openspaceman

Too right mate

More likely it will put them off buying logs

I don't see the definition of "efficiency" in the context, we used to use the same terminology as is used for heat pumps, coefficient of performance, and that measure was the amount of heat necessary to remove a kg of water from the wood. @Squaredy is right about the waste and it is true of much of when we burn fuels which is why there have been combined heat and power schemes over the years to attempt to address this. Most of our fossil fuelled electricity comes from combined cycle gas turbines, these use the waste heat from the jet to boil water to turn a turbine, and manage to gain 50% more power from the heat. We could do similarly with kilns in that the hot moist air leaving a kiln at, say 40C, could still be used in an underfloor heating system but it's a question of increased capital cost verses cheap heat. Given that a furnace is going to put out 1200C+ there is lots of scope for cascading heat when you are drying wood at less than 100C but the added complexity costs.

If you heat wood up it does give off Volatile Organic Compounds before pyrolysis starts at about 330C and yes these will burn. They are likely the things bugs get at first as wood rots and of course these are what you smell as you heat wood up. We used to reckon the loss of chemical energy was insignificant below 125C.

? It's what I hope to do for a small woodland heavily infested with ash dieback, subject to planning, but I will use bits from a polytunnel and possibly clear corrugated pvc sheet rather than polythene I regret not doing this for a little extension I built between my shed and garage but otherwise the insulated profiled steel sheet does well and no problem with condensation one gets with the plain sheet.

I hope we don't have to go down this route but it does seem a pretty low energy device for such a good performance, any idea of the cost? In my situation getting onto the chimney to service it would be a bit of a problem.

40ft (12m) Container Canopy 10m Wide WWW.BUDGETSHIPPINGCONTAINERS.CO.UK 10 Metres of covered space between 2x 40ft shipping containers 5 year manufacturer warranty High Tensile... there seem to be a number of firms offering this, presumably you use the top locks to fix it to the container and it must be possible to get a translucent or clear covering

@renewablejohn Electrostatic precipitator (ESP) by OekoTube for your wood fire OEKOSOLVE.CH Manufacturer information about types of electrostatic precipitators. Check all models online.

Good idea, make a bender with a transparent sheet and get some solar gain too.

Here's one that seems odd to me: Motorists remove barriers to avoid 28-mile detour WWW.BBC.CO.UK Immovable barriers are installed at the site of roadworks due to last all year. While they're sitting pondering what to do for 45 weeks why can't they stick the bed of an old low loader and some armco sides over the culvert and control traffic with lights and a weight/width limit?

Perhaps your only hope is finding others with the same problem and joining in a class action

I wasn't aware of it and have it on the desktop now but there is a lot of jargon there which is beyond my understanding even in the first pages, I'll try and get further but I gave up trying to interpret stuff like this when I retired and no longer needed to see how the firm could comply. The first things that smack one in the face is that they have no intention of tackling consumers, only sales at source. This will be straightforward for coal " While some enforcement and administration costs will fall to the regulatory body, they will be recovered by the regulatory body from fuel manufacturers through the levy of registration charges and fuel testing fees paid by the manufacturer". It will quickly be traced back to a manufacturing plant but for small wood suppliers it looks like "businesses which voluntarily subscribe to the Ready to Burn scheme. The scheme currently covers less than 1 percent of businesses in the market although it should be noted this includes the biggest fuel manufacturers in terms of the tonnage of domestic fuel sold on the market." So it's the executives' salaries of yet another quango that will benefit from this. How they will dis-enfranchise small log sellers, ones able to comply with the new moisture criteria but not wishing to join the scheme or have to pay for their logs to be tested, will be interesting.

Okay but I would expect to get it lower I think I need to look at some airflow under my stack, trouble is that will lose me some volume. Which is why some people kiln dry, it can mean a lot in cashflow terms I agree but there is also little doubt drier burns better, again it's BATNEEC and the damage this does to the woodland management could potentially be counter productive . The reasons behind the legislation is that a target has been set for PM2.5, the powers that be have set that target without considering the implication that many respiratory problems stem from long previous exposures and also that the alleged contribution of PM2.5 from burning firewood is largely from burning purchased firewood when in fact things like bonfires are also lumped in with the "domestic fires" portion. The reason "domestic fires" now allegedly account for 30% along with 30% from unknown sources is that industrial stacks and transport have been cleaned up to a fraction of the 1970 levels. Particulate levels have reduced to about 20% of their 1970 levels overall, a lot of it from loss of heavy industry. Now that is illogical, here in SE England the equilibrium moisture content settles about 17% so nothing is likely to rise above that, what has happened is the conditions in the stack mean the log did not become below 20% before winter set in. To illustrate this I picked out 2 pieces of oak and one piece of bay that were left from the previous year but otherwise in the same shed, the oaks were 17% and 19% and the bay 14% ( but it was quite well buried in the pile and high against a side) so as I said my conclusion is that if I can get the logs dry enough in a summer than they will not adsorb moisture to any worrying amount.

I doubt drowning it will make it totally damaged and even if the photos/videos were on the internal memory they will may be recovered. First take the battery out and then leave the phone alone and in a warm dry place for a couple of weeks. If it won't boot up then you may need to swap the motherboard into another phone of the same type. Last autumn I had my phone on my lap driving down a farm track and a van was reversing out. I stopped and got out, dropping the phone, arranged for him to go forward to a turning point and leapt back in to my car and promptly drove over my phone. Screen smashed and chassis bent beyond repair. I bought a used phone and swapped the motherboard to retrieve my info and videos. I couldn't get it to make calls again.

