Chalgravesteve

NOW SOLD

This is my Gandini processor still in excellent condition 8 years old now but it’s been a backup for the last 2 years pto driven very decent entry level processor looking for around £5500 for it message me if any interest

Ive got one and I wouldn't dream of hiring it out for that, unless I was hiring it out on a proper, permananet hire commercial contract. Unless you are properly set up for commercial hire, with 3rd party liability insurance, theft/damage cover etc etc, its simply not worth the effort for such a small sum against the value of the machine. If something goes wrong and he cuts his fingers off, are you covered? If it gets stolen whilst hes got it, who is covering it? Delivery? Collection? What if the blow/bend a ram or both of them? What if the snap the splitting knife (weve managed to snap one knife off ours once!) In my experience, when you lend/hire someone a piece of kit you are taking the chance that it will come back with some part damaged (that no one tells you about). How many bits of the BB40 can you repair for £250? Not a lot quite frankly!! Leave it to the commercial hirers and keep your own machine in good nick!!

Thanks I did think that’s what it would be

I bought this one before Christmas and it’s been indoors ever since gradually started cracking and I’m wondering what anyone might do to stop that continuing I appreciate that it’s just caused by the wood drying out but I didn’t expect it to be quite as significant as it seems to be getting any suggestions?

Its 90cm from the bottom of the cradle to the underside of the top bar so it should take a 80cm diameter quite easily. After that it will start to get tight as the log is unlikely to be exactly round an its got to roll into place

Ive got a binderberger gigant 40 with a 12 way knife for rings. it will take about a 1.5m length of trunk. What you can do is roll the trunk onto the lift. Cut through most of the way with a chainsaw, say 3/4 of the way. Use the lift to get the trunk into the channel. Once there, cut the rest of the way through so that you now have 5 x 30cm rings next to each other. Push them straight through the splitter in one pass. If you split the trunk into 4 billets, then you have 4 x the number of cuts on the processor for the same result. Ive seen it done, but we mainly get pre cut rings rather than 1.5m long sections, so we just load 4 rings at the same time and push them through in one pass. Brilliant piece of kit if you have the timber to go through it.

Does anyone use a machine to empty an IBC cage? We have some of our bulk dry wood stock stored in IBC's ready to be bagged up. To get it back out of the IBC by hand is a pain in the @rse, but I am not convinced that the flimsy screws/bolts that secure the cage to the pallet base are anywhere near strong enough to hold the cage and pallet together if I were to strap the IBC to the telehandler pallet tines and tip/shake it out? I thought I had heard of people using a "rotator" headstock as well, but again I'm of the opinion that the cage if the IBC isn't strong enough to hold its shape and stay fixed to the base when you rotate that weight of wood onto the cage as you turn or tip it? I suppose we could ratchet strap the cage to the base to reinforce the hold between the two bits, but just wondered if anyone else had any ideas or tried and tested ways of doing it?

Interested. Sent you a PM Cheers

Correct about no logic to their rules. Years ago, we needed to abstract more than 20m3 per day and the EA said we couldn't and we should build a reservoir into which we could abstract 20m3 per day every day and then use that water at whatever rate we wanted to once it was retained in the reservoir. We took that advice and submitted a planning application. The first people to object to the application were the EA!! Got there in the end though.

It depends what happens to the water after it has been "used" by the wheel and you probably need permission from The Environment Agency before you divert any water from the river. The current restrictions are any volume less than 20m3 per day is unlicensed, so you have to be able to control the flow of water into your "pond" to be less than that in any 24 hour period. However, if you are returning the same volume of water to the same river further downstream, then you are simply diverting the water, not abstracting it. If you don't return it to the river then it is abstraction and you will need consent once you abstract more than 20m3 (which wont run a water wheel for 24 hours!) in a day. In order to have the head of water at the top, and still be able to return it to the same river further down, will require quite a bit of frontage as if you are dropping the water by 4/5/6/ft or more, then the river has to drop by the same height for you to get it back in there. The reason why you cannot just abstract from a river that is passing your doorway, is that when you take water from the river at that point, you are denying that resource to someone further downstream who may already have a license. There are lots of regulations and hoops to jump through with the EA.

I had a 10,000 litre one and added another 20,000 litre one last year. The tank cost about £6/7K and then there was the install costs, but now we have it all settled and working its the way to go. You have to run the kilns all the time, otherwise by the time the kiln is starting to get reasonably warm, the boiler is going out and it starts to cool until you reload. The more accumulator capacity you have, the more consistent you can keep the temperatures in the kilns and build the heat up. We have insulated the kilns as well. The heat exchangers/fans are equally as important, its no good having 15-20kW ones, theres not enough heat being produced. The time of year also makes a difference. If you run them in August when the air temp is 20 degrees when you add 50 degrees your kiln runs at 70 degrees. That same kiln can run at 45 degrees when its -5! The accumulator (and control panels) also ensure that they system doesn't freeze in winter. Whilst the kilns shut down when the tank gets down to 40 degrees, the system continues to circulate water periodically to keep the pipework/water jacket all well above freezing.

