Stereo

We have an Esse W25 or some such and it will go through a travis Wheelbarrow a day of good dry wood. That said the boiler still kicks in from time to time so I'm not sure how much good it is doing. Does make the house nice and warm though and we can cook and boil a kettle on it no probs. I wouldn't be without it but I also wouldn't want to see a time and motion study on the amount of effort I put in to keep it blazing.

Good luck Mick, nice to see someone willing to graft.

We have a 641 (I think, the number is rubbed off) at the mo which is a lot smaller than the 873 (not 853) we are getting. Currently have bucket and a grab but this one is coming with pallet forks. I also like the look of the mini digger attachment. Plus a nice splitter is available. There are hundreds of attachments for it, amazing variety which I only found out about the other day. The controls do take a while to get used to. The golden rule is generally when things start getting away from you or it starts jumping about, don't try to correct, just let go of everything. Our 641 must have shifted thousands of tons of earth over the years. But it's not man enough to drag trees about and struggles with heavy work. We have a picture of 'our' 873 holding a smaller bobcat about 12 feet in the air on pallet forks!

I don't get the chicken thing. Either an in joke or people think I'm spamming. Or both.

I've mentioned the purchase of said vehicle on a few forums and people seem to think I'm some kind of redneck. I'm very excited as we tried it out and pulled a 60ft fallen Alder tree clean out of a boggy spinney like it was a twig. Is it just me?

They go on eBay. As Stihl and Husky won't let you sell online, a year old saw makes nearly new price on the bay. Then we buy new, all set up and tuned. Saves a fortune on servicing costs.

Just to ressurect this, we have an Esse stove in the kitchen with (in my humble opinion) far too much enamled pipe before it converts to SS double wall. This has always been a problem as the Esse can sometimes burn cool and create a lot of cresoste if you are not careful or use damp wood. The SS pipe cleans easily but the enamled pipe gets a coating of thick gunk which is impossible to remove without taking the whoe thing down and doing it mechanically. Anyway, I bought some flue cleaner from eBay made by 'The Gallery' as far as I can see. You chuck a couple scoops on a low fire every fortnight or so and it's supposed to weaken the tar and make it brittle. My god, it works! I've just swept out the stove as it was getting sluggish and the reason for this is that all the years of accumulated tar which I have never been able to remove with a brush have hardened and fallen off in flakes. I stuck the brush up the pipe and it was literally shining inside afterwards and half a ton of hard flaky tar came tumbling down. I'm totally gob-smacked as I didn't expect this to work. The biggest downside it appears is that you are initially going to get a lot of stuff falling back down into the stove which may be a problem, depending on the design. Worth a mention I thought.

I don't sell it, I burn it. Got a few acres and am in the process of regenerating ancient coppice and planting new. Hence, most of the stuff we burn is 4-6" so it's nice easy work. I cut a lot of Alder which granted is easy work but we also have a few old fallen beeches and oaks which is when the big guns are needed.

I can remember doing this as a kid maybe 30 years ago. We were told to chuck a coke can in every other day. No idea what effect it had or what emmisions it released into the atmosphere.

I have a big Husky with an 18" bar and it's a fantastic saw. I forget the model number but it's about 2 years old and has the easy chain adjust thing and easy start. I love it to bits but the saw I use for most of my work is a Stihl MS180 with a 12" bar. It's super light, will go all day and with a sharp chain can fill a Hilux in half an hour. Lugging a heavy saw around all day is not only tiring but also dangerous if you are not physically up to it. You don't want tired arms with these things. So, my advice would be to go for a saw that is as light as possible. If it's your only saw then maybe a 14 or 15" bar would be wise. I used to have a little Husky with a 15" bar but found it struggled with big stuff and was too big for logging off etc. I decided to get a really nice big saw for the tough stuff and a second saw which was as light as possible for day to day stuff. I find a 12" bar is perfectly adequate for 90% of what I do. The only downside really is the side of the fuel tank but then that adds weight as well.

I've got a Villager 'A' Flat. Not particularly fashionable and apparently rubbish but it's brilliant and keeps us toasty all winter long. My brother has a Clearview thing and it's a pig. Probably the installation but he's given up using it. At the end of the day, it's a stove. An iron box with a glass door. To coin a phrase, it's not rocket science. I think a much larger factor is the chimney. We've got a fully insulated 6m straight up and down with a draught proof cowl on top. Takes 10 mins to sweep and works perfectly.

It was our kettle! We had been given it years ago as a wedding gift and it's supposed to be for hotplates. My grandad passed on a few months ago and while we were clearing out we found a genuine old Aga kettle in the garden with strawberries growing in it. The lid was in the shed. I took it home and yesterday decided to clean it up. Much scrubbing later, I popped it on the Esse full of cold water and within 3 minutes it was singing away! That was with the fire door fully closed and a low fire. Putting the door on the catch with dry fuel boils it in under a minute! Can't believe we didn't try this earlier. I had wondered but the price of them always put me off. Doh.

