ash_smith123

Go for wallenstein! They start at £1600 and great splitters. Built like a tank, proper Honda engines and really good uk customer support.

Sorry I should have worded that better. She was putting the RHI payment down as a sale and for some reason putting it at 20% vat but as you said a firewood sale would go down as 5%. In really not sure why she had done it. I did tell her it was a government subsidy [emoji849] I think the fee's would be 20% as it's probably classed as a service. They aren't selling you fuel they are selling a service regardless if it's to do with renewables so would probably be 20%

I've got a kindling machine coming this week and have been doing some research over the last few weeks to find the best way to produce it. I will be cutting softwood rings with a posch 350 and putting them through a posch kindling machine (yes wearing my posch hat and jacket drinking out of my posch mug [emoji23]) Do you guys dry the rings before putting them into the machine? Or net the kindling and then dry? For those that have a kiln how do you find they dry stacked on a pallet or is it better to throw the nets into an Ibc loose and stack onto a pallet after? (I don't like double handling!?) Any help would be gratefully received!

I agree with you but the RHI and BSL has been a "inefficient, under resourced and poorly administered process manned by unaccountable, disinterested desk jockeys with little or no subject matter expertise" project from the start [emoji23] very much like any government involved scheme. I rang the RHI helpline the other day as my accountant has been putting 20% VAT on all my RHI payments for the last 3 years to see if the payments are VATable or not and I spoke to 3 different people and they didn't know. HMRC also didn't know, I got transferred to a "Renewables expert" who amazingly had never heard of RHI? and took 3 weeks to find out and get back to me. (They are NOT Vatable if you want to know) I understand it's an admin fee but outsourcing the running of these schemes to under resourced and poorly administrated companies cost money that needs to be recouped. I know it's not an advertising fee but I look at it that way to make it slightly easier to swallow.

If the 120 odd quid a year and 9p a m3 bothers you that much I suppose you probably shouldn't be on the BSL. In the grand scheme of things it's a tiny amount of money. I see it as a form of advertising, How much do eBay charge for 7 days? how much do auto trader charge to put a car on for a week? £40+ Does anyone moan about that? I've put a 1/4 page advert for a month in a very local paper for £150 before and got nothing from it. I've sold a few hundred cubic metres of BSL fuel over the last few years. I've had orders of 50+ cubic metres at a time at full price so if paying £120+ a year for me to advertise on a website that someone tomorrow could call up and order 50+ cubic metres, to me that seems pretty good value.

Don't listen to those comparisons on those websites, they are miles off!! We have had stacked crates 2.35 x 1.1 X 0.8 which gives a stacked volume of about 2 cubic metres internal and we get at max 2.6 loose cubic metres out of it. We also bought a crate from a national company in the past and they quoted on their website that you get 2.8 loose cubic metres out of it and we just about got 1.8. I did email them but they didn't respond

Phil I can help you out. Give me a PM

It would cost you £200-300 a day to hire someone with a WP36. Finance on a £12k wp36 would be roughly £200 a month so if your going to hire one for more than 12 days a year I would finance one. Second hand value is pretty good after a few years so you will never be in negative equity if your looking to keep it more than 2 years. I would also look at buying it in bulk already done!

Yep I would recommend the WP36 too. Great machine

Are those the Chinese ones on eBay with a Diesel engine? I wouldn't bother, a guy I know bought one for £2.5k and it was made of cheese. Snapped bolts left right and centre and bent the main steel section. You can get a wallenstein for the same money and it's 100 times better machine with a Honda engine

Yes if your not bothered about the RHI I recon you could do it under £5k! Second hand boilers are going for peanuts on eBay. £500 would buy you one with a flue kit too. Container with delivery £1k. I bought aload of seconds insulation off eBay from seconds and co £200 (in the summer) pumps and pipework £1k. Small buffer tank again loads on eBay under £500 and Heat exchangers £500-1000 for cheap ones on eBay. Happy days you've got yourself a kiln.

