Stereo

Best split smallish and barn stored. Will dry in a few months and then be perfect. Not long lasting but good to add in the mix with harder stuff like Ash, Oak or Thorn.

Got a Stihl one which agrees with my Silverline one so I think it's pretty good. Unless they are both well out.

Been looking at this as well. I have good backdrops and quarry will be bunnies for food and magpies / crows for vermin control (steal all my eggs). Also the odd fox if they cause me aggro. But I'm happy to live and let live if possible. Dad had .22LR when I was a kid and it was a brilliant little gun. BSA I think. But I've got roads around the farm so worry about bullets bouncing around. That said, the crack of an HMR is likely to upset neighbours too. So was considering an FAC air rifle but advised not to on airgun forums. I've got an AA S200 .22 which is OK but I find it a little short on range and not too accurate out at 40 yards compared to an LR. It runs at 11fps I think but can go up to 24. If you were to go for FAC air, what sort of power are you looking for to take crows at 50/60 yards and which caliber is best? What is the ultimate FAC air rifle I guess is the question.

We're on our second Bobby now, this time a big one, 875 I think? Maybe wrong but it's the really big one. Great tools and very versatile from hedging to grading land to loading logs or taking off pallets. My one issue with them is reliability. We are always mucking about with it and it was the same with the older one. Wheel bearings, a billion hoses and metal pipes, valves, filters etc. etc. etc. Always leaks oil. Maybe look at a more reliable make? I would personally choose a tractor loader and a mini digger instead but Dad loves the skid. In a tight space, there is nothing to touch them but you will wear out either the floor or the tyres with all that skidding around. Zero grip on wet ground as well.

Brought in a load of smallish hazel sticks today. Logged it and saw moisture coming in through the bark but a few cut logs stacked by the burner tonight dried out in no time. Split one and 15% on my Stihl moisture guage. Seasoned wood will get wet again but it can then be dried out pretty quickly to it's original state.

If it's alder and it's red then you want to split it (if it's not) and get it in the shed for 2 weeks. Burn it when it's orange. Alder goes red because of the blood of the evil spirits in it so you really need them to extricate themselves in your shed, not your house. Once all the evil spirits have toddled off, it's one of the best firewoods on the planet, especially in a good stove.

Primroses coming up here.

I also said to my missus (and I'm not trained) 'look at that' and she glanced up from the ipad then I said 'what the hell is a chainsaw license?' and she said it was a license to use a chainsaw. So there you go. Carry on.

It's in South Devon. I can't imagine what it would be like living 200 metres from an industrial chipper doing 25000 tons of wood a year.

Hello folks, I wondered if any of you could offer any input on an issue we have. Our county council want to put in a waste transfer plant on a current horticultural site which has been out of use for years. It's essentially for chipping waste wood and plasterboard. That's fine, it needs to happen somewhere. However, the planning statement seems to me to contain glaring errors, as does the flood risk report. My question really is on noise. The application states that there is a residential property about 500m north of the site and that this is the nearest residential property. Well, according to google maps, there is a farmhouse about 220m from the site and a farm cottage about 320m from it. These may not qualify as 'residential' on a technicality but people live there. Also within a 500m circle there are plenty more properties, ag and residential. What is this going to be like for these people. I'm not one of them but I have serious concerns. I can see it ruining lives. They estimate 12 HGV's in a day but that is probably minimum I would expect. It's a waste transfer station with wood chipper and plasterboard grinder. Anyone have experience of that? I totally accept that this stuff has to go on somewhere but it appears to me that this site is going to be dealing with waste from a town about 10 miles east of us and all those trucks are going to be coming through one of the most congested towns in our county to get to this site. It's not even our rubbish. The EA seem to have waved it through on the grounds of a flawed flood risk assessment and highways also seem to have caved in despite the main road recently losing it's 'B' status.

I have a little Stiga Ready and not blown away to be honest. Struggles with anything but short dry grass and had lots of issues with bearings in the deck and also the deck height thing which I have now bodged up. Idea of a mulching mower is great but after a month of rain you really want to collect it up and put it in the compost, not leave a horrendous mess over your lawn which takes 2 weeks to clear / re-mow.

What about tents? Plenty about for free and would last a season or 2. I picked up an old mouldy 4m bell tent this year and it's mostly intact so that's sort of the plan for next summer. Trig it up and stack everything in there on pallets with decent airflow.

I like the idea of a log / pellet boiler. Could use pellets for the duration of the RHI and then move to logs after if you wished. Or become a self-supplier as mentioned.

