Spruce

Have spent the last few weeks there with the hedge trimmer at face height and I don't know how anyone can say its not an issue.

Its absolutely horrible.

 

What is an issue is the closest distributor being in Huntly. An hour and a half round trip at best and practically impossible in winter.

 

Come on Aspen you need to do better than that.

Is that Strathbogie Saws?

And c'mon, Aberdeen/Huntly isn't too bad in the winter. Bit slow, maybe, but the same goes on all routes.

Nothing wrong with sitka, not sure why everyone raves about larch, not really much difference.

 

Sitka keeps me warm and cooks my dinner so im not complaining:biggrin:

The sitka we get from the FC always has a lot of rot in it, I don't know if this is just a consequence of being palmed off with rubbish they can't get rid of any other way or whether sitka is quick to rot once down. Even rotten, though, it burns fine if it's dry, provided you can split it without it disintegrating into smush.

Will you get 25 ton of seasoned soft wood on an artic?

Much better if you can't, then you're getting the maximum volume for your money.

To the OP: That sounds expensive. If you're the end user make sure you are paying 5% VAT.

Indeed! However it's generated, the heat used in the kilns has a cost to it. A premium air-died or solar kiln dried product should carry as much if not more kudos than part-cooked logs.

Yes, and it should be marketed as such. Kiln drying (ie, drying with heat generated from a fuel source) is a complete nonsense. If you think about it it's as wasteful of energy as burning green wood in your stove.

There's a place just down the road from us producing wood pellets for pellet boilers out of perfect processor size cord. I don't know how wasteful of energy the process of making pellets is, but I'll bet it's at least as bad if not worse than kiln drying. If it were a waste product that was being made into pellets it would probably be justifiable, but decent wood that could just be cut up, air dried then shoved in a stove? Bonkers.

Fc sell me cord at 20%, and call it 'firewood' on the invoice, I sell on at 5%, I've never managed to find anyone who has been sold it at 5%, which office have they dealt with?

(I know I'm not the end user, but they have never even asked ).

But you probably sounded like you had a clue when you phoned then up.

"Oh, er, hello, I'd like to, er, buy some wood for firewood please" was probably pretty close to what I said. They sure didn't need to ask whether I was the end user:001_tongue:

It might be arguable that selling cord to an end user could be charged at 5% but 25 tons for a single end user is a huge amount and the VAT inspector may take some convincing.

The FC sell cord to the end user at 5% VAT. 25 tonnes is about a year's supply to heat a reasonable sized house up here, a lot of (most?) people who rely on wood for heating buy in by the artic load and process themselves. It wouldn't be financially viable to do it any other way.

Last presentation I went to at the chimney sweeps show indicated that in the previous year 140,000 stoves had been sold yet only 30,000 had been installed and signed off as being safe to use by Hetas regisitered engineers. Add another 5000 perhaps done via the building inspector leaves a lot of stoves installed by unqualified persons and not signed off. Any of these people having fires in their property risk having their insurance being invalidated and being prosecuted for breach of building regs.

 

A

Is it ok to have it signed off by the building inspector rather than a Hetas engineer?

Stovax Sheraton logburner model, top air draw only - brill stove about 14 kw, had it in for say 15 yrs will control low and when cold run like a blast furnace all winter. Any problem could be the flue is too small, when I first installed mine I connected it to a 5" flue (the old gas boiler one) to try it out first winter, it ran well but needed sweeping every 6 months or it wouldn't draw. I later fitted the recommended 6" flue with much swearing - me standing on the roof shouting down to my dear wife to pull **** harder, 2 double bends to get around.

 

Now it draws better with the 6" flue only clean the flue one a year, not much comes down 1/2 a small bucket. As it's the only heating used we get through tonnes of wood in the winter, so it has a hard time I need to replace the cast iron 'smoke deflector' every 2 yrs as it often runs red hot and burns out.

 

As a stove I would buy the same again, although I don't think they still make them.

