openspaceman

Because it would foul up the combustion if it went in the engine. It is injected into the exhaust where it reacts with any nitric oxide to produce nitrogen and water. Oxides of nitrogen are formed when the combustion is hot AND there is spare oxygen in the cylinder, which tends to happen at higher, but not peak, power.

DERV is the abbreviation for Diesel Engined Road Vehicle, so DERV diesel fuel is the white stuff you put in lorries. Rebated diesel fuel AKA gas oil is the red stuff

I decided long ago it's not; if three axe blows don't split it I saw it. The drawback is extra sawdust but I keep that under cover and put it in a bag at the base of the fire before I start it.

Well yes but it's actually 12 foot pounds that's the upper limit and not much use under that

Why use expensive white diesel when red is so much cheaper?

Which is why I alluded to the requirement, grasshopper. Outwith an urban environment no one from the planning department or EA seem concerned.

Does this not constitute engineering works? Disposing of the spoil also needing permission or an EA exemption? In practice as long as you stay under the radar...

Not a problem burning but it wears out the dies. I have written about my working life in a thread somewhere here, the conspicuous feature of all my ventures is my complete lack of business acumen.

That'l be bone dry dust and silica debris from the sanders. Even the Shimada screw press dies have a short life because wood is actually abrasive. They have to be built up with stellite welding frequently. I wonder if a sawdust burner could be made clean enough to direct fire a rotary kiln the same way oil or gas is used in dryers, of course there will be a higher moisture content but that would not be a problem if the fuel were essentially free. Ours was down to 30 parts per million CO and no visible smoke.

Of course that is a non sequitur and I don't want to derail VI's thread; it was aimed at charcoal making in this country were at the time we were importing over 80% of our barbecue needs. Twenty years ago a couple of australian soaps had triggered an upsurge in barbecue use in UK and a wannabe politician had lighted upon making charcoal from neglected broadleaved woodlands as a viable product but the higglers that were recruited to the system were ill equipped to make a go of it. So I became interested as I had a philanthropic interest in small scale biomass cooking in the third world. What we developed was for this country and the scheme got hijacked as there was grant funding available for producing electricity from biomass, so a simple concept became unduly expensive. An off shoot of promoting cleaner burning methods in cook stoves was that a couple of americans developed a burner that had very low particulate emissions, it also left a residue of about 25% of the initial dry mass as char. One of the pair and a later comer to the fray, a retired american geography professor, began promoting these types of burner to reduce indoor pollution and attract carbon offset credits to the third world by incorporating the char in soil. The interest to me is that though CO2 release from fossil fuels is concentrated on industrialised countries removing it by sequestering carbon in soil can be distributed in any populated area, if the credit for this could be passed to the farmers in the third world it would provide an alternative to cash crops which are currently exporting fertility.

Less risky than being the Company's Obligatory Sacrificial Scapegoat.

Me and TCD too, not to mention the wastefulness.

My problem with these various means of making char that get discussed is they are wasteful of the heat energy in the wood. If you have dry woodchip (G50 W30) it is feasible to run it through a standard wood chip stoking furnace, utilise the heat and have the char as a byproduct. A chap in Canada, Alex English of Burts nurseries, did it with a chain grate and I followed his lead and made a very ashy char with a Kob 500kW(t) boiler. Some 70% of the heat energy in the wood is in the pyrolysis offgas, we even ran a simple gas turbine using offgas from a pressurised kiln fired with veggie oil and made decent barbecue lumpwood charcoal, mind the capital cost of the gear was eye watering. The challenge I was wanting to address was taking fresh arb arising woodchip, dry it, make a biochar and utilise the low grade heat.

Something must have changed as I just wore prescription spectacles with plastic lenses. Mostly I was IWA but and ordinary mesh visor with other PPE was all I needed when sawing.

I've posted about why birch gets wetter as it rots in the round before. As our poles were to be turned on a lathe in the round any deeper affected the product. The point I would make is the effort of making the stripes would be better put into converting it to firewood straight away. Birch is amazingly good firewood as it splits easily, dries fast and burns well plus because the bark is oily it lights up very quickly. If I stoke too many bits on my stove the bark will overcome the supply of combustion air and it can produce black smoke like if someone’s thrown an oily rag on the fire. I've lost the thread where someone was asking about putting big or small pieces on the fire, if they are dry it probably makes little difference but I have noticed if I put on a big lump that was too awkward to split it produces a wispy white smoke for a while, whereas adding a small cleft log while the fire is flaming doesn't. I put this down to a couple of things

That makes best sense but having said that I was presented with a Stihl 361 which went in the river whilst running. It sat in the workshop for over a year before I was asked to look at it. The flywheel key had sheared and @GardenKit did me a deal on an old stock flywheel, which I fitted and the saw was still working fine when I was retired a year or so after.

You called?

It has to cut all the way through the bark to white wood, we used a striping tool made from a hoop of bandsaw blade, one stripe up to 3" diameter and two for 6" IIRC, a chainsaw cut too deep.. It was foist on us by the toff that owned the turnery business when he cocked up the extraction, I did it for one load, ruined a pair of work boots (no steel toecaps required then) and bought a County to do all future extraction. I also started selling to an opposing turnery works just to spread the risk. I wouldn't dream of doing it with a low value product but at the time turnery paid 50% more than pulp and firewood was a very limited market.

Stripe not strike. It means the moisture can get out otherwise the wood rots inside the bark, it really applies when the wood cannot be immediately extracted. I would imagine it is unnecessary with mechanically harvested wood as the feed rollers do an adequate job.

a quick search suggests it's not actually unlawful as long as you comply with The Sludge (Use in Agriculture) Regulations 1989

When I grew up there was no recycling but most homes had fires and all the paper got used to light them, similarly there was no plastic packaging other than celophane. The only reason I don't burn much paper now is that it produces more ash, so it's more convenient to put it in the blue bin. I only lived in a house with a cess pit for two years, hoped to buy the place but it was a tied cottage. That was raw sewage that had to be tankered away, I thought a septic tank needed cleaning less frequently as it was basically only a sludge that built up over a year or so and was less environmetally unsound @eggsarascal?

The biggest single thing I don't like about my daughter's is that you need an oven glove to open the door. My Morso can be opened bare handed, it also has a bigger firebox, Mind it was double the cost of the Stockton.

I don't fully advocate this and in @Squaredy's case it would contravene the incineration directive, fair enough in a domestic stove though. The thing is we should have confidence in our refuse disposal system such that it is either incinerated cleanly in a purpose built facility or landfilled in a sealed cell which is monitored for leachate. In fact since I realised tea bags needed plastic in them to be thermally sealed I dry them and burn them or put them in the black bag rubbish. Actually for the last two months I have reverted to leaf tea. A young lady I am unduly fond of criticised me for my woolly thinking about plastics when I queried how come life forms had evolved truly amazing and complex molecules, like chlorophyll and DNA, yet had not managed to make simple polymers like PVC or polythene, could it be that they had been previously synthesised and found not to be conducive to life?

Yes, it's used as an arse covering exercise so that the grunts get the blame. Our guys got handed a multipage risk assessment which they were expected to read and comprehend while travelling to the job and had to sign that it was understood.

I've got leanings toward wanting a fairer society but as I've got older I've thought wouldn't it be much simpler if murderers were topped.