It is also almost impossible in my view to try and maintain the water temperature in the water jacket/heat exchanger system by regulating the heat of the burn in a GF Boiler (or my Dragon for that matter!) The burn will go through various phases of heat, but once it escalates hotter than 80 degrees, you are heating a small amount of water with a great deal of heat and very little margin for error. The last thing you want is a water overheat and a boiler still burning as that is bloody dangerous. I am assuming that you have an upper limit of water temperature in the system of 80 degrees beyond which your automated processes should be shutting down the burn as much as possible as you are in danger of having the water starting to boil. Whatever you have attached to the boiler (kiln/radiators etc ) that draws the heat off, cannot be taking more than a few degrees off the water temperature in the circuit, so it is really easy in a small, low volume water system to cause an overheat on the water. So it is far easier to operate an accumulator tank system, which means that the upward change in water temperature is far more gradual and enables you to shut down the boiler burn and maintain a temperature increase commensurate with the drawn off heat of your kiln/radiators.

You need a large accumulator tank. I run a 197kW Dragon with a 30,000 litre accumulator. Burn the boiler hard and get the heat into the accumulator and draw the kiln heat from the accumulator as required. Then you can run it all night

Indeed I do. I have large accumulator tanks so that the boiler can be fired in the most efficient manner. I also only process arb waste from local tree surgeons, who bring me their chip and logs on a daily basis. We burn the crap bits to produce the heat and process the easy bits to make the firewood. The tree surgeons work within 10/15 miles on my place and I deliver in the same area. So our kiln dried firewood has travelled no more than 30 miles in its entire life. I think that's a reasonably sustainable set up.

Yes I have competition. But every single business has fixed and variable overheads. Rent and rates, staff costs, equipment and plant, fuel, insurance, LOLER compliance testing, Ready to Burn Accreditation, delivery vehicle, bank charges, admin costs, computers, website hosting, website maintenance, online gateway and merchant services, phones, etc etc etc. Fuel costs, for delivery and production of product have probably increased by far more than the cost of the Ready to Burn accreditation.

But this is my point! If you are selling it as a product under 20% MC then get it registered and sell loads of it in whatever quantity you want to, to whoever you want without having to get any bogus forms out to justify why you sold it! I can't fathom why you want to spend so much time and energy (which costs you money!) doing something on EVERY single sale in order to possibly avoid a bit of legislation which if you are selling wood at under 20%MC you actually comply with!! Each to his own, I suppose.

Good luck with that. The process of selling, on an ongoing basis, to the same customer over and over again requires trust from the buyer in the seller. "Please sign this form, where you lie to protect me, for which you gain no other benefit from the lie other than a pile of wood which is probably greater than 20% MC" (as otherwise you wouldn't need to worry about the little form). If you asked me to sign it I'd tell you no. So now what do you do? Forge signatures on little forms? Well you might as well, as if you are knowingly trying to circumvent regulations, whats a bit of forgery?

I can't speak for others but in my case I burn wood in a large biomass boiler to produce the heat to run the kilns. We have approx 32,000 litres of water in an accumulator tank which drives the kilns 24/7. We burn the boiler twice a day to maintain the heat cycle into the accumulator tank and the kilns draw heat from the AT. The kilns are equipped with temperature sensor and humidity sensors which determine when to remove the heated, moisture laden air to maximise the capacity of the heated air to draw off moisture from the logs. We use the surplus wood that is hard to split into firewood as the fuel for the boiler, as we are processing arb waste to produce the firewood that we sell. The kilns can produce approx 36/40m3 of dry (12 -15% MC) wood per week.

Surely, anyone with any common sense will understand that when you are trying to "manipulate" a rule in order to not comply with it, then you know that you are breaking it. The world seems to be full of people who think that rules/laws should not apply to them. Novak Djokovic, Boris, Dominic Cummings, John87, etc etc I don't agree with the requirement to register for Ready to Burn. My stuff is ALWAYS well under 20% MC, I've invested a lot of money in kilns and boilers and machinery to process, shift and deliver firewood. I know that my product will stand up to any scrutiny and test to determine it is under 20% MC, but the law now says it has to be registered, so despite the fact that I know I comply anyway, I'm now registered. In the great scheme of things, there are much more higher cost elements of firewood production than a registration for RTB.

I've not found a better way than a daily manual schedule. Assuming that you are doing the same as us which is delivering over a 15/20 mile radius, we had a map printed which shows all the postcode areas overlaid and circles showing the 15/20/25 mile radius from us. As we get orders in, we build a schedule around the larger ones, in terms of geographic location. If we get a late order into the same area as an existing schedule and we have space on the van, we get it on to minimise the travel distances as much as possible. It wouldn't be difficult to create the manual master list into an excel spreadsheet though for each day.

Why rip out the old boarding? If you put the new, extra deep insulation onto the existing loft boarding, you are still insulating and retaining any heat existing below that? If you need some loft flooring, put a new suspended loft floor in where you need it? If you rip out all the old stuff, you are then putting new extra deep insulation onto the ceiling boards of the room below. If you put it onto the existing loft floor, there is an insulated layer under your insulated layer and unless there is a bloody great hole where the air can escape to within that layer, then you must be achieving the same thing.

Unless your loose (or tightly stacked) logs are all certified under 20% moisture, you can't use your pickup truck anyway as you need to be selling in a volume greater than 2m cubed........ Lights blue touchpaper and stands well back.........

You guys have got too much time on your hands......... that pile must have taken about a month or more to create at that pace.