ash_smith123

My HM130 is up for sale if anyone's interested? 2 years old, hasn't been used in the last year. 3 phase £2k

Woodfuel Wales vanished around 5 years ago. From my experience of the last 6/7 years of trying if you are a retail business and not a farm you've got no chance. They seem to throw money at the farms around here, if you're a proper business that is looking to expand and employ people you may as well not bother asking.

Sorry but commercially air drying makes no sense in firewood. The same way you see harvesters and forwarders in the forest doing the same job as a chainsaw and a horse. Big sawmills pumping out cubic metres of timber on big saw lines instead of one lad sat on a woodmizer doing a cube a day. Unfortunately anything on a commercial scale has an environmental impact. The end user is the one that decides on how the whole supply chain operates. If the end user only wants air dried firewood everyone will be selling air dried firewood but they don't so we will carry on selling kiln dried firewood. The industry has done this to itself. So many people have sold substandard firewood for years and the customers have finally over the last 5/7 years got used to buying quality kiln dried firewood. They will only buy it once and not go back to Dave the farmer that's scrapped a load of crap off the barn floor that he sold as "barn dried" that he cut 3 weeks ago.

[emoji23] what a load of [emoji90] All I see is a biased comparison of 2 different products, one you like and the other you don't. I don't know what you need to carry on trying to justify to us that seasoned firewood seems to be far superior than kiln drying it. We are retail businesses, I supply what the customer wants and customers want kiln dried hardwood. If youve got the time, space and can be arsed you crack on processing and leaving firewood outside for 6-12 months then fine, but stop badgering the people that don't or don't want to. I supplied 2 products for the last 6 years, seasoned hardwood (25% that we actually kiln dried in our own kiln) and a kiln dried product that we bought in at 15% moisture. Sales were always around 70% kiln dried to 30% seasoned. This winter was the first time we stopped supplying seasoned hardwood and only sold kiln dried. Sales were up around 10% overall this winter.

No one's arranged a time to "do the deal" he never replied so it's still available if trigger_andy wants it!

Will have our 130 mill up for sale soon if you're interested??

The last 3 weeks have been crazy. Contactless delivery with everyone paying when they order. We had around a 10 day wait at one point but 2 vans out all day every day the boys have smashed it. Getting 20+ cube out most days. Bulked a load of local deliveries together one day last week and managed to get 14 runs of 3 cube out.

Bedmax ones are good. You can get good deals through wholesalers but I would try and go direct and get better prices

We had this idea a few years ago to run our kilns overnight. We bought an old oil boiler but it never really got going properly and then they bought new rules out for waste oil burners (licences ect ect) so we didn't bother going further with it. If you can get free oil (hard these days as garages have to get rid of it "responsibily") and a cheap oil boiler it might be worth a try! We also had a cheap sawdust burner when we started 8 or so years ago. I think the company are still on eBay now, but the thing was amazing. You could start a fire, 10 minutes later fill it with wet sawdust and it would burn for ages giving incredible heat!

It's bonkers at the moment. 2 vans full the whole of next week now, booking deliveries for Wednesday 18th onwards [emoji51] Won't be long and we'll be booked up for Christmas.

WTO tariffs for timber products in the event of “no-deal” Brexit - Timber Trade Federation TTF.CO.UK WTO tariffs for timber products in the event of “no-deal” Brexit

Wrong! No tariffs on wood products on WTO or any other terms if we left without a deal [emoji106]

Might be interested. Hauliers are coming from Kent back to South Wales empty so I might be able to sort a back load. I'll let you know asap

2 people, 2000 cube minimum. Our delivery driver does a minimum 9 cube and at most 15 (if all really local) a day in the winter 5 days a week and 6/8 cube on a Saturday. We also get quite alot of people collecting. We've got 2 vans so if it's busy we put a run of 3 cube on the second van. That's what I mean, if you just bought it all in and really pushed it you could have 2 drivers running out and not worrying about cutting it!

I would probably get a little unit with a forklift and delivery truck and import everything. If you find a tidy supplier there's still good money in it if you can get the customers but again your right in a minimum of 2000 cube a year to make a good wage. Low starting and running costs.

Yes it's a non starter at the moment with planning being a major issue and having the money upfront to do something like that! We would need a unit 14/15,000sqf minimum really and you probably wouldn't get much change from £100k doing a concrete base and putting up a unit that size maybe more, plus putting 3 phase electric into it. Land is also quite expensive around here, a nice plot with a few old barns on it came up last year for £375k. On a commercial mortgage we'd need the best part of £150k for a deposit. Plus your £100k+ to build a unit. I wish we had that much cash to throw at it [emoji23]

Not easy.... Easier [emoji57]

You're bang on. We started with a £6000 investment both working full time. Having to pay rent and finance any bit of mechinery we needed and built it from there but like you say even now having all the gear pretty much paid for it's still hard to make a tidy profit only doing firewood. I look at the 3/4 decent sized firewood producers in a 30 mile radius from us that have started up since we started and they are all on farms with massive investments (one in the region of £750k in biomass boilers and firewood equipment in the last 2 years) and I just don't know how they think they will make enough money to pay for the equipment let alone any wage. One thing is though they are all on daddy's farm, with daddy's tractor, telehandler, no rent, no business rates, insurance already payed for, woodland on the land and as much land as they want for storage. We are looking to move into a slightly bigger unit/yard and there isn't anything available in the size we need for under £50k a year rent and rates. So I can see when you take all the above out of your monthly outgoings you might actually make a profit not doing too much firewood on daddy's farm.

Supply will be the biggest problem facing us all in the years to come. We have gone from producing 100% hardwood 2 years ago to now 95% softwood this year and import the rest as we can't find the 1500+ tons of hardwood we need. One of our haulers said the other day they had 3 loads of processor size ash 5 miles away from me but we couldn't have it as euroforest were paying them £900 per load on haulage alone to take it to the biomass plant in Kent (from South Wales) taking into account roadside hardwood prices are £60+ a ton we are at £100+ a ton delivered it. Bonkers. We have been going for 7 years now and would struggle to make a decent yearly wage for 2 of us on just firewood, the timber merchant side of the business is now bigger within 2 years.

Jesus!! That's cheap! Softwoods £50+ a ton in South Wales

A farmer down the road from me has gone up from £80 to £135 a cubic metre for kiln dried hardwood in a year! ?

All our softwood is homegrown but last year with the lack of hardwood in the area most of the hardwood we had to unfortunately import. We've hopefully got a few good loads of hardwood lined up this summer but the wood will all have to be purchased before August I would say this year. We are just too busy in the winter to keep up with wholesale orders as well [emoji106]. Another person to try for hardwood is Walkers logs. They are Gloucester way and do home grown wholesale kiln dried hardwood by the artic load. Would be worth a try [emoji106]

I did give you a price last year if your still interested? we are now Ready to burn certified on hardwood and softwood. Only down the road and always happy to help [emoji106]

Sounds similar to a cowboy company that only do wholesale I bought from in Penrith a few years ago.

Just had a price for £95+vat delivered. You can buy imported for £70 a loose cubic metre at the moment.