Big J

I don't know. I had a fairly pricey Delmhorst meter when I had the sawmill, but I left that with the business. The issue is that even with a windy site, the air can only carry the moisture that it has capacity for. So 90% RH at 30mph (a stiff breeze) and 5c can still only carry 0.56g of water per cubic meter of air until saturation point is reached. Obviously, that metre cube of air moves quickly in a breeze, but even so, it'll still only dry as low as equilibrium moisture content and no further.

I'd check your moisture metre. There isn't any way the MC could be that low. Looking at the general forcast for central NI, the average relative humidity is just over 90% (and has been all winter). It's very unlikely it's below 20% and I'd guess it'd be 22-23%. The equilibrium moisture content it 22.2%, and whilst it might be carrying a bit of summer gained dryness, I'd hazard a guess that you've had plenty of 100% RH days that will have knocked it right up. I'm not being pedantic, but just had to point out that in the UK that sub 20 in winter is very tough to achieve and sub 15 is impossible.

Just checked my firewood in the house. 19-23%. That's ash that was split and stacked 13 months ago, left in stacks uncovered until mid summer and then brought into a completely sheltered but fully ventilated woodstore. The ash was also windblow to start with, which was offrooted and processed to length in October 2018, so it's had plenty of time to dry. If my average moisture content is just over 20% (which it is) in perfect (domestic) drying conditions, I don't envy you guys trying to do it commercially.

That would be in the ball park, though I'd say £20/t if you have to collect it or £40/t if he's dropping it off. Arb waste is slow to process compared to proper, forestry cut firewood.

Congrats Steve. She is beautiful.

The only real way around it is to sell green. I used to take a 7 cube load of larch/spruce to a customer in central Edinburgh twice a year. Really nice guy, background in forestry, so knew to dry it himself. I'd park the trailer under the conveyor outfeed, and the trailer was full in a little over an hour, if that. Easy money. I used to do that for about £55/cube delivered, if memory serves, a couple of years ago.

Machine operators love sitka brash. It's brilliant for driving the machines on as it doesn't break down, thus reducing the likelihood of getting stuck on bad ground. Sitka is a good construction timber. Here is a barn I built with Sitka some years ago: You do have access to very cheap timber. My hardwood firewood is going out at £54/t and softwood sawlogs £55-58.

Nah. I can't be bothered with a fire anymore. Don't have the time or enthusiasm for it. Sell the timber at roadside, fill the oil tank. Simples.

I hate it. Once I burn through the 20 odd cube I have left, I'm selling my firewood roadside and filling the oil tank.

Higher value per dry kilo, but lower per cubic metre due to lower density. It's not by much, mind.

It's brilliant if grown to a proper size and mechanically harvested. Produces consistent (low to medium) quality timber, doesn't fracture when being felled, produces brash of fantastic quality and grows well on wet sites. Depending on how much you have, clearfell it and replant with eucalyptus glaucescens. Double the growth rate of spruce (at least), looks lovely and produces good logs.

Interesting to see Jotul recommending hardwood. I hadn't seen that before. Either way, we put around 150-160 cube through ours in 4 years, mostly softwood, with no issues whatsoever. Didn't ever sweep the chimney either as I didn't ever see a reduction in draw, and the stove was on 8 months a year. The dried weight of pine, larch and hemlock is not significantly lower than ash or birch. If I were selling logs these days (which I wouldn't) I'd be looking to sell softwood at about 20-25% less than hardwood. I'd still make more money than selling hardwood as the processing time is so much less, but equally the customer would get better value for money. This local firewood retailer to my old yard has successfully converted most of their customers to softwood: Logs and Woodfuel WWW.CHAMPFLEURIEESTATE.CO.UK Garden furniture from Champfleurie Estate - Site Map

I would interpret it that way, yes. I'd go so far as to say that the advice would only need to be issued once to each customer.

They run the Biomass plant at Sandwich in Kent. Otherwise known as Kent Renewable Energy. Not renewable at all though. They import chip from (amongst other places) New Zealand (eucalyptus).

