ash_smith123

Yes that's another good way of doing it. Buy in to start and build up your arb waste stock. You can then sell 2 levels of products, seasoned and kiln dried. Like GDH says it's always worth looking around first to see if you can buy local. The other good thing about that is you might be able to buy 10/20 cube at a time rather than taking the plunge and buying 70+ on a container. My experience with trying to buy local for wholesale was I couldn't get under £85 a cube for quality stuff when wanting to buy 100+ at a time but it might be different where you are. Like everyone has said it's a huge step from going small to big scale and something that took us 4-5 years of making pretty much no money. If you have £50/60k sitting in your back pocket you might have a setup to start making money but you won't have the customers! Start small, build up slowly. Don't owe anyone money and treat your customers like royalty and you won't go far wrong.

2 different ways I would recommend doing it. Get yourself a small unit/barn and buy it from Europe. You will need about £5k to buy the container and it Comes in at the moment with the exchange rate at about £70 per loose cubic metre. Sell it for a minimum £120 a cubic metre and see how you go. You only need a pump truck (£50) a half tidy forklift £2-5k and a way to deliver it. You can go down the arb waste, chainsaw and petrol splitter route but your going to have to be a year ahead of yourself. If you sell out in October your out for the winter and you can say bye bye to the customers you have gained because they will go elsewhere. At least if you buy containers in if you sell it, just buy another one!

We are the same gdh!

Averaging about 80 cube a week at the moment. Ticking over nicely

Go and see one, Chris is only in Pontypool in South Wales. I'm sure he will be happy to show you!

First I would say be very careful if you go through a "renewable heating" company. My experience of 3 have been shocking and I've heard plenty of horror stories too! We have 2 boilers but I will give you the figures for the 130kw eco Angus. £18k complete to build (bought all the parts myself and got a plumber to fit it) Dries 30 cubic metres in 80 hours down to 20% inside the log. Uses 1/2 a cube a day in the summer and 3/4 of a cube in the winter. We get about £12k a year on average back from the RHI. If you can afford it go for a chip boiler, they will be a lot more than our setup but in all honesty log boilers are a pain. Burn time is only 3/4 hours Max so if you go for a log boiler don't expect to run it overnight.

And maybe for once on here I am going to agree with you! [emoji23][emoji23] it's stupid the prices some people are punting out. I can never understand people underselling products. It used to happen a lot in the cycle trade when I was involved in it. If a competitor is selling 1000's of cubic metres at £120, what's the point in selling it for £80? Yes you might gain a few customers here and there but your working just as hard for half the profit! Sell it at a decent price so everyone can make a few pound coins. Isn't that what we all do it for!!?

lot of people took serious advantage of it! I have 2 boilers into kilns but it's my sole business and that's what I needed for my business to grow. The RHI is a nice but not the sole reason I got the kilns. There is a farm down the road that has spent in excess of 300k on boilers and another 150k on firewood equipment to start a firewood company but only delivers 1 cubic metre at a time in a 5 mile radius and only when they have time around what they are doing on farm. They sell no more than 200 cubic metres a year. 450k investment for £20k a year in sales! It's not a business it's a front to claim massive RHI from the timber they have on their land.

And you can all bang on about there's no need for kiln dried etc etc etc but there will always be a market for it. You can fight it until the cows come home but there's a lot of people selling a lot of kiln dried firewood

Not really? It's pretty obvious when most people advertise that they have been kiln dried in their own biomass kiln system like we do.

Got charged £30 for a sharpen in the summer in South Wales. £1 each if a tip needed replacing

If you can get quality cordwood under 13" I would look at the Posch 360. I would never go back to a chainsaw processor after having a Posch with circular saw! Great build quality and backup from Jasp Wilson is good too. I would also budget for a hydraulic deck as well, a processor is half the machine without a deck! I would definitely go and test a few different machines before making the jump!

My sisters just got one of the chilly penguin stoves with the oven on the top and the firebox is tiny. Lovely stove but a 7-8" log just fits in! We do get the odd request for a 6-7" log but not that often

Loose tipped. The transit is split into 3 cubic metre bays so we can go out to 3 different customers on 1 run if needed. Ideally a 7.5t with 5/6 cubic metre bags would be ideal but I would have to do the licence so opted against it. We sent a survey out to customers asking if they would rather them in bags and most came back saying loose is better as they have got to take it out of the bag in most cases anyway.

this is what discussion forums are all about, loads of people with different views arguing them out [emoji4]