I thought about fitting a cover here but as you say, bit of a pain. Would need to take the whole thing down more or less. On another note, how do you get on with yours? We have underfloor heating with a heatstore and find that this takes a lot of heat out of the stove. Boiling a kettle can take 15 minutes unless we put the door on the catch. I do love the thing but sometimes thing we are not getting the best out of it. Kind of wish we'd just gone for a cooking only one as it warms up the whole downstairs anyway with ambient heat.

I've tried various brushes. The standard type which I've always used for our old Villager with a straight up and down 6m flue. 10 minutes to sweep once a month with no mess. I bought some expensive flexi rods with a special brush which has a ball sticking out of it. The intention being that the ball will find it's way around the bend. The flue is 4' up, then a 45 to the lright, a 4' diagonal and then a 45 to the left and the rest is straight up to the top. I think the issue is that just after the second 45, the flue changes to insulated stuff as this is where it goes through the roof. I just can't get the brush to go around the second 45. I think it's the fact that the rod is bowed downwards after the first turn and I'm asking it to bend the opposite way. Maybe I should hire a sweep and see what he uses.

We have an Esse W23 in the kitchen with a slightly complex flue. It has 2 x 45's in it and even though I have the super flexy rods and the brush with the ball on the end, I can't get around the second bend from the bottom. The only way to clean the top vertical bit is to get up on the roof and stick a brush down it. A bit of a pain as I like to give it a quick sweep every month through the winter for best performance. As the Esse tends to burn a little slower than a standard stove it can gum up, especially if we are pushed to burn wood which isn't perfectly dry. So I saw this powder you can bung in once a week or so and it is supposed to make creosote build up brittle so that it doesn't cause a problem. Anyone used it, is it any good?

I have found sycamore takes a good while to season. It will burn green but picks up moisture very easilly. In my opinion, best stacked well under cover and off the ground. Nice firewood though when dry although it goes quickly.

I coppice Alder and can heartilly recommend it. Cuts and splits easilly when green, dries quickly and grows at turbo speed. Also coppices very easily and is a tough tree to kill. Also, I believe Alder can promote Ash growth as it creates nitrogen in the soil? Maybe wrong on that but sure I read it somewhere. Anyway, Alder would be a good baseline as it'll give you a return very quickly and will multiply once first cut. If the ground is wet or boggy, even better.

Probably depends on the flue / chimney. If it's fast and well insulated then it may not be an issue. If it's slow and has twists and turns, green wood of any type can cause big problems. The worst in my experience is oak. We always season oak for 1 year per inch of thickness and then it's an amazing fuel. If you burn it green it's a disaster (and doesn't really burn either). At the end of the day, there is no comparison between green and seasoned wood. Your green ash may look like it's going well in the open fire but the heat output / burn time will be nowhere near fully seasoned ash in a closed down efficient stove. Just my opinion.

Thanks for all the replies. Nice to find a busy forum on this subject. In terms of time now, I have none. 3 young boys under 5 and a business at it's busiest seasonal time means I am flat out and exhausted. I have some wood laying in the fields which is seasoning but it's on the ground and the weather will turn soon enough. I have thought of solar kilns / polytunnels etc but the problem is the land is not mine and there are often sheep and cattle on it who would trash a poly tunnel. I could build a solar kiln in the garden. I usually spend a lot of time in October / November gathering and stacking next year's wood. The weather suits me and the sap is not up so cut coppice is easier to season naturally. This year though by the time I get cutting and splitting I'm going to need the fuel. I'm not keen on buying in if there is a way I can season the wood quickly and on-demand. In terms of mixing seasoned and dry to keep the fire going, this is fine in the villager as sticking the brush up the flue and a full sweep out once a month takes 10 minutes. The Esse though won't tolerate it at all as it burns slower and has flue ways which take a while to clean out. It's one of those tools thats all or nothing. A cheap and practical joy with very dry wood, a complete nightmare with green wood. Back to the oven concept. I have been told that this will remove the moisture but not the sap. I was under the impression that the sap would harden and become fuel when dried. Is this a problem I will face? It might be possible to create a cage area in our stream where I could soak the lengths for a day to strain out the sap but this of course makes the wood sodden in the short term.

Afternoon all, newbie here. I've been cutting, seasoning firewood for many years and have an old Villager stove plus an Esse W23 woodfired stove which does cooking and hot water. The problem I have is that for the last year I have been flat out busy trying to save my company (credit crunch etc). I have just about succeeded at this but now find I have no wood stacked for the coming winter and no time penciled in to do it until Sept at the earliest. I have access to plenty of fallen trees and active coppice which I have managed, mainly beech and alder. So, I'm thinking of ways to dry this stuff in a hurry. The Esse in particular is very fussy and wet wood will clog it in 2 days as well as not producing enough heat. I was considering building a kiln or mud oven of some sort. Probably an oil drum on it's side up on 2 rows of blocks with a space for fire underneath. Then cover the whole thing over with earth, fill with wet logs, place a steel plate on the front with a vent gap at the top and light a hot fire underneath. Effectively, baking the logs. I have access to plenty of old pallets and other junk wood. Anyone done this? A lot of Esse owners recommend drying wood in the bottom oven overnight but the way I see is that the moisture has to go somewhere when you do this and it's probably not up the chimney. Do you reckon that a couple hours at say 200 degrees C would be enough to dry out green wood enough to produce good results?