Big J

Ulephone Armor 3W. I can't recommend it enough. It's a brick, but that's because it was a 10,000mah battery. I am on my headset all day. I listen to either Radio4 through the internet, or various podcasts of Youtube. I spend at least an hour a day on the phone. I can never managed to drain the battery in less than 48 hours. Under normal use (ie, not on a headset/on the phone all day) you get 4 days out of it. I reckon 6 days would be possible at a push. It just removes all anxiety about running out of battery as even when you're on 10%, you can usually make that last the rest of the day.

I'd add that one of the greatest qualities that a main contractor or forestry manager looks for in a cutter is consistency and reliability. If I were to describe my ideal chainsaw operative they would be: Punctual and reliable. Phoning in sick first thing in the morning due to a hangover, or turning up to site half pissed and an hour late isn't acceptable. Steady and consistent. Knowing that you're going to get a constant work rate from a cutter is vital. There's no sense going hell for leather out the gate if you've burned yourself out at 11:00. Equally, I can't bear slackers. Well equipped and well skilled. Have the right equipment and know how to use it. Not be permanently skint. It's incredibly annoying being hounded for wages at 17:30 on a Friday evening. Polite. A bit of banter is OK, but excessive swearing, sexually explicit talk or talking bollocks is at best wearing and at worst wholly inappropriate. Flexibility. Knowing that you can ask a cutter to stay late very occasionally to finish something off is useful. There's more that I could add to that, but that's the bulk of it.

You won't find better advice than this. Wallis knows his stuff, and he is actually glazed in sitka sap 😎

As firewood, I'd choose the pine. Denser and a lower overall water content. It'll be sticky to process though. That said, almost my entire winter's fuel is sitka and it's great. I suppose all I'd say is that given the choice I'd take pine.

A fox with the trots is how he got into this mess! 😀

Very nice. How is the black bullet getting on?

And here are a few shots from the thinning a block on the other side of the road. It was worked in early 2020. You cannot tell that we were there. No trace at all. Also one shot of a track we created within the eucalyptus block.

Visited a site this afternoon which we replanted with eucalyptus (mostly nitens, but the very tallest are mostly denticulata) April 2020. This is what some of the tallest trees look like now. These may well be the fastest growing trees in the UK. The tallest one is 5.6m at 19 months old.

You are correct. I think it was 1.75% on harvesters and 22% on forwarders.

The prices seem a lot higher in Norway than Sweden. I know that the electricity prices spiked in Sweden in September, with the Swedes outraged at paying £0.138 per kwh. The 5 year average has been around about £0.05/kwh, though it was as low as £0.02/kwh in March and April 2020. It's settled back down to about £0.105/kwh now and is falling. We're bidding on a house this week in Sweden with a bergvarmepumpe (geothermal borehole heat pump) and with a 4.25 COP (coefficient of performance) you've got a very low actual cost for heating (2.6 pence/kwh at present prices, but half that normally). Is it just the very high electricity prices that are buggering up the economics of it for you at the moment Rich or is there something else in the mix? Is the weather that much more savage in Norway?

Firewood isn't big business in Sweden. Most people just cut it from the birch/aspen that they aren't selling for pulp/sawlog (because it's not pine or spruce). I don't think that commercial log retailers exist in any great number - it's mostly just forest owners selling their own wood, for which they have paid nothing.

But hang on a second - everyone has told me that Sweden is really expensive?! 😄

I have it from a reliable source that the next month or so is to be dominated by high pressure, so cold weather ahead. I'm no Peckerwoo (weather forecasting oracle that he was, sadly AWOL), but confidence is high

That's usually the plan, but we had just over 5 inches of rain in 13 days at the end of last month. There was fairly widespread flooding in our river valley. With the clay holding the water like a lined pond, there's just nothing you can do but make a mess. I took the view that the ruts I've created are going to be tidied up as that section of the woodland is getting a couple of large ponds and a drainage ditch. The back section of the woodland is much drier and I've barely marked the ground there at all. After October, you really want to be up on Exmoor or Dartmoor away from the clay, but unfortunately, it rarely works out like that.

To contrast mike's utopian forestry scenes, this is what I had to contend with this week. Deep Devon clay, reeling from an extremely wet October. The video of the road is what (in part) caused it - 4 hours of torrential rain on Sunday morning. VID_20211031_072413.mp4 VID_20211103_124639.mp4

I don't think you'd see any appreciable difference in band life between narrow and wide throat mills. A narrow throat will do a 30cm cut faster than a wide throat mill. The reason is that you can push harder before the blade starts to deviate. As such, you could make the argument that the blade spends less time in cut and would last longer. An adjustable blade guide doesn't necessarily mean accuracy. You still get flex and flex means deviation.