A cube a week?! That's a lot of wood. What size stove is it? Most of my customers buy 1-3 cubic metres a year. 99% don't burn wood to save money on heating. A new 5kw stove burning from 6-9pm most nights and a little longer on weekends a cubic metre would last a few monthsz

You need to stop saying selling unseasoned logs at £60 is more profitable than selling the same logs at £120. Twice I've given you the simple figures of if I sold 1500 cubic metres of your £60 unseasoned and my £120 kiln dried and it was £75k up PER YEAR. There will always be the customers who ring early in the year for fresh cut stuff, there will always be people who are happy to trawl through the forest for logs to cut up themselves. There will always be customers who think kiln dried is nonsense and "burn too quick". There will always be customers for you air dried guys that sell what you do and there will always be customers that are happy to buy and burn my 30% logs. There will always be people who want kiln dried firewood and they are adamant they want kiln dried. Customers that are happy with softwood, others that only want hardwood. Some who want a loose tipped load, others who want it in nets and others who want us to stack it. I don't know why they are blithering idiots if they want dry logs ready to burn to turn up on their driveway! We live in a time that Tesco will deliver your shopping to your kitchen! People can't be arsed to go to the shop anymore!

Funds unfortunately! Being quite a new company as we went LTD most finance companies wouldn't give us much so a chip boiler was out of the question. We didn't go through a biomass company for the second kiln and sourced the parts ourselves and got a local plumber to fit it so it costs just over £16k.

We've got a log boiler but buy what the supplier classes as softwood chipwood. Bought some pop cheap in the past as well, when dry it kicked out some insane heat! yes the RHI payments easily cover the fuel costs.

Finally someone who speaks some sense! I'm now about 40-60% split from seasoned/kiln dried and kiln dried is catching up! The most simple thing to do in business is supply the demand!!

Il call it "force air dried in a timber framed box over a less time than our kiln dried hardwood" rolls off the tongue that! I hear "barn dried" in the firewood industry a lot, can anyone let me know what Moisture content that has to be?

I use softwood "chipwood" mainly. It's sold as "chipwood" so if I don't buy it, it would be on its way to be burnt somewhere else, probably at 40%+ moisture in the biomass plant in port talbot

Think we might have to agree to disagree on this one! You don't like kiln dried which is fine. Your free to voice your opinion the same as I am.

Give me proof that 20% kiln dried logs are inferior to 20% air dried? I'm not being confrontational, I'm just voicing my views. I'm not slandering anyone? I'm a professional merchant, 2 other of the "bigger" Forewood merchants around here all advertise seasoned at 30% and kiln dried at 20%. I don't have cowboy antics? I sell 2 quality products that all burn very well. Like I said I have thousands of happy customers and to date no negative feedback about my firewood. Where do you recommend buying local? So you don't put the moisture content on your page because each bag can be different, so how do people know what they are buying when looking on your product page? It could be fresh for all they know? It doesn't mention anything bout pollytonnels or moisture contents, size of log, length of log, what hardwood it is? All it shows in your pictures are bags stacked up outside? So do you leave all your bags outside? If it rains is the customer going to get wet logs delivered? These are all things a customer would be thinking. So you give an opinion but people are free to choose? Sounds about the same as me then doesn't it? I tell people exactly what they are buying and they are free to choose?

This is too good.... You accuse me of trolling people... so I checkout your website... On the product page on your website so what people click straight onto when they want to buy your firewood, THERE IS NO MENTION OF YOUR LOGS BEING SEASONED, DRY, KILN DRIED NOTHING! no mention of moisture contents either! [emoji23][emoji23][emoji23] if I went onto your website, when straight onto "online shop" because I wanted to buy something I wouldn't have a clue what I was buying. Yes you've got it in a different section of your website that you have to go and look for and not on your product pages. Who's trolling the customer then! Oh and this: "Kiln Drying: We don't currently offer kiln dried logs, we feel that firewood should be as environmentally friendly as possible with minimal haulage and seasoned under cover by the sun and wind. force drying can change the structure of the wood so the log actually doesn't give as much heat due to some of the volatiles already being burned off. Kiln drying also has a carbon footprint and if the kiln is set at an improper temperature it can actually seal moisture into the log, although the outside might read 6% the internal mc can still be 35-40%" Is complete and utter BS. So stop lying to your customers! You say firewood should have minimal haulage as possible because of the carbon footprint then offer NATIONAL DELIVERY! [emoji23][emoji23] I bet my kiln dried logs from 5 miles down the road and delivered 10 miles away and loose tipped has a lot less "carbon footprint" than yours from 5 miles away, delivered 300 miles in a bag that's been flown over from China! [emoji23][emoji23]