If you follow this link it takes you to the (updated) chapters of a book Jo Ellis wrote when she was private woodlands officer for surrey So, you own a woodland? WWW.RFS.ORG.UK So you own a woodland provides online guidance for new woodland owners including videos and links to other helpful...

I know where you're coming from and @Woodworks is saying much the same but here in Sunny Surrey I was pulling softwood from my log shed in the low teens , I've very little left to test but I'll look to do a test. Okay I've tested a piece of Wellingtonia that went in the shed, on the floor, February 19, it was fresh felled and I reported here at the time the moisture content was 75%, today it came out at 25% but the bit I split off prior to testing burst into flames immediately when I put it in the stove. The piece of hardwood, beech, went in sometime in winter 19, green and today was 21%. I guess left to another summer they would continue to lose moisture but because of space considerations I will not season stuff more than one summer before I burn it. These pieces coming from the floor or near the bottom will not have dried as well as stuff nearer the glass roof. In the meanwhile this morning my neighbour took delivery of a cut and split load of ash from the local log merchant, I asked her for permission to weigh a bit and it was at 31%. NB because of the small sample size and accuracy of my kitchen scales I would allow +- 5% variance on these figures.

I definitely second that.

I know where you're coming from and @Woodworks is saying much the same but here in Sunny Surrey I was pulling softwood from my log shed in the low teens , I've very little left to test but I'll look to do a test. Yes but as I mentioned some posts back the equilibrium moisture content verses relative humidity is not a line but an area bounded by two ogives, one is the path the drying takes as timber dries and the other as it readsorbs moisture, I have found an image from a research paper on mahogany as an illustration, so it is to illustrate the principal only: Equilibrium moisture content of mahogany wood as a function of relative humidity at 25°C. Filled and open symbols correspond to the adsorption and desorption states, respectively. If you interpolate using 90% RH as the average maximum humidity a log will experience in the middle of a stack ( given that it takes time for the whole log to reach equilibrium) you will see it settles at 16% mc but the same log being dried from green settles at 19%. Again there is the problem is that the basis on which the moisture content is being measured is not stated. What it means is that the water from 25% down is weakly bonded to the wood structure and energy is needed to release the water molecules from that bond hence the drying line is higher than the wetting line.

I possibly have not followed whether the tipper motor and ram were both transferred to the vehicle. If they were the heaviest loading would be when the pressure relief blew off and at this point the motor would be struggling and running slower and taking a higher current but no more than when on the other vehicle. On most of these electric-hydraulic pumps the spool valve and relief valve are built into the motor pump unit.

Fairy nuff I'd missed that but the OP hasn't said where the 700 degree temperature was recorded, I can easily reach 700C in a bed of glowing coals but agree a flue temperature that high would make the steel glow bright red.

It's ill thought out but it must be aimed at garage forecourt and garden centre sales. It may push people to buying from reputable log sellers. There has always been legislation about smoke and I've never known of it to be prosecuted for domestic fires, or generally other fires. I'll cite non smoking as being a successful campaign where legislation was used after education and peer pressure had made it unacceptable in restaurants (public transport bans preceding this). Then we have the dogs fouling of land act and its successor, a masterpiece of ill intended consequences, while I'm glad the verge outside my house is seldom fouled I am incensed by poo bags in the countryside where I would prefer to see the shit.

weigh it. I cut a piece as near under 30g and weigh it on a postal scale, note the weight and stick it in the microwave for 1 minute. note the weight let it cool a bit if it is steaming and repeat until you observe no further reduction. that stable weight is then the oven dry weight and it should pick up a gram or so over the next few hours. The original moisture content is the original weight minus oven dry weight divided by the original weight.

Have you turned american most, even oldies like me, have grown accustomed to using SI units.

I've not got anything against the idea, after all all modern gas boilers have a balanced flue to do this but you need 4 or 5 air changes an hour in any case so using air from the room just ensures some of this.

Graphs like that don't tell me much without a bit more context. Even so the green band of the curve seems to have been selected arbitrarily and doesn't indicate much reduction below 25%. When Tom Reed told me that 12% was optimum it made no sense to me, after all petrol and diesel have insignificant water content and burn with low particulates, alcohol burns with low particulates and it is partially oxygenated like wood. I'd love access to a lab to investigate stuff like this but I do have a few observations from my own fire. One is that if the fire is hot but turned down fairly low with a bed of hot char and I reload it with a couple of big medium sized logs without altering the air control after a few minutes the inverted flame from the air bleed at the rear middle of the fire quickly fill the firebox. I can go outside and see a faint dark haze from the fire. This I know to be because the secondary burn is too rich. The solution is to close the air control till the bleed air can "catch up" with the offgas being produced as the hot firebox pyrolyses the logs. The evolution of pyrolysis offgas has exceeded the ability of the air supply to completely burn it. I can also crack the door open to allow a supply of secondary air but this simultaneously supplies more primary air and causes the power to shoot up.This does not happen with damper logs because the energy needed to evaporate the water damps down the pyrolysis. I can see exactly the same if I put a piece of birch on in the same conditions, it's like throwing a plastic wrapper on, the air supply cannot keep up with the evolution of gases from the oily bark for a short while. In practice it's not a problem because it means the stove is already producing 4kW and doens't need reloading yet and then only a piece at a time.