ash_smith123

I bought and fitted my second 130kw boiler for £16k. £1k of that being RHI metre and sensors. That kiln can dry 2000 cubic metres a year flat out. yes your right about the boilers, I’m giving mine 10-15 years max! The RHI was EU funded but wonder how much the UK government will get back in Tax as the RHI payments go as income on your accounts so will incur corporation tax if you’ve made a profit.

Maybe but I don’t fancy spending £100k on crates - 2000 cube a year plus nets and kindling so say - 4000 x £25 for 2 rotations. I would need 2 rotations for the winter after the one that is dry (if that makes sense) and I don’t know what sort of yard/unit you would need to store that much processed wood. Also from my experience drying wood outside isn’t the best either, you would always need a few months inside to finish off. Rent around here is expensive and a unit that size you’ll be looking at £50-60k+vat and rates at 50%. It’s just not viable for me. If Softwood prices went up and it made a cubic metre £20 to dry instead of £10 I would just put up my prices by £10. I’ve put my prices up this year for the first time in 5 years and we are busier than ever. I also get an extra £21 per cubic metre for kiln dried hardwood so I would also loose that extra as well. I’m here to make a living and that means we have to make a profit. I understand we have all got to do a bit for the environment but me burning a bit of Softwood to be able to sell extremely dry hardwood isn’t going to change global warming.

Just out of interested, where did you hear that?!

Yes looking back I would have changed a few things but it was last minute and we only did half a days filming. I would have put a brush around the place and tidied up if I had more time! ? no unfortunately not, the outside kiln is still running but not as good as the inside one. I just can’t be arsed with the RHI paperwork to move it inside and change the pipe work! Yes the inside ones are ply lined, the new one next to it is being built to dry kindling as we do t have the capacity to dry our Wholesale kindling. Hopefully should be ready in the next few weeks. No they don’t degrade at all, I plaster the inside in SBR every couple of months and it seems to be holding 4 years on.

Thanks for your comments! I’m glad you all like the setup. It’s definately not perfected yet, still a long way to go! Ahh the mud!! I can’t wait to move somewhere with a concrete yard.? We empty the cages to keep a rotation going, we’ve only got about 250 crates so I need them all full and 2 big piles before the winter starts. I don’t really have the room for another 250 crates to store and using the bucket to load the truck is really quick and easy. I can load up 3 cube and be on my way in less than 5 minutes. Also in the area we tip I used to fit about 90-100 crates but I can fit about 250 cubic metres in that bay so I can get far more wood in it, inside space is a premium for us. We don’t have a rotator unfortunately but I just flip the crates with the jcb, it’s easy with a bit of practice!

One of my friends does a bit of filming and editing and has done a little promo video for us. Only short but what do you guys think?

The “loose cubic metre” that is quoted on the imported national companies websites are completely wrong. We bought a couple of pallets off a few of them years ago to find out what they equates to and they are all Massively optimistic! One quoted 3.6 loose cubic metres and we got 1.6/1.7 out of it. I also emailed them all to tell them, obviously fell on deaf ears!

Really?! Mine was as quick as any splitter I’ve seen before and Still got through a cube an hour

Wallenstein are the ticket! I had one for a few years and It was awesome

I changed the bank details on ours... the most painstakingly drawn out process I’ve ever been involved in. No payments for 6 months and the people you speak to at Ofgem are on a different planet.

Look what people are selling around you. If you want to start small with not a lot of room or investment look at buying in pre cut/dry and sell on. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and money to start off. You can look at people like white horse energy or other wholesalers for buying a few crates of kiln dried and just turn it around quickly. Instead of worrying about cutting and waiting 1/2 years for it to dry you can start selling straight away. To make money with Firewood you need to do volume, it doesn’t matter if that’s processing and drying yourself or buying in and selling on. If I was to start again I think I would have to think long and hard about just buying in and selling on. Not so attractive now the exchange rate to the euro is awful but you can still make good money with very little overheads. To process/dry over 1000+ cubic metres a year you need to be looking at around £100k worth of kit. To buy a container of kiln dried, a forklift and a cheap truck £10-12k and you can start selling from day 1. The margins are tight in Firewood and processing/drying yourself is a very time consuming/pain in the arse thing to do. Like everyone else has already said being in the middle is very difficult and something I went through for a few years. Selling a few hundred cubic metres, spending every hour under the sun processing and trying to dry it to make no money is soal destroying!

