depends on finding a few of the right customers. My folks run a solid fuel, 1940's vintage Rayburn, an open fire and a stove. They believe themselves to be lucky because they have found a furniture-making place which lets them collect exactly this sort of wood waste free of charge, by arrangement. My parents are sufficiently happy with this arrangement that they are prepared to do a nearly 40 mile round trip to collect a 1 cube trailer full, and to do the loading themselves. Plenty of the other members of the family, who run both open fires and closed appliances, are desperate to find out where the source is. I've had some of the wood myself and it is great for coming home from work and getting some heat up quickly. I think if you can find the right customer base you will have no problem at all shifting this "as is" in dumpy bags without processing it in any way. At the right price I'd consider buying some myself to augment my own personal log supply but distances are prohibitive!

I can't guess they will get too many bulk buyers... ALDI - Sunday Special Buys 6th November 2011

At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, it's worth to you and value on the market aren't necessarily the same thing. With road access I would expect a small package of flat land to fetch at least 10 grand per acre if there is any likelihood of it being put to some form of commercial or "more money than sense" use by horse owners. If there is even the tiniest of chances of ever getting planning on it, or if it backs onto gardens / land of someone that particularly wants to preserve their landscape, rational valuation goes out of the window.

This is my brother-in-law's eldest getting on the scoresheet twice and doing his media bit at the end! [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSvOa5Y-n24&feature=player_embedded]Saints Academy 30-0 Sale: Highlights - YouTube[/ame]

For what it's worth - if you have already got some big curtains up and as quoted the problem is with cold air coming up through the floorboards, have you thought about getting a job lot of clear silicon and sealing the gaps between the boards? My sister bought a Victorian house which had been done up as a "builder's refurb", having viewed it during the summer. Come the first winter, she found the nice shiny polished sawn edged floorboards (no T&G) meant huge draughts. Think about it - if you've got a 12 by 12 room, that's 144 square feet. If for each 4 inch board there is a 2.5mm gap, that is three and a half square feet of "air leak" space. You can get a dozen tubes of clear silicon from Screwfix for £18-odd.

If you've got an Ipod you can download podcasts of language lessons for free, the ones I got for German are from "Deutsche Welle". Deutsche Welle has also got a website which might be worth a look. Along with everyone else, my suggestions would be to find some native speakers who want to learn English, then try to hold conversations where both sides speak in the language which is "foreign" to them. Oh, and do it sooner rather than later - certainly based on my experience of learning German these last six or seven months is that it's a damned sight harder than learning French ten years ago!!

All the stuff at the site I visited was being chipped and burned on site for electricity / heat generation.

Quick query - my other half, bless her, is in the mood for spending some more of my hard-earned. I'm trying to weigh up the merits of doing the kitchen (her first choice) and the fireplace (mine). The fireplace as is is limestone, extends about 8 foot along the wall and around a corner, and has the best part of a couple of foot of hearth. It's an 18" grate, with (allegedly) fully lined dedicated chimney. (The house was built in 1976 so according to the building regs then, it should as a minimum have been built with interlocking pipes). So really my question is - anyone got an idea of what it would be likely to set me back for getting rid of the existing fireplace / hearth, building something new and fitting a decent quality stove (the room is pretty well insulated so it doesn't need to be huge, I'd guess 5-7kW)? I was guessing about £600-700 for the stove, a similar amount (ie a couple of days work plus materials) to change the hearth?? If the flue needs to be lined, what would that set me back though? The ceilings are not very high, so I would guess the height from stove to chimney pot is about 22-24 feet. Any info / thoughts appreciated!

In the first post, I think I might get in there with a question about the origins of the logs, because I'm of course only interested in logs from native British tree species, not any of this foreign nonsense. And for the Euc - I'm surprised he didn't just write in the listing "I got a quote from a professional and decided I didn't want to pay a couple of hundred quid to get rid of an unsuitable tree grown in an unsuitable location between two potentially fatal power cables, so I thought I'd let some amateur with a B&Q saw come and have a go."