 

One other item to check is the house sealed? I have x6 30mm air holes drilled into the lounge floor to draw air from the air bricks, and left the old catflap in to act as an air balance valve (bit posh for an old cat flap) but in a sealed house with a kitchen extractor fan running it's possible to draw air back down the flue.

I'm not totally sure whether you're answering my post or the thread, but I put in a 7" liner as recommended by the stove manufacturer for wood burning. It draws great - but only with air from the bottom which is the way it's meant to work. The airwash is there to keep the glass clear, the air from the bottom comes through a thermostatic flap controlled by the boiler temperature. There is an additional manual air intake which we normally only use when lighting (instant raging inferno!) or when it's flat calm. Flue is swept twice a year, probably excessive as very little comes out, and it runs straight up . We have no problems with lack of ventilation - quite the opposite, unfortunately. In spite of that the house is lovely warm. We use about 3/4 artic load of softwood a year. It's also our only heating apart from the little Esse, but we don't really need that. We were going to do a combined oil boiler and stove originally but thought we'd get lazy and use the oil too much, so we thought we'd see how it went without the oil. As it turns out we've never once regretted that decision.

Yeah I agree, soft wood is great I'm burning scots pine in my stove and i prefer it to hard wood!

We'll be burning Scots pine from about Xmas, once the rotten Sitka I got landed with last time round is finished. The Scots looks and feels much more substantial and I'm looking forward to getting it into the stove!

The primary air control on our Squirrel has been shut for years - and we keep the ash up to the firebars as well so I doubt that any air would get through in any case. Glass is clean all the time. It's fair to say that the airwash on a lot of cheap stoves, particularly often with Chinese imports, does not do such a good job of keeping the glass clean. Fahrenheit on here, who installs hundreds of stoves every year will confirm this. I'd agree with everything Alycidon said except the bit about the blackened glass being caused by air coming through the primary inlet.

 

Andy

Maybe it's a size thing - ours is quite a big stove (Aarrow Stratford 21kW), we just wouldn't be able to burn enough wood to heat the house without an air supply from below as well as the airwash, unless it's a really wild night. Now I think about it the wee Esse we have in the living room burns fine on the airwash, but that only takes a few small sticks. It can be quite hard to get that one shut down enough when it's windy without blackening the glass.

Wood burns from the top down, you don't want air getting underneath the grate otherwise you will get black glass. Once the fire is going close the primary air supply completely and control the stove using the secondary air supply only, primary is under the grate, secondary is down the inside of the glass.

I have to say that isn't what we've found. The sooted up glass is caused by incomplete combustion due to insufficient air getting to the fuel - the 'airwash' from above is raraly enough to prevent this. The glass remains clear, or at least clears quickly after lighting if there's a good air supply from below. The only time I'd shut off the primary air supply completely is when there's a gale blowing and the flue is sucking like crazy.

Hi does anyone know any who can supply artic loads of hard wood in Nairn Scotland, I seem to be selling it faster than I'm bringing it in at the moment, unfortunatly I can't seem to give soft wood away! Cheers.

If you're giving it away we're near Banff, feel free to drop it off any time!

What is this problem people have with softwood? We've been heating our house with it for a few years now and it's, well, wood and it burns.

Having bought a new Husky (236e) a couple of months ago and been cross cutting firewood with it since, I thought I'd dig out the old saw I bought from B&Q a few years ago.

 

After an hour cutting cord, all I can say is what a heap of junk! I can see why I lost confidence in it and stuck it in the back of the garage.

 

I know the 236e is at the bottom of the husky saw food chain, but its still a million times better than the PP.

 

Time for eBay I think

I went one worse than that! I had a Performance Power electric chainsaw first, then a Performance Power petrol one before I gave up and bought a Husky 345e. Since then I've cut 5 artic loads of cord and it's still great. If it weren't for my, er, 'variable' sharpening and the occasional bonus Forestry Commission stone life would be perfect.