Wallenstein! They are built like a tank and very good value for money

I’ve got a posch kindling machine and it’s brilliant for kindling. They say you can do logs with it but it makes big kindling not logs!

Sounds about the same as I worked it out for our log boiler buying in sub 20% Softwood cord to use in the boilers. Still well worth doing it even if the RHI wasn’t available. The going rate is £80/90 per loose cubic metre buying in from the EU so far cheaper buying and producing yourself

Why anyone would charge £70 for a cubic metre of dry hardwood is beyond me.

Beat me to it Sam

You won’t get much better and more versatile than the WP36 for the money. We put thousands of tons through ours and it was great for most of the time!

The new Palax C1000 looks a nice machine. Think it’s 40cm but not sure how much it is!

Got some nice Hardwood in at the moment. Been lucky to have 6 loads of the best Ash I've ever seen over the last few weeks. Been averaging about 6 cube an hour with most of them being 300-350mm!

I have kiln dried softwood kindling available for wholesale. 50x40 Leno nets, neat stacked kiln dried softwood kindling, 60 on a pallet for £2+vat per net, 3 or more pallets at a time £1.90+vat. I sell these for £4 but some shops I supply charge £5. Prices are ex works, collection from Pontypool South Wales. Delivery available at cost. Cheers Ash 07772280850

Yes I had a kiln system fitted (not glen Farrow) with a uninsulated 40ft container. The heat we lost out of the top half of the container/roof was insane. Half way down the container we couldn't get it Luke warm let alone hot at all. We bought some kingspan and insulated the roof and walls and it made a huge difference with temperature inside the container and halved the drying time. We then built our second kiln system ourselves. Bigger output boiler and overall better system for half the cost. We made a insulted timber framed room to fit 30 cubic metres in it and put the fans in the roof blowing down, this also made a massive difference to the bottom crates drying properly.

It's bonkers that they sell them un-insulated! The difference in uninsulated and insulated is amazing.

We are at £60 for pure ash and £50-56 delivered for mixed hardwood. Had a quote for £45 roadside for softwood chip wood the offer day!!

Yea we started with a WP36, it would be ideal for small diameter stuff like on the picture. You've got to take in to account that without spending a fortune on advertising your not going to be selling 1000+ cube in the first few years as well! With rent, paying yourself, finance costs ect ect ect with £100k worth of machinery you'll need another £100k over the first couple of years to pay for everything until you get the client base. There's a farmer down the road from us that spent the best Part of £500k on a full firewood setup. 6 biomass boiler, diggers, trailers the lot. Kept saying he's selling loads and loads of firewood. Came to do a day splitting for us with his screw splitter and was gobsmacked that we sent 14 cube out in a day. Said "we don't manage that in a week" [emoji23] how he's paying his finance I never know!

[emoji23] you are very right! Unless you've got a mattress with £100k to blow on setting up your doing it the hard way! Yes our suppliers are very good, out of most of the loads we would be lucky to see anymore than 3-4 logs that don't go through. I've always toyed with the idea of getting a cone splitter and a digger but it's just not worth it for what we get in. I would rather pay £3-5 a ton more and get quality straight stuff that will all go through! Anything 30/36cm is perfect with the 8 way. I can imagine 12 way you would need to go 40-45cm to make it work. We only use the 4 and 8 way, the 6 is useless! You get 2 huge logs on the side and slithers top and bottom [emoji849] We've imported a lot in the past but hopefully this year we can do it all in house.... touch wood!