I'm living just north of Dusseldorf at the moment. I'd also recommend you get yourself onto a website called Toytown Germany - English language news and chat which is basically a forum for English speaking ex-pats. There is a part of the site for small ads and life in NRW, so you should be able to stick a post on there offering English-speaking tree / gardening work. Have you also thought about contacting the English speaking schools in the area? There is an International School in Kaiserswerth with about 600 pupils, 60-70% of which are American or Brits (and hence tend not to speak much German and consequently be wary about getting ripped off). There are also international schools in Neuss, Essen (I think) and Duisburg. The school in Duisburg, called St. George's, is just moving to a new site which is being built / redeveloped. Last time I drove past it looked like there might be scope for some work. (But generally on the schools point, I was thinking more about using them as a place where you could advertise). I suspect if you could get over the initial hurdle of getting a good reputation, you wouldn't be short of work around here, although a lower proportion of the housing stock is houses with gardens, much more oriented towards flats. Hope this helps!

So, according to that first advert, the kind of person that would want to use a Stihl is a b***ard that'd ignore the wishes of a man on his death bed??? I'll have a Husky then...! <<where's the emoticon for ducking out of the way and waiting for Stihl - Husky arguments to settle?>>

Nah, it's not crap firewood - in fact I'd say it is very good, personally, having burned about 6 or 7 cubes of it over recent years. The caveat on that is that it has got to be really well seasoned - it is crap firewood if you try to burn it any less than two years old. Give it three full summers, or more, and it is great stuff though - lights well, burns hot and when poked breaks down into a good solid bed of red ember which lasts for hours. I'm not sure about the woodturning, I gave some of my euc to an old lad at work who does some turning but have never got around to asking him what it was like, and I've now moved office.

Well done for protecting your assets from this "bargain". Sadly I guess he's got the nous not to go back to the same dealer again, and assuming he got the wedge in cash (or cash-like) then it's probably going to be hard to trace for the plod. Got to agree with some of the sentiment in the comments about the dealer though, if they laid out close to six figures without seeing documents, it does make me wonder whether it wasn't the first time. Still, I guess they'll learn their lesson out of it too. Out of interest, assuming the worst had happened and you'd lost the machine, would you have been insured? You mention insurance against theft but not necessarily for items that were on hire; I'm just curious how the insurers look at that kind of thing.

Nowt to do with me, I'd be interested myself but it's too far to fetch: Firewood Log Saw Horse Frame Clamp | eBay

One of those on an 6 or 8 wheeler was exactly what I was thinking of. You would also need to devise some way of measuring the amount delivered to the customer. Much as I would prefer to see chip sold by weight, volume measurement is probably easier - especially if the customers go onto fairly standard sized hopper. Otherwise, you could partition out the truck body e.g. into 1 / 2 / 3 m3 multiples and sell it that way I suppose. That way at least you could do multi-drops. If the delivery rates are as claimed up to a cube per minute, the slowest part of the delivery would be the coupling up. I like...

No, that's just to help the customer think you are more trustworthy and reliable than the next guy down the road, so you can hopefully charge them a few more quid...

I am sensing an opportunity in the market here, and for years to come... Properties moving off oil and onto woodchip boilers, and suppliers with piles of woodchip around but no sensible way to load it into a truck or customer to buy in single digit tonne quantities. So... question is, is there any way to load it into (and out of) a tanker or corn lorry using compressor and flexible hoses? I think that will be the way of the future for delivery woodchip to hopper fed boilers...

I would recommend alder as firewood, although as has already been said it's light once seasoned so you will get through a lot of volume of it. I'd also suggest trying a few eucalyptus, I know it's not native but if you can get it to grow, the wood is good for burning (once seasoned) and you may get a quick yield dependent on species: Prima Bio - eucalyptus specialists - promoting new uses for eucalypts (That all being said, it is a pig to split though!!)