I've been burning coppiced hazel for the last while in the form of small logs and can confirm much more ash. Still burns very well though and in many ways is cleaner to handle than split wood. Don't mind the ash as it's good for chicken dust baths!

Some of it is but a neighbour tried that a while back and got hell to pay from the locals. But 'special' around here if you know what I mean........... On RF's point, I have found that is the key. I can sit at the PC for hours and waste the day, then feel crap. You just have to get up and do something and then do something else. Sounds stupidly obvious but when you are a bit down, it's easy to just hide from life and wait for tomorrow. I've found that tidying and sorting is making such a massive difference to the place even though it seems petty at the time. Selling stuff, Freecycling stuff, scrapping stuff etc. Just clearing out all the crap of the last 2 years of life.

I've got a 200l thermal store which can also take solar thermal so I'm thinking this can be DHW and towel rails, powered by solar and the Esse and maybe I'll look at hooking up the underfloor heating to ground source heat at some point as we own all the land in front of us. Some good battery tech coming out now so it may be possible to power the ground source pump solely from PV with a battery for night time.

We looked at a Wamsler when we bought the Esse and although it looked a far better machine, we like the trad look of the Esse as we have an old barn conversion. This was a mistake really.

Ummm.. You might be surprised that some ladies do find the sight of a man smashing something to be quite...attractive. I don't get it but I know my missus and I had a bit of a falling out and I went out in the garden and destroyed a problematic old concrete drain with a 12lb sledge and well, it brought us back together..... So..keep it up.

That's what it can do but it was sold as more than that. When you hook it up to central heating it kills the cooking ability and doesn't really do the central heating. It's not a bad machine really but I feel I need to totally re-design my system so that it's only doing cooking and DHW. It can't heat a house. I was assured it could.

Problem with the 23 Esse I have is I feel it was oversold. It was marketed as this miracle stove that would burn 2 or 3 large ash logs a day and heat your house and hot water. Yes, of course, I should have taken note of the output but I think this is even over-stated and Esse climbed down on Moisture content after a while. Maybe the stove can put out what it is quoted with the door on the latch and perfectly seasoned wood by the barrow load but in the real world, it's nowhere near that. Maybe the 35 is the model I needed but I feel that the 23 was sold as that when it wasn't. In my fitting manual there was no mention of a laddomat type device which is now seen as essential. This is only 6 or so years ago. I also am disappointed with the general fit and finish if the stove. It's just average to poor in most areas.

Can you make them from dead standing elm without seasoning? Got an outdoor do coming up and it might be nice to have a few. We've got loads of DED around, many of which are lying against other trees and bone dry. Also, do you make the vertical cuts with a chainsaw or is that too wide?

I feel the outputs given for these stoves is generally optimistic. The new Esse 990 Wood gives a figure but it does imply that you would be burning it flat out all day and loading it every hour or so. That's not realistic. Same with the 355SFW. It doesn't really give an output figure for using it in the way that most people will which is to load it up, shut the door and only get it really blasting when they need to cook or maybe if all the kids are having showers etc.

Hilux? My 93 just keeps on going. Wings falling off, all the lights on the dash are on but it never stops. You can't kill them. Of the 3 cars I have (VW and Honda), if I had to get to Scotland (from Devon) tomorrow and my life depended on it, I would take the Hilux.

Got one too. Pretty cross as it doesn't do what they said it would when I bought it, now I'm stuck with it. Mine's a W23. Very fussy on wood and as you say clogs way too easily. I've invented all kinds of devices to get in the nooks. I feel gap between the oven top and the flue entrance is too narrow and you soon lose efficiency there which means hot plates off. The idea that all the chimney soot should fall down and block the back of the oven is not so great either and why is there that little ridge at the back which you have to get a scraper in over? Maybe that's just mine. I wouldn't recommend it to be honest. We wanted something that would do DHW and CH as well as cooking and I feel we were misled. I don't mind shoveling wood into something as we have plenty but spending time chopping wood and then hearing the gas boiler chip in every 10 minutes is depressing. Is there a Rayburn or similar which will truly heat a modest detached house with a thermal store?

I've found a pretty good source of very cheap, clean pallets locally. I've got an Esse stove which runs great on the chunky bits of the pallet and have chickens so loads of empty feed bags (standard fert bag size) which I have to pay to get recycled. I've got a pretty good method of chopping pallets with a circular saw and a 300mm chop saw for the bigger bits. I can get one chopped in a couple mins. So I was considering making the plank bits into kindling and flogging it locally. What would you charge for a feed bag full? Not sure how many pallets that would take. Might test it tomorrow.