Big J

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.

Poker straight oak and chestnut grows like a weed in France. In the UK, any broadleaf woodland left unattended will rarely produce anything other than shit due the constant weather onslaught and grey squirrels.

This is one of the main issues. There is no physical way an open fire can burn cleanly, and I feel that before trying to apply daft regulation to fuel wood sale, they should outright ban open fires. Emissions from an open fire burning wood at 10% MC would be far worse than a stove burning wood at 30%. In my personal experience, once you're under about 28%, you're not going to have any issues with a decent sized stove. I think smaller appliances require a slightly lower MC.

Not to mention that retailers wouldn't have to worry about the logisitics of having to deliver firewood at the most challenging (weather wise) time of year. I wonder what the realistic cost saving would be to the end user if retailers could process straight into a tipper and delivery immediately? At least 20%, I'd reckon, if not more.

That's a lot of capital investment, both in terms of the barn and stock for almost three years. If firewood customers weren't idiots, then we'd have them all trained to take unseasoned timber in spring to season themselves over summer. No storage costs, no capital outlay. We'd save a fortune, they'd save a fortune and we'd be doing it like the rest of Europe.

Well the wet wood thing is total bollocks. Wet wood is only wet for a short while until it's dry and only an idiot would burn wet wood. This country is moronic. Everyone else in Europe seems to manage to buy fresh firewood.

Extensive rot and blue staining indicating metal. The burrs are reasonable, but personally I wouldn't bother as burr oak is rarely that impressive. Sorry to be negative, but it a stem looks that bad from the ends, it's only going to be worse when milled.

PM sent ?

Yep, it pays for itself. I had the first Logbullet in the UK, and have been out to Finland to see them in action, and will again go at Easter. Mine is 630hrs and 18 month old. It's paid for itself already. I've broken various bits of it, but the manufacturer support has been outstanding and everything I break gets replaced FOC and subsequent machines sent out are uprated. I'm basically the "if anyone can break it, he can" guy, and I'm helping with development going forward. Small machines have to built down to a weight, and as such are delicate, but if you're a sympathetic machine operator, they are reliable enough and cheap to fix when they break. I've just had to replace a lift motor and ram on my much larger Komatsu 840tx and that's about £800 once fitted. Just to be able to lift the sodding cab up. The difference in ground damage has to be seen to be believed. We're working on a site at the moment with a big machine clearfell, a big machine thinning and a small machine thinning. The ground was hard on the big machine bits and is now completely buggered with the weight of the machines and the weather we've had. The small machine section was very soft to start, but the damage has been minimal by comparison. I'm biased obviously, but I'd say go Logbullet. Alstor make very good machines but they are extremely expensive. I don't have any experience with Kinetic, but again, a different price class to the Logbullet. I don't have personal experience with the Kranman forwarders, but they are popular in Sweden, and I have the Kranman processor, which is very good and their backup is also very good. I don't know where you are, but you're welcome to come and see my machine in action in Devon. Otherwise, there are a couple more of us on here with Logbullets, one in Wales, the other North Yorkshire (I'll let them introduce themselves!).

A point I forgot to mention is that my back is much worse now that I'm a machine operator mainly. Having the back held in an unnatural position for 8-12hrs a day is just not good.

Bugger. I'm sorry you've had it so bad. As someone with an occasionally incapacitating and usually stiff back, you have my sympathy. Training is the only thing that works for me. The osteopath really helps, but there are good ones and bad ones. What has been the most likely diagnosis from your various tests? I realise that back complaints are hard to diagnose.

Not really, no. I have a good orthopaedic Ikea mattress and I still wake up as stiff as a board. Only place I wake up fresh from is a reclining chair. I know you're generally as fit as a flea, but what core and posterior chain exercises do you do? I find my back is only OK if I'm disciplined and do some weighlifting, specifically squats.

The stove is almost exclusively loved by men and exclusively loathed by women. It's an engineering masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned, but I agree that it can be contentious with the women folk.

Bullerjan 01. We had one in a similar sized room in a similarly draughty house in Scotland and was certainly not OTT. 11kw. Should be able to find one in budget, though they aren't the easier to get in the UK. The convection from the pipes is superb, and they punch above their weight. Take 50cm logs too. Much more interesting than the current trend for boring square boxes with oversized windows.

OK, you win! ? It's just been so wet for so long. Just over 400mm in the past 11 weeks. The majority of the rain free days have been foggy, so no drying. The only week I've seen any drying all winter preceded Storm Ciara and then was completely undone by the weekend's rain. I was chatting to another forestry contractor down here, and he said he's spent more time debogging and repairing machines this winter than actually operating them.

Liquid mud. This defines my life now.