By the time you have got rid of the brash, used fuel, travelled etc it is more than just thewages for an hour and a half or two hours of saw work. I'd go with the recommendations for telling him to burn the brash (it'll be nice and dried out by bonfire night :-) ) and charge about £75-80.

I was thinking last night about building a firewood trailer and had a bit of an idea. I wondered if anyone else on here had done something similar in the past and had related experience or opinions to add. I have got a 4x4 capable of pulling 3.3t braked, and don't want to spend the money on having another vehicle sitting there. I only do firewood for myself and the owner of the land it comes off (at the moment, at least) so also don't want to weigh out too much cash. My idea was to get a tired out horsebox (there's a few on ebay all the time in need of a new floor), then re-floor it and ply line the front and sides. I'd plan to put some form of cage door across about 3 foot in from the back, to leave a working space and give something to hold the cut logs in place. The logs could then be removed via the smaller door at the front. All simple enough, up to now. Where it starts to get a bit more complicated is that into the "workspace", or hinged from the tailgate, I was thinking about building some form of processor - as a minimum, a steel X-form sawbench, but ideally with some form of elevator to drop the logs into the storage area. Strengths of the idea are: 1) end up with a single "package" for going logging with 2) cheap enough to build (trailers look to be about £300 tops, so I reckon I could finish it for £500 if the processor side of things is "basic") 3) a twin horse trailer will carry over a tonne of horse and I guess weighs another 15cwt or so, so I'd be able to get plenty of logs in (I guess up to 4 cubic metres or say a tonne and a half) Weaknesses / concerns: 1) are the overhangs too long, and chassis ride height likely to be too low to prevent me from actually getting the trailer anywhere usefully close to the timber (particularly compared to something like a Sankey) 2) Am I gaining anything by building in the processor / sawing horse, or do I just leave a bit of space free in the back and take a portable sawbench instead? 3) Would it end up being too hitch-heavy with a tonne and a half of wood on board???

Have you thought about writing a letter to the local paper as well? My recommendation would be to check your bank account next Friday and if the money isn't in there, go round and (assuming the business has its own driveway) park a vehicle across there at about 4pm. In doing so, you are not using force, not tipping any waste, not damaging anything, so even if the plod gets called you aren't likely to get into any bother. The prospect of not being able to get out of the office on a Friday afternoon should prove to be persuasive.

Anyone connected to mains gas would have to be tapped at current prices to switch to biomass. I don't really buy into the concept of electric heating whilst we are using fossil fuels for generating the power; the only logic for it that I see is those countries which have very large amounts of baseload or uncontrollable generation (e.g. nuclear, wind, run of river hydro). But I stand by my opinion that with the RHI, demand for chip is going to go up, and particulary in areas off the gas grid. I'm just curious if / how people are preparing for this, in terms of physical equipment, wood supply and links with installers etc.

I was just wondering if people are starting to see, or are anticipating, increased demand for log and chip with the RHI coming in? I'm curious - I work in the energy industry (electricity) and am interested in firewood / tree work etc as a hobby and for personal use only. A friend of mine is looking at moving over from lpg to biomass and I've had similar thoughts. We both have ample personal supply of wood but it struck me that if other people do the same there will be a huge increase in demand. A biomass boiler will use a lot more fuel than a cosy open fire that people buy logs for at the moment!! At my pretty well insulated, double glazed house, we get through about 1200 litres of oil a year (i.e. a tonne, near as damn it), maybe half a tonne of coal and maybe 3 cubes of dried, stacked alder (I guess another tonne or so). If I convert all that to wood, using the relative calorific values, I get to 5 tonnes per year of woodchip. That's for one moderate sized house, dounble glazed with cavity wall and loft insulation. Even if new biomass boiler penetration is low, I can only see demand and prices going up up up in the next few years.

But as a PS if cost is the reason for brewing, I'm in Germany at the moment and in the local supermarket you can buy a case (20 x 500ml bottles) of 4.8% lager for under €5... hic!