Chalgravesteve

I'm interested in insulating mine. I've PM'd you about it...

I've just taken the Snugtop off my Navara D40 (2005 Mk1) and its in decent nick. Currently on Ebay if you fancy it. No reserve, so its definitely going to sell. nissan navara d40 Mark 1 snug top | eBay

I've not had it mapped or anything. That's what the mpg computer says and I don't think its wrong. It tells me I can do about 500 miles on a full tank and unless I go berserk its about right. I've got a pathfinder as well and that's doing about 27mpg. The navara is the oldest and maybe its a euro 5 engine not a euro 6 like the pathfinder is? It seems to me that the emissions criteria makes the engines less efficient at burning fuel, ie it uses more fuel but gets less mpg as well! Bloody mad.

Agree it is 1m3 less the wheel arches. I get up to 6 barrow bags in mine, and Ive got a truckman top on it as well! Bags are 48x48x97 and we get 3 or 4 on their sides and two upright on the open tailgate! So that equates to about 1.4m bagged up. If I was to take the truckman top off, which I might do, then I'd easily get all 6 standing upright in there. Cracking vehicle. I've got one of the first ones sold, on a 05 plate with 142,000 on it now, all done by me. Had a heavy duty clutch put on under warranty and that's about it. I'll drive it til it dies then get another one. Currently getting 37 mpg!

Income received from RHI subsidy is "outside the scope" of VAT and therefore the VAT element is zero. So, if you receive say £1,000 from RHI subsidy, it is receipts of £1,000 with No VAT. If she has been accounting for it as a gross income of £1,000 and declaring that it is effectively £833.34 + 20% VAT (£166.66) then you have been overpaying your VAT and you can reclaim that.

I'm happy to supply my kiln dried logs as a BSL accredited product. I expected there to be a greater demand for it, but, at least where I am, there appears to be negligible requirement. I'm not fussed about the fees they represent a very small %age of overhead costs as effectively I'm paying £120 per annum to advertise my products on the BSL.

That's how I calculate mine! I take the monthly increase in the RHI reading, say 24,000 kw, and use a benchmark of 4500kw per tonne of seasoned wood, which as I recall, I got from the forestry commission or similar info? So that equates to 5.34 tonnes of wood consumed.

The original advice I was given to complete the quarterly returns, was that I simply told them what tonnage/m3 we consumed ourselves to power our RHI boiler and what tonnage/m3 of kiln dried we sold in the same period. As I didn't have to pay any fees etc, it was just a matter of calculating the figures and entering them in the form, it made no odds to me if it was BSL or non BSL, and they said the total we produced. Once it became a charge per tonnage/m3 I had a more vested interest in whether it was BSL/non BSL.

Answered in about 6 minutes......

I rang the BSL Helpline today as I have been intending to query something with them for a while, since they started the suggestion of charges. Firstly, I'm a producer/trader as I use my own seasoned logs in my own RHI biomass boiler. I only sell kiln dried, I don't sell seasoned at all. I'm a Small/Micro company, which means my annual fees will be £120 per annum. We haven't got to the tonnage sold start date yet, but in the last Sept/Oct/Nov period, I've sold just over 120m3 of kiln dried logs. I'm based in Bedfordshire and almost all of my customers have woodburning stoves. Now, it was bugging me that in the three years that I have been selling kiln dried, and I was accredited and on the BSL right from the start, I have only ever been asked for the BSL numbers to be on the invoice, because the purchaser was claiming Domestic RHI, ONCE. That customer bought a few loads from us, but he wanted greater bulk and cheaper price, so I haven't had an order from him this year. So, essentially, 99.9% of my customers have no interest in the BSL number, they just want kiln dried firewood for their woodburning stove. They don't claim DRHI. So I asked the BSL helpdesk, how I should be calculating the tonnage/m3 supplied, in terms of is it every scrap of firewood I sell, or do I only calculate to tonnage/m3 sold to people requiring the BSL number. Amazingly, I got the answer I wanted! If I sell my kiln dried firewood to customers who need a BSL accredited number, I have to declare that. If I sell my kiln dried firewood to the general public for use in their non RHI woodburners/open fires, I don't need to declare that and I don't pay any tonnage/m3 fees on that element. So, I'll have to pay the £120 a year registration fee so I can use my own seasoned in my own RHI boiler, but I'm unlikely to have any further charges for tonnage/m3.