I'm quite surprised the "don't use a kiln, let the wind do the job" brigade haven't turned up to this thread yet... I really can't see this working. I don't know how your going to transport a kiln and boiler system for a start. If it's in 2 20ft containers maybe but I had 1 20ft container taken 15 miles for £150 a few weeks ago. Unload it and you've got to connect it. I wouldn't want to keep putting together the 2" matpress pipes all the time. If your say 30 miles away Drying 30 at a time, before you've even started you've got £200+ haulage, nearly £7 per cube. A day fitting the system together and getting everything upto temp. £200 another £7 a cube. You won't be able to get RHI if it's mobile so fuel cost, 1 cubic metre per 8 hour day (I'm guessing your not going to work 24 hours loading the boiler?) 9 day drying so 9 cube used. Let's say £50 cost per day of fuel so £450 over the drying cycle. Another £15 per cubic metre. That's £29. Electric isn't much over the week so total £30 per cube. Add a day to cool down and disconnect, transport cost back another £14. £44 total. Plus if the person hiring it out has got to go back for any reason. Plus loading and unloading times. And everyone's got to make a profit on top too. If you want to go down the kiln route Either buy yourself a kiln or import it.

I know it's a bit of a "how longs a a bit of string" question but roughly how many 45x65 kindling nets do you get out of an artic of softwood? We sell a few thousand bags to customers but always get asked by our wholesale customers to supply kindling too. I've always bought it in but the cheap supply has dried up.

You would be far better importing it. At £70 a loose cubic metre now (when the exchange rate is rubbish) no one can compete with that. I asked a local farmer if I could buy some from him. He has capacity to dry about 100 cubic metres a week but only sells about 100 a year, his best price cash was £90 per cubic metre. From previous experience dry but it very poor quality firewood. A container turns up, always decent looking dry stuff stacked in a crate. No one in the U.K. Will compete simple as.

We've only had a few requests over the last few years for logs under our normal 10" and I ask if they can go and measure their fire box. They have all given a size bigger than 10" so we just supply them our normal size

I'm looking for someone a few days a week processing firewood on a Posch 350 machine. We will load you up so just processing needed. Plenty of tea and coffee on offer we we are very flexible with the hours and days you want to work. Hourly or day rate available. Based in Mamhilad, South Wales

Yes if you've got the details for that eucalyptus wood I would be interested in that too

Just out of interest how do you deliver it? With a hiab or tail lift?

Sorry the £70 was including the VAT. If your buying from Europe and have a VAT number the vat isn't on the invoice so my £70 per loose cube was including the vat price. So yes sorry I didn't take the vat off the same price on the first calculation so it's more like 60%.

The problem is half the time they aren't cubic metres either. There was a lad not far from me selling unseasoned cubic metres for £40. I bought 3 off him for £35 a cube and I put the whole pile in 1.5 Ibc crates. I told him they are definitely not cubic metres but to this day he still sells them as cubic metres. Puts pictures up of "3 cubic metres going out" and the transit back is 1/2 full.

My supplier of kindling is struggling to keep up so I'm looking for dry kindling in 65x45 nets. I would be looking to get around 400-500 nets at a time and I'm in South Wales. Someone pretty local would be ideal to save on the pallet cost. Cheers Ash

Well considering most retail industry trade to retail price is 30/40% profit margin. buying in kiln dried at £70 trade to £120 retail is pretty good at 75%. I also have a timber business and most of the products trade to retail is 35/40%.

I've sold 3000+ cubic metres of firewood since I put our briquettes on our website at a very reasonable price and I've probably sold 40 x 10kg packs at max in that time. So for me, i don't think I will be chopping my processor in for a briquette machine just yet.

I done some calculations a few years ago on how much I would need to sell to go self employed and to earn roughly £25k a year. If you were buying the wood in It kept coming to around 1000 cubic metres at an average of £100 per man. That's taking all business costs, rent, machine finance, fuel etc into consideration.

If he's already got a saw, splitter and van to delivery why wouldn't he bother? Never put someone off having a go! If your happy with it being a sideline just charge decent money for it and sell whatever you can. Don't under price it. If your going to sell 50 cubic metres a winter there's no point selling it at £60 a cube and sell it all by October when you can charge £90 and sell it by March but make more money. Whatever industry you go into you will always have troublesome customers. In 6 years I can count mine on 1 hand, used to work in the bike industry before this and I could count them on one hand per week... If you've got most of the kit just give it a go! You've got nothing to loose