openspaceman

Remember if you heat it it will lose a lot of that energy through the steel wall. If you add insulation to the outside the roof will need to protect the extra width. If you insulate from the inside you lose space but the insulation has to be totally vapour proof, else warm moist air will permeate the insulation and condense either in the insulation or on the cold wall and eventually run down the inside and cause problems, including rust.

A long time if roofed and jacked a few inches above ground away from vegetation.

Can you explain what it filters out, sizewise and how long the filters last, or are they cleanable?

I think something is lost from timber as it gets very old, I have burned stag headed oak (remaining heartwood only) and it is very coal like to burn with no liveliness despite being around 20%, as you say even recently felled and seasoned oak is not as lively as something like birch, or holly as I am finding this year. I attach a picture of a drying experiment I have posted before, as you will see oak dries similarly to other species with birch being the quickest in my samples. The pine and elm I added later as I came across them and by then drying conditions were better. Bear in mind these are individual logs on a shelf rather than in a stack and cut to ~10" and split with initially a weight around 1kg. So I think logs cut and split ready for the fire, under cover, with reasonable air circulation will be below 20% wwb by the end of a summer season . Then they will be in equilibrium and in my case will pick up a small amount of moisture as winter progresses. Logs dry by moisture leaving the surface, as this dries moisture migrates from the inner parts to get back to an equilibrium, so there is a gradient of moisture from inside to out until it reaches equilibrium with the ambient air, in my case rising to about 17% wwb by late winter. The time it takes is dependent on the length and cross section of the log and as moisture moves more readily out of the ends a shorter log will dry quicker than a long log of the same size.

If he's meaning solar PV panels, and not thermal, then he'll likely get about 0.75MWh for every 1kW installed peak capacity per annum and 80% of that will be May till August, when a solar thermal kiln will do well enough on its own.

I shouldn't think there is much loss of energy in VOCs emitted till you get above 120C.

Much the same here and I try and open the door carefully, just taking the ash out raises dust and thus room gets covered in it. All the same I do not think ash dust is in the same league as the other products of incomplete combustion, that's the thing about PM figures they don't differentiate between particle chemistry. Of course dust is still a problem if exposed to it constantly and being largely silica it causes silicosis. I need to see how I can get my python program to write to a file and then I could log PM through the day and see if it rises particularly when loading the Morso 11 stove, which runs 16 hours a day at present. Oddly after I bought it I noticed the Morso manual showed it was for intermittent use but it seems to be faring reasonably.

No I was just pointing out the drawbacks of ploughing unless interrupted and on the contour, did not see the Clarke device referred to. Yes there's no way I would enterntain manual working it a powered machine can get in there.

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In this day of flood problems getting water off the hill quickly is probably the opposite of the aim of planting the hill. not to mention scouring.

Actually these are far better because the ring attachments are keyholes which allow for adjustment. Noting @Rough Hewn's concern about splitting, I wonder because the bottom tension in the chain puts the board in compression, just like if you pick up 5 bricks between the palms of your hand.

Is that 2021 or 2?

Why not just a barrel chain with gaff hooks instead of clamp. Perhaps a shortening clutch on the ring to allow for different widths

What I should say is a lot of the problem stems from when the milk marketing board was removed, farmer's set up a co-operative called milkmarque to combat the power of the supermarkets but it was ruled a cartel by either the EU or our own monopolies' rules, and that was a dreadful shame in my eyes.

Yes the bloke either gets income from outside or goes bankrupt I suppose. Many big farms will dip into loss some years and make it up other years, their accountants will be able to carry money over without the taxman getting to it to tide them over, a small farmer won't be able to so could end up in supertax one year and none the other. We can see even with subsidy it's not sustainable hence less dairy farming and imported milk.

Pay attention at the back, it's not about carbon emissions it's about particulate and NOx emissions. If you downrate the power by reducing fuelling then there is less heat in the combustion so even with excess air NOx is not formed and because the mix is always ultra lean less particulates form. Look at how tweaked diesels push out black smoke, well it's the opposite of that. At the Ae machinery course I got marked down for pointing out that the Valmet forwarder was over fuelling as it came under load and pushed out black smoke, Stuart told me not to be silly, how things have changed in 20 years

Good job too!

I wonder if you really lit fires with tyres @Stubby, any fule knows that diesel doesn't work as well as petrol, and remember to pick the wire out of the ashes.

In the context of what's been said about sugar beet and milk down the drain this happens some years, and you cannot switch off milk from a high yielding cow, Same with throwing over quota fish overboard. Similarly you cannot expect a farmer to stop producing beet. This is why I said farming is volatile which is why support is used. Also think how taxation has an effect on a person who's income varies greatly from year to year. A sole trader is only allowed a limited amount of leeway by the taxman if they have a bumper year but if they have a year when profit dips below the tax threshold? Yes I am sure a lot of farms depend on subsidy.

That was milking on a shoestring, the farm was hanging on by the skin of his teeth by the time he sold up. Poor old gent but he was cantankerous.

Do you mean King Edwards school by Witley station. If so the chestnut all around there was coppiced every 4 years for the walking stick factory which was just down the road. Closed a few years ago so the coppice grew on.

No ashpan then, do you just shovel ash out?

I think you are spot on with that but I think the mechanism was a bit different. Because the short termism of the shareholding classes after WW1 meant dividends and cashing in were the rule it meant there was little re investment. In turn the common market gave the financial sector a massive boost which was amplified by vastly increased mortgage lending in the 80s. The knock on from this is wealth diverged and the wealthy classes spent their money on services making manufacturing wages less attractive. So our labour rates became linked to our financial sector rather than our industrial competitors' rates Yes but the US has vastly better resources to counter the short term share culture, we had grown in victorian times because we had access to empire which disappeared (largely in exchange for american financial assistance as they won the war.) and with that access to cheap resources.

Not necessarily if they are a part of a large farming business, they will have a bigger proportion of subsidies, their accountants will make sure of that but as with any investment in capital equipment the rate of return on investment will favour a big capital spend that eliminates a unit of labour. We saw this in my industry when harvesters came in, two men working long shifts displaced about 20 men doing motor manual harvesting with tractors and trailers. That they messed up the soil structure and the matrix of trees in thinnings was one of the unforeseen outcomes, life adapts to change but it gets harder as you get older. Being a grumpy old man I don't see the advantage of much of it. Could this be to do with transport costs and population density? My father was born in Aberdeen but AFAIK he never went back to scotland after childhood till I threw him off big ben.

Farming is a volatile thing, some years there is glut and some scarcity. Farmers do well in scarcity because of the price elasticity of food, when you have insufficient you will pay a lot but as soon as you are satisfied you will buy no more at any price. The government intervenes to stabilise prices and when we originally joined the common market this europe wide intervention caused various food mountains and attracted a lot of fraud, not to mention the cost of administering the scheme in wages for two levels of civil servants.. While the CAP seemed to favour poor farmers in France its effect here was the opposite with big landowners gaining immensely while small marginal farmers struggled. My first job was on a dairy farm and a herd of 35 cows paid one man;s wages, now because of price pressure on milk (supermarkets pay less than cost of production) only big dairies with heavy investment in mechanised/robot milking can survive and one man has to deal with 200 cows. I think we now import a lot of our milk from economies with lower wages.