I can't see how it would work to be honest. I have my own kiln (40' shipping container) with a RHI Boiler to heat it. If someone brings me 40m3 (which is roughly what I get in the kiln (20 x 2m3 cages on wheels) somehow, the supplied wood has to be loaded into the cages (which is done when we process/split our own stuff). Then the cages have to be loaded by machine into the kiln. They are dried over a period of 7/10 days, so I've got a fuel cost of the boiler for that period. Once dried, I've got to unload the kiln with a machine, then empty the cages into bags. The amount of manual labour involved is far to high, so the cost to me ,before I add a profit margin on doing the work, would mean that the person who supplied the firewood to be dried in the first place, would have such a high cost just on my element, before they add the transport to and from my site, then the transport to their customer! 40m3 at a time is just too small scale to get any economies of scale. The imported kiln dried is being done on a massive scale, with substantially lower labour costs and substantially lower timber costs. In addition, the only time that I have spare capacity in my kiln, where I am drying wood faster than I'm selling it, is through the summer, so the person wanting the timber dried would have to be doing all of this out of season and paying for it to hold it in stock for later. In short, the transport, handling, fuel and labour costs on a small scale don't make it viable. If you took the suggestion to put the boiler/kiln onto a flatbed, and take it to the wood source rather than bring the wood to the kiln, either you have to offload the boiler and kiln at the destination, which then means it needs to be plumbed together and electric power attached, which is not a 5 minute job, or you try and manufacture the boiler/kiln to be permanently on the flatbed, so it is a complete and ready mobile unit. Now the kiln and boiler is about 1.2m off the ground and needs to be loaded unloaded and the boiler fuelled. Apart from that, I can easily see this working!!! LOL

I've never said you do. It's just the way I do it as it makes business sense to me. However, big brands like Homebase selling the same "seasoned" Log taints the whole seasoned log industry. There is an expectation that they have applied due process and got a reasonable product. So if their stuff is wet then some people will taint all seasoned wood with that same brush.

Nope. I have a 40' shipping container/kiln attached to a dragon boiler and 10,000 litre accumulator tank. Yes it is on RHI. We light the boiler once a day and forget about it. The boiler heats the accumulator and the kiln draws the heat from the accumulator and can run 24/7 if we light the boiler every day. We run it Mon-Fri. I have local 6/8 tree surgeons who bring me their chip and arb waste logs daily. I have 5 greenkeepers from my main business, a golf club, who instead of washing machinery all winter now run a firewood business instead as well as keeping the course in shape during the winter period. We run a Gandini Forestcut 48 processor, split logs into steel cages that are 1.2m x 1m x 1.9m high and on wheels so we can push them around in the kiln and we get about 40m3 into every kiln. So we process and dry every single log we sell. Our logs are BSL accredited. The carbon footprint is tiny, as the logs we sell probably travel less than 30 miles in their entire lives. The RHI boiler burns all the stuff that is hard to split, so the entire tree gets used up. I looked at doing firewood about 6/8 years ago and concluded that the space required to store the seasoning wood, and the time that it would take to get it down to a consistent level so that I had a consistent, decent quality product was not worth the effort for the return. Splitting stuff today, drying it for 7-10 days and selling it in the weeks after, that is a decent business model. I don't have any additional staff costs as I was already paying the greenstaff anyway. I just get a better use of their quiet time and produce additional revenue as a result. I am the recommended log supplier for 6 different stove suppliers who love our wood, so every time they install a stove they give their customer my card. All that takes groundwork to establish and just as much hard work to maintain.

Skyhuck is correct. My customer base is almost entirely people who have stoves but have little or no space to store wood, or no inclination to do so. I sell kiln dried wood in barrow bags, I deliver them, not to their door, but to their "store" whether that be their garage, shed or a forklift truck pallet and a tarp cover in the garden. I don't drop it on the drive and leave them to clear it up. I also have no interest in spending this year splitting logs and stacking them and keeping them for 18 months. I don't have any interest in doing the same again next year and still not getting any money for what I did last year!! Getting paid in two years time for the work I do today is, in my opinion, a bloody bad hobby!! Each to their own. I know my market. I sell in relatively small volume (although my customers are used to buying nets from garages so they think my bags are huge) and I provide an exceptional service, prompt delivery and right to the place they want it.

Just delivered a couple of bags of our Kiln Dried Logs to a customer. Last week, he bought a net of Seasoned Hardwood Logs from Homebase as he was running low. The two logs he tried burning used up most of his kindling and the rest of the logs I delivered to him before, to not burn entirely through. He gave me one to put a moisture meter on. It weighs an absolute ton!! unbelievable!!

That's surely a huge contradiction in principles then? Happy to "run a business based on numbers that count by importing from eastern Europe so a lorry/ship travelling 1000's of miles is ok but criticising a RHI funded kiln using local wood because the numbers do count is not acceptable? That's having your cake and eating it!

So why are you comparing my single bag price to your cube bag? My bags are notionally 0.25 m3 and stretch to hold about .35. So my 4 bag price is about 1.2m and costs £150! Not much in it is there? If you are going to compare your prices with mine, at least be honest enough to compare like with like! I deliver one bag at a time if necessary and I don't refuse steps or alleyways, I might refuse a lot of steps but 2 doesnt seem unreasonable. Ihave a reputation for being friendly and helpful, which gets me referrals and more sales, so I stay local all the time. Not Rocket science.