When we moved to Devon we brought a 20ft container load of spruce and larch down at 12% MC and it burned beautifully. It's just a bit lighter when dry compared to slow grown Scandinavian softwood

In Sweden it's only about 10% hardwood, as a proportion of the forest that covers 69% of the country. The slight majority of the remainder is norwary spruce, the rest scots pine. I'd personally choose pine over spruce, but slow grown spruce is still excellent. That is, I'll admit, one of the issues with some softwood in the UK. We're very reliant on Sitka, which grows far too quickly to be a quality fuel wood, on account of it being about 60-65% water when felled. Hemlock makes a much better (whitewood) firewood. Anyway, as ever, dry wood good, wet wood bad! ?

It was the 20kw stove from The Champion Stove Company. A Jotul copy. The slightly lower calorific value of softwood is more than offset by the fact that it takes only a fraction of the time to process, dries more quickly and is more readily available. Some of that cost saving can be passed onto the customer. There is going to be a massive shortage of fuel wood in the coming decade. The Commission stopped planting large amounts of new woodland from the start of the 90s and many of the restocks after about 2000 (after softwood clearfells) were native broadleaf. Given that squirrels have knobbled most of these, and ash dieback is buggering the rest, there is a large gap in supply coming up and given that the (very hungry) RHI accreditted boilers on higher tariffs still have up to 17 years left, they will be able to pay more for timber than any firewood producer. Drax in Kent sucks up timber from as far as West Wales and Cornwall. The eucalyptus is the only way to plug the gap due to it's staggering growth rate.

I used to have a Jotul type stove at our last house in Scotland and it was my understanding that they were designed to work best with softwood. Given that that was most of what I burned, it worked very well. I produce some fairly tidy hardwood firewood. Several thousand tonnes a year. That being said, when I look at the stacks at roadside next to the softwood 2.5s (same price roadside), I can only see that it would take 4 times as long to process the hardwood, for a fuel that is only has a fractionally higher calorific value. Anyway, give us a few years and softwood/hardwood will almost be a moot point. We're planting 75 acres of new eucalyptus woodland in May, and it's in a class of it's own.

Air drying.

British I feel. We don't have the quality hardwood supplies that central and southern Europe enjoy and we don't adopt softwood universally as I understand they do in Scandinavia.

Whoops! Wrong thread! ?

On the high temperature kilns, I really don't think that there is an justification for burning timber to dry firewood. A better use of that waste wood is to dry sawn timber, where a specific moisture content is more important and the levels required for interior use are too low to be acheived naturally outside. As regards the powerstation's carbon footprint, I know that we're rapidly moving away from a carbon based power creation economy, and my anecdote was half tongue in cheek. It's more a reference to how we're prepared to delegate our emissions production to elsewhere in the supply line rather than produce them ourselves. I also wonder how much voltage drop through the power distribution network affects overall efficiency?

Firewood is like a economic and logic blindspot for the British middle class. I find with my sites that they'd far sooner take a bootful of crappy logs than cash. And inevitably, they are retired, look like they are going to give themselves a hernia loading it, and invariably muck up their very expensive cars for the sake of a few quids worth of logs. I had to stop supplying logs t most of my customers when I had the sawmill as I found that once they started specifying species, it was time to put them onto another supplier for the sake of my sanity. I do wonder if the British hesitation to adopt softwood logs is resultant from so much bad press about tarring up chimneys, or whether they've just never burned properly dry softwood (ie, under 25%)? I'd take larch and pine over ash and oak anyday.

The notion that in order to reduce emissions from burning wood, we need to be burning more wood (to kiln dry the logs), thus creating more emissions and for the likely endpoint being badly stored logs that regain the moisture that was reduced in the first place is truly moronic. It's like having an electric car powered by fossil fuel powered power stations. It's madness.

One thought I had was that certainly in England, the local authorities make it quite hard for firewood producers to work fully within the constraints of planning. It's classed as an industrial process, planning has to be obtained, and then in more often than not rejected on account of all of the locals objecting (often the very same people that buy the logs - I know of a local example that exactly fits this description). If the government is committed to ensuring high quality firewood reaching market, it needs to assist firewood producers in professionalising their operations, including polytunnels and well ventilated barns for drying. Otherwise, it's just going to be builders bags with tarps over the top, which are a real struggle when trying to achieve 20% MC or less. At this time of the year, such a MC is actually impossible under those circumstances.