Big J

Woodmizer actually. Their machine is the most competitively priced. About £8k with the extra roller tables.

Lovely timber, just not outside. Well worth milling.

You might get a better selection of stock from James (Muttley), but my email address is rstw at hotmail dot co dot uk

Why bother? I can't see how breaking up pallets can make anyone money. If it's kindling you want, I've stacks of cedar edgings (mostly small stuff) at £18 a tonne. Need to break up a lot of pallets to get a tonne!

Do that. I'll see what we can do. We're cutting cedar again next week. Otherwise, if your hive works with timber that is less than 125mm wide, I've got tonnes (literally) of reject boards at 150mm that can be edged down to 125mm or less.

I could do, though I'm actually rather short on supply at the moment. Larch will dry quickly too, though probably two months rather than 1. Store it somewhere under cover, with strong air flow.

I've been asked by one of my customers for feather edge. As such we'll be buying a horizontal resaw in the new year to produce a lot of feather edge. I have been askedf or it now and again in the past, but have not been able to cut it. With the promise of over 100 cubic metres a year, it makes the machine cost justifiable. I do like feather edge myself, and would probably use it for cladding if I produced it.

I cut a lot of cedar for beehives. Hundreds of tonnes of the stuff. It dries extremely quickly. 23mm cedar will air dry within a month - just take the green stock and dry it yourself

I think that we are back to the point that a great many firewood customers are idiots.

If your logs are already 20%, I would consider it entirely unnecessary to go to any effort to reduce that further. A consistent 20% all you need.

It shouldn't absorb moisture too quickly, as it's dried beyond the fibre saturation point. I wouldn't worry about it though - it's hard to get it below 20% here with the perpetually miserable weather!

No, but typically kiln dried will be drier than 16% (at least on the outside).

Once kiln dried, provided it is kept from being physically wetted, it won't absorb moisture very quickly. This is due to the molecular changes caused by drying timber beyond the point where all of the free water in the cell is expended. Beyond this point (typically 25-30%) you are removing the water from the cell walls. This takes longer than removing the free water, but on the flip side, it also takes longer for it to be reabsorbed. The result is that kiln dried timber, placed into an environment where the equilibrium moisture content is higher than that of the kiln dried timber will reabsorb water, albeit at a rate that isn't quite as quick as you would think. I still think kiln drying firewood is silly.

That's pretty much exactly the same as mine (about 700mm). Saves so much time on processing and handling.

I agree with Nick. Mill the ash, replace it when rots.

I agree entirely, but in that situation a stove is possibly not advisable. Wood smoke (which you get even from a DEFRA approved stove) isn't ideal in densely populated areas.

The Commission have very little cedar up here. It's poor quality and overpriced. I'd consider Devon certainly. I'll PM my details.

Bah! It's a British thing. Everyone else in Europe seems to be able to dry their own firewood. We (collectively, as a nation) just can't be arsed.

20kw. It's only a large two bed cottage (127 square metres). Very rarely need the central heating.

All the reasons you list above are the reasons I am delighted I don't supply the domestic firewood market. I don't care about people that put their stove on a couple of times a month for ambiance. I don't care about people who specify by species, moisture content or indeed almost anything else. If a customer wants great value firewood delivered in bulk at a price that is directly competitive with fossil fuel heating, I'm your man. If you want a cube of kiln dried cherry firewood with a sprinkling of basil and thyme on top, I am not! [ame] [/ame] Seriously though, I believe a stove's primary function is heating. I just don't know how customers can afford to put theirs on at the prices being charged for kiln dried hardwood. In the depths of winter we burn a cube a week - that's £120 a week to keep my house warm. It's nonsense.

Don't think of them as cheap wet logs. Think of them as best value for your customer and least hassle/handling (and theoretically best profit) for you. Similar situation with sawn timber for me now. I used to do lots of kiln dried timber, trying to accommodate everyone with a broad variety of species, thicknesses and other variables. Customers would come, take one, two or perhaps 10 boards. High profit percentage, but overall a lot of work and hassle. These days, I still maintain a kiln dried stock, but mostly cut bulk softwood and hardwood to order. Orders are usually hundreds or thousands of boards, at a lower margin, but more profit overall. I think that the same principle would be most profitable if it was workable with firewood. Rather than selling single bulk bags for £120, I'd rather sell 50 at £60. But I'd rather not bag them, as it's inefficient. There are enough larger scale users to justify this approach, and I believe that a lot more people would order in bulk if they understood the cost benefits to them. Or perhaps they wouldn't and they are just blithering idiots!

Perhaps the education of customers needs to start with the stove retailers. Instead of specifying kiln dried hardwood only, they could explain the benefits (both in terms of cost and quality) of drying your own firewood, as well as explaining that there is no golden timber species. Hardwood, softwood, it doesn't matter. It just needs to be dry. I honestly believe that 90% of firewood customers have the capacity to store a year's supply of logs on their property. Quite why they don't is beyond me. I've not headed into a winter with anything less than a winter's worth of logs for over 5 years now.

Firewood customers really are blithering idiots in this country. If the heating oil companies offered 30% off for orders in spring and summer, they'd be inundated. I'm glad I don't sell much firewood!

No need. Yew and cedar are extremely unlikely to end check or split. Infact, I've never seen it in either species, and I've cut a lot of both. I suppose it may depend on which species of cedar it is. As a rule, never consider end sealing softwood (and yew is a softwood) and if hardwoods are cut at the correct time of year (winter) and correctly stored (under cover, away from sun, with reasonable but not excessive air flow) there is no need to end seal.

Agreed. A business needs to make economic sense regardless of whether government funding is available or not. I am slightly worried about the number of times we've agreed on things in the past few days TCD! Beyond that, all this debate as to what constitutes seasoned/kiln dried (in terms of moisture content) only reaffirms my belief that the sale of seasoned firewood is nonsense. Fell it, cut it, split it, let the customer assume the responsibility of seasoning it. They save money, you save money, everyone wins. It's only because we're a country of short termist numpties that this isn't drilled into us. Seriously though, I wonder if the lack of any understanding regarding the burning, seasoning and storage of firewood is down to the fact that it's not actually something that has traditionally been done on any scale. Forest cover is now 11.8% across the UK, which is the highest it's been since 1750 (twice what it was during the First World War). Even then, it's less than 1/3 of the EU average of 35%. The British have historically had access to abundant quantities of cheap coal, whereas our European neighbours have always had abundant access to cheap wood (and an amenable climate to dry it). Perhaps we are just used to being short termist (ie, we've run out of coal, better call the coal man). This is definitely an area where we ought to be more European!