LOL I amended it to show the £37.50 per bag figure as people seemed to be incapable of realising that £150 for 4 bags was substantially cheaper than buying 4 x 1 bags @£47.50! Next time I'm updating the website I will maybe add the word "each"

A good business plan looks at all possible areas of income and analyses that against all fixed and variable costs, leaving you with the likely and potential profit. In the case of RHI for kiln drying wood, as the business gets bigger from actual operational sales, the "subsidy" income from RHI becomes less important. Tier One is the only bit "worth" having in that respect, so a 195kW boiler on tier one will produce about £20,000. If the business employs 2 or three people, then you need to sell £100,000 worth of firewood to make a reasonable profit on top, and you can't be making much if your gross income is £120,000 and you emply three people, plus all the rest of the business costs! But already at that level, RHI is by far the smaller element of the business and as the business contiues to grow, more costs get added as well. A kiln has a finite amount of volume you can get through it. Once you reach that maximum, the only way to expand is to add another one, and RHI is already at a level now where you would not do it from scratch. However, an expanding business might well be able to still do so. As far as I am concerned, its a very sound business plan!

I'm not "feeding" the moisture. I have a covered barn type building that has a reasonable airflow, so the logs we have already dried are stored in 2m3 wire mesh cages and stacked in the cages in the barn. My experiement is purely for my own wood in my own environment, to determine that wood I dried in April is still under the 20%MC I say it will be when I deliver it to the user. I am confident already that any increase in MC over a period of say 6 months, is going to be negligible. The stuff we dry in the winter, I expect to sell pretty quickly. I don't have vast areas to store stuff, nor the inclination to do so.

Yes, I don't disagree that the kiln dried stuff possibly would make it back up to the level of air dried wood over some as yet unknown period of time. It may not though. It might be that the force drying process has changed some element of the way that the log reacts to the atmospheric moisture. The reason we are testing is because this is a new part of my business. We haven't done this before, but we are rapidly gaining some very good accounts, particularly some potential high volume wholesale accounts. In order to supply those accounts, we may need to start drying greater volumes during the summer period, to provide us with bulk stock ready for the Autumn supply times. I need to know that the stuff I dry March - September can be stored ready for delivery without the logs going outside the MC range I am guaranteeing to my wholesalers.

Yes, last time I shifted a pallet it cost me £65 to have it delivered. I assume from that then there is 100 bags per pallet. Can you give me the 3 dimensions of the filled net please and a collection point postcode so I can get a haulage quote for 2 pallets. I will need to know the cost per net of course. Cheers Steve

I didn't say it has gone up to 25%. I said we would all be dead before it gets near it, it will take that long. We kiln dry to around 15/16% MC in about 7 days. We have a number of logs under test that we took out in February at 15%. They havent moved yet. They still show 15%. I would expect them to take something back up over time, but my customers use the stuff I deliver within a few months, they don't store it for a year or more. Even if they did, I wouldn't expect the logs to get anywhere near 20% based upon what I have seen so far.

We are currently conducting and experiment to see how long it takes a kiln dried log to reabsorb moisture. As far as we can make out, we will all be dead before we get a reading at 25% MC again. It is not like a sponge, once the moisture has been expelled, the rate at which it returns to the wood is massively significantly slower. If dried wood just absorbed it back at the same rate, furniture, general untreated timber in sheds and other outdoor uses, would just get sodden very quickly. The reason the moisture is there in the first place is because the tree was alive and drawing sap/moisture through the trunk as part of its growth process. It's now dead. That process no longer happens. Take your Christmas Tree cut off above the root, stood in water for three weeks or so. You might sustain it for a few weeks that way, but the end result is the same. The tree died when you cut it off at the root, and the ability to absorb moisture immediately started to slow at that point until it stopped completey.

I sell them as a "stovemix" bag, as my wood pile source is completely mixed. We are starting to seperate stuff out as it comes in and we can do a pure hardwood now if people ask for it (but they don't! - maybe 1 in 50?) and I charge a £10 per bag premium for it. Bag prices, including delivery within 15 miles, are 1 bag @£47.50, 2 bags for £44, 3 bags for £41.50 and 4 bags for £37.50. If customers want to collect, I charge £40 per bag or £37.50 if they bring me a reuseable bag back. The bags are pretty robust, but if they have just dragged the barrow bag over concrete and there are holes all over it, then I would not be reusing the bag for someone else. If they have their own sack barrow and shift them about like that, then the bags can last 10+ uses. I am looking at supplying the North/West London are this year as a possibility, so we might have to look at the delivery charges for that, but the prices I already have seem to be significantly lower than the London prices anyway, so I have some margin to work with. My customer is the guy who wants more than the garage forecourt/garden centre net, but doesn't have the time/space/inclination to store wood for months prior to use. The majority of people putting stoves in these days are of the "Just in Time" generation, they want to buy it now and use it now, and me to bring them some more when they are getting low.