I would go against the general feeling and say that buying the smallest mill you think it practical is best. I don't like wide throat mills really. They just aren't as accurate as narrow throated mills unless you spend an awful lot of money and use very wide bands (4-6 inch plus). It's extremely difficult to ensure consistent, accurate cutting across anything over 60cm with a 38mm blade. If you're not planning to mill big logs, don't buy a big mill. The one extra I'd say is much more useful is basic hydraulics. Log handling is brilliant. 3ft wide, 100kg plus boards aren't, unless you have all the appropriate handling machinery and a market for the boards.

Speaking of growing firewood, a eucalyptus nitens I planted at the foot of the lane during April at 20cm tall is now 195cm. The stem is the thickness of your finger. It'll keep growing through winter, and I expect it'll be 240-250cm by next April

The Touareg is now at it's new home with Andy (Dumper) in Essex. It was lovely to meet him, and for his assistance with Stansted parking and such like I miss it's ludicrously comfortable pace, but I couldn't justify it anymore.

I take your point, but (objectively) as a form of heating, £130/cube is much to expensive. We get through a cube a week if it's properly cold. It's the massive inefficiency in the whole process from start to finish in the UK that means that we have to charge so much more. I'm in Sweden this week and a cube of perfect, dry birch logs is £50 delivered. That's standard. But then everything is harvester cut here, there is a flawless road network and production is quick and easy. But then think of the work we have to do to produce a cube in the UK. At least with us, the job we're on presently, much of the timber is winched, it's then processed by hand (with assistance from a 14 tonner with a grab). There is a primary extraction by little forwarder to trackside and then a secondary extraction by tractor/trailer. Then the lorries that come to site only have one way in and one way out due to half a dozen width restricted roads and weak bridges. So conceivably there could be a customer a mile from site that would have to haul the timber 10 miles to avoid those. Then the cost of production is sky high too. Yard space is rare and at a premium now due to so many barns being converted for housing under the class Q planning exemption. What you can find is often wholly inadequate, muddy, doesn't have 3 phase, doesn't have lorry access etc. And all the planning issues about change of use and NIMBY neighbours who will happily buy your logs whilst dobbing you into planning because their utopian vision of rural life doesn't actually include anyone working rurally. Then there is staffing. It's so hard to find reasonable, reliable guys to process logs at a fair price. And then there is delivery - trying to shoehorn your delivery vehicle down daft little lanes and driveways to drop off only 1 or 2 cube at a time because no one will order in advance. My point is this. £130 is way too much for a cubic metre of firewood, objectively. But within the nuthouse that is the UK it becomes subjectively justifiable. The cost of doing business here is extremely high.

Thanks for posting the figures. There is so much misinformation and fear mongering about heat pump systems in the UK at the moment. I think the primary issue is that they serve to highlight just how shocking our insulation levels are here. Of course they aren't going to be economical in your average UK home with average insulation. We insulate our homes like we insulate our cattle sheds. We have a Swedish friend a few miles away whose parents don't like to visit (Devon) in winter. They are from Mora, which is at the start of the mountain chain that divides Norway and Sweden. The beginning of the wilderness really. And they say they find it uncomfortably cold inside and out here in winter. It's the driven rain and damp that means we really do need good insulation here. The heat loss from a wet wall is extraordinary. The best way to illustrate this is to stick your hand out of a car window at 50mph when it's cold outside. First do it with a dry hand, then with a wet hand. I wish more people took the climate in the UK more seriously. We seem to deny that we need proper insulation or heating, and then on the flip side endure weeks and sometimes months without A/C in summer because "it doesn't get that hot in England". The funniest thing I saw recently was a reply to a comment I made on a Guardian article about heat pumps. I raised the issue of insulation, and that we need a lot more of it. A chap replied to me saying that if he insulated his house more then the heat wouldn't be able to get out in summer and he'd overheat. It really was a Picard faceplant moment. 😆

Its a ridiculous amount, I know. The house we're in presently is the worst insulated I've ever lived in. It's roasting hot in the summer and very cold in winter. We use a little bit less than our last house in Scotland, but then that one was 30 square metres larger and the climate is colder. I'm in Sweden at the moment and the houses here feel so warm and comfortable by comparison to home. I was out walking with some German friends who recently moved here and parts of their house is quadruple glazed. With ground source heating, they are very warm indeed.

Jammy barstewards. We've had 70mm of rain in three days and this is what my ground conditions look like: