Chalgravesteve

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.

Had a few questions on the Garden Cube. Its made in the UK, and really solid and well built. The cube has 4 glass sides which are completely and easily removable for cleaning. The firebox top and bottom are 5mm steel and supports are welded on all sides.

Really Good. We load it with logs about 12" long and quite chunky, in a criss/cross pattern and burn it from the top down. Once its going, you can sit a comfortable distance from it, you don't have to huddle round it close to get warm! We were outside in 2 degrees c for several hours a few weeks ago!

http://www.logs.co.com/?product=the-garden-cube-outdoor-stove Absolutely fantastic piece of kit. 4 glass sides. 1.5m flue. really solid construction and weighs 90Kg so its not going to move! You can get you current "Rule of 6" around it, no one is getting covered in smoke or ash. RRP is £1495 inc VAT and delivery to most mainland UK addresses. I'm happy to do an "arbtalk" deal for anyone interested. Please PM me.

Hi Can anyone supply me with pallet loads of netted logs, preferably kiln dried but will take seasoned and kiln them myself if need be? Also Pallet loads of kindling. Please PM me with contact and prices. Delivery To Toddington, Beds Thanks Steve

Yes thats all correct. Its way more complicated than just heating up a kiln and keeping it hot. I agree that if you can get the air to higher to higher temperatures at the start then you can re use the air/heat so you dont have to reheat it back to the full highest point, but you then also have to run that cooling air through a dehumidifier to remove the moisture it now holds, before you heat it up and send it back into the kiln. If you just keep reheating the moisture laden air, it wont absorb any more water so it becomes a balance between how much does it cost to get the water out of the air against the cost of heating fresh air drawn from outside to a level that enables the wood to dry in the timescale that is acceptable.

Our kiln does not "cook in a large oven" The principle of kiln drying, at least in my kiln, is that you create a flow of warm air, over and through the stack of firewood you are trying to dry. Warm air holds more moisture and so it absorbs the moisture from the wood as it passes through, thereby drying the wood. Its the same as drying your hands in a hot air drier. Once the moisture is absorbed into the air, you have to eject that humid air and replace it with new fresh warm air which will continue the process. People seem to have a vision that a drying kiln is like a furnace. Its not.

Dear All. I have an option on my firewood sales website for my customers to buy a chopping block for £10 and its collection only. There's always some who don't read the collection only bit! So I've got 2 online orders for a chopping block at £10 each , one in TA9 (Highbridge Somerset) and the other in ST6 (Brown Edge, Stoke on Trent). If anyone local to those two addresses wants to exchange a lump of tree trunk for a crisp £10 note, just message me with your name and mobile no and I will put you in contact with the two customers. Cheers Steve

I sent you her details so you could ring her.

did you get that sorted?

Yup that would be great. Let me have a name/email and mobile no and I'll pass you the details Cheers Steve

Hi all. I've got an order on my online system for 4 x chopping blocks @£10 each required to the postcode above. If there is anyone local who wants to take the order and cut 4 decent chopping blocks for them, I'm happy to pass on the details rather than just refund the money to them? Let me know if anyone wants the job? Cheers Steve

Exactly. For the battery casing to rupture as it has done, the explosive mixture must have been contained within it. In my view, had the explosion occurred externally to the battery, the shock wave might have knocked it over but if there was enough force to break the casing from an external explosion you would have a bit more damage to yourself than red dots on gloves......

As Manuel from Fawlty Towers would say..... "Que???"

When you phone them to log the call, tell them that you identify as a woman and you are on your own......you will then get priority!!

That's exactly what is happening. So, either just don't bother going to quote, or, just for the sheer hell of it, put a quote in that is stupidly cheap. If you get it, then you are now on the roster. If you don't then you have just confirmed what you knew in the first place!

This process is just a magnified version of any sub-contracting job with two fundamental differences: The client proposes a job. Main contractor says they will do it and prices it up. Asks sub contractor A for price. Sub contractor A subs out the job elsewhere to Sub contractor B and gets a price of £1,000. Subby A then tells Main Contractor £1500, as he needs to make a profit on the job, even if he's not actually doing it. Main contractor tells the client £2500 as he also needs to make a profit and he employs loads of people who shift paper in getting quotes from subbies, and needs to make more profit than the subbies A and B as a result. The client flinches at the price but accepts it. The fundamental differences with the public contracts are: that at the very top of the tree, the client is in fact someone who has absolutely no idea about actually doing the project in the real world, and so doesn't have the ability to say "thats bullsh*t" AND when the subbies and main contractors just escalate the prices (for whatever reason) no one at the top is going to say no, you quoted this, you build it for that!

From the Panning Portal..... Outbuildings and other additions must not exceed 50% of the total area of land around the original house. Sheds and all other outbuildings (see intro) and extensions to the original house must be included when calculating this 50% limit. The term original house means the house as it was first built or as it stood on 1 July 1948 (if it was built before that date). BUT your member location puts you on the Norfolf Broads, which is classed as a conservation area and not all elements of permitted development may apply as a result. Your extended garage will be 49m2 larger than it is at present. So it depends upon the extensions to the original house and any other sheds etc, plus how much land there is with the house as well. And then, because you are in the Norfolk Broads area, even if you meet the requiremetns for permitted development, you might need planning anyway. Work out what you can have under normal permitted development, draw a basic plan showing all the elements and then ask the planning office for advice on Norfolk Broads.

Can you message me with the spec and costs for all the kit? Cheers

One thing I can't work out, is why people might think that leasing a vehicle absolves them of any problems as opposed to buying it. Ultimately, the dealer/supplier gets paid the value of the vehicle up front. They arrange a third party finance lease and you pay the third party lease company the monthly/quarterly payment for the duration of the lease. At the end of the lease, unless you have specifically ensured that title to the asset passes to you, usually for a nominal sum, then you have no value/asset at the end of it and it is returned to the finance company. So, in order to calculate what you pay each month, the original cost of the asset is what its based on. The huge majority of vehicle lease options have an added parameter: the residual value of the asset at the end of the lease. So if a vehicle is £30,000 new and they consider that it will be worth £10,000 at 3 years old, with normal wear and tear and normal mileage then they finance £30,000 over three years, charge you for the £20,000 "depreciated value" and have the £10,000 balance repaid on sale at auction - but if you do more miles or damage the vehicle, then you will have penalties to pay. If you think that if the car goes wrong in the lease period that you can hand it back and they will stop the payments you are entirely wrong. Its still your responsibility to insure/maintain/repair the vehicle unless you have a "contract hire" version, which includes servicing. Even with that option, all they are doing is including the cost of the service in the finance cost. So whilst there may be good reasons from a business expense/cashflow/tax point of view as to why you might want to use a lease, when you sign a three year lease deal (or whatever period it is) you are signing to say that you will pay all of the payments for the whole period.

Yes. Its interesting that one. I looked at that myself a few years ago. As I recall, unless the regulations have changed, the minimum criteria for transporting a body and its burial was on a plank of wood covered by a shroud! But its not just the fees you need to consider, its permanent, ongoing access. You can't bury a load of people and then drive tractors across it and harvest the woodland in a decade!

Anything that can already be done by the end user for free, is not going to generate you any real revenues. For example, mountain biking. You can come up with a great track through the woods, up and down ravines etc, but they already can and do ride in woodlands for nothing. So you have to make it exceptional AND then have staff there to charge for its use, in order to take any money. The same principle applies to nice things for kids. Lets say you charge £5 per kid. (are you VAT registered, because that £5 just became £4.17 if you are!) Family of 3 or 4 kids will want a discount. Or they won't come because its too expensive and they can walk in plenty of woods for free. Glamping etc can be good revenue spinners, but you have to maintain them, prepare them and clean them for each and every user. You would have to have a changeover day, which means that you or your staff have to commit to being there at that time, week in/week out to do that. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm trying to ensure that you take an objective look at something and try to consider the downsides to things as much as the upsides. As a decent general rule of thumb, ask yourself if YOU would spend the money to do what you want to offer. If you wouldn't spend it, its unreasonable to expect a load of other people to do so really! Rent it out to a paintball company, or something like that, where you don't have to deal with the end user, you have minimal involvement and just pick up your rent. You can't always guarantee they will treat the area as you do though! If it was easy, everyone would be doing it!!

Balls of steel, Guy Martin. Even with the modifications to save weight, that thing still weighed 3-4 tonnes. If that had deviated off the straight line at that speed, it would have gone over. I didn't notice any rollover cages etc in that cab, and I'm not convinced you could build a rollover cage to withstand that anyway, so if that went pear shaped he was getting crushed. Great bit of publicity for JCB, and a credit to everyone who took part to be able to be able to get that machine to do that speed.

Yes if you can get it to work as a drying floor, getting the air under the bottom pallets so it can rise through the stacks you might have a chance with that. I’m not sure you can easily push enough hot air in enough volume underneath though without s network of pipes in the pallets?

The principle of drying wood in a kiln is not necessarily all about heat. The description of "kiln" does tend to make people envisage oven like temperatures, when in fact the way that they work with log drying is the movement of hot/warm air over/past something that holds moisture. Warm air can carry greater amounts of moisture than cold air, so by making warm air flow past moisture laden logs, the moisture can be released from the log and absorbed by the air as it passes by. I have a 40'ft shipping container kiln. For the first two years we just let the heat exchangers blow into the container and it worked ok. But we would struggle to get the temperature inside the kiln much above 28/30 degrees C. So we insulated the walls and ceiling of the kiln with KIngspan insulated boards, and the temperature now sits much higher at the 36 degree+ levels. As a result, we dry the logs faster and better, whilst still using the same amount of energy. So my critique of what you are trying to do, is that when you introduce artificial heat, it will easily escape through the poly tunnel roof, as the heat will rise in the first place. You will also need bloody big fans to move air through that space! So, what works in your favour in the summer, the "greenhouse effect" of the poly tunnel in increasing the temperature of the air inside the poly tunnel works against you in the cooler times as it can't hold onto it. I think you would be better creating a smaller area or areas within the tunnel, so a tunnel (made of ply?) within the tunnel which you can insulate and contain the heat , so that you can dry some stuff in say 2 weeks. You have the heat/fans down one end and removable far end, so you can slow the passage of air and dry what in there. When its dry, open the far end and move the dry stuff out and put new stuff in. As with all this stuff, its all heavy! I'm, not sure how easily you can move a machine and stock around in the polytunnel? You only have to get it wrong once and you have wrecked your polytunnel! So personally, I think you would be better creating a smaller drying area where you can control the heat and airflow better. I think you will do a lot of work for minimal impact in the polytunnel alone. Creating a drying floor in there would be better, as you would be pushing warm air under the logs to be dried and then it will release upwards through the logs which might work. That warm moist air will hit the underside of the polytunnel and turn into condensation so you need a means of getting the moist air out of the tunnel