openspaceman

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.

Why should there be? Most of them will be specified for G30W30 and the power stations were accepting 45%mc. Mind on the installations I worked on which were supposed to burn G30W30 I never measured a sample drier than 40%. The thing to remember that it's not dryness that decides how clean wood burns its the combination of the time the wood and offgases have to reside in the fire, the turbulence that causes mixing of the gases and the temperature the various species of chemical produced in reactions are subject to. A big installation can satisfy all these ans still burn wet wood, a small domestic stove cannot.

I find with my Morso that if the door catch is not pushed in firmly it sucks air past the door seal which makes the fire run away. With the modern stoves there is an air inlet above the firebed which is permanently open, this is so there is always enough secondary air to burn any offgas from the fire in a clean flame. In older stoves you could choke off all the air and the heat in the firebed would pyrolyse any remaining logs, the offgas then condensing as tarry soot on the glass and chimney.

I see the Lucas mill I did some help with is listed at Petersfield. Run by Frank Spooner and Tom Hartley, good lads but I've not seen them working.

Syngas doesn't form at less than 800C and then it will be too contaminated with other products to be syngas with wood as a rawstock. The portmanteau word comes from synthesis gas which was fairly pure H2 and CO used to form other more useful organic chemicals, like petrol, from coal. Below about 330C the whole thing is endothermic and the early products are highly oxygenated so no good as a fuel, You have to be up in the 300-440 range for pyrolysis to be self sustaining and give an offgas which will support combustion, in the absence of a support fuel. You can use the exhaust from a spark ignition engine to pyrolyse wood but then it is difficult to keep a flare (necessary for controlling smoke and pollution) We heated wood in the output of a vegetable oil gasifier and fed the offgas to a small gas turbine but only ran it briefly, long enough to produce nice logwood charcoal though. Ideally we would have liked to heat the wood with the turbine exhaust and then dry the wood downstream from that.

This is the main point and why most firewood is hardwood. In point of fact softwood has more energy per kilo than hardwood at the same moisture content. It has a higher initial moisture content than most hardwoods and tends to be 30% more bulky. I burn whatever comes out of the woodshed as it comes out. I fill it with what I bring home in the back of the vitara off jobs whether hard or soft but tend to not bother with willow or poplar because they take up too much space.

it's been nigh on fifty years since I did any courses on electrical engineering but it depends what type of generation you are meaning, as I said the average losses between generator and consumer are 7+%. Most coal fired station back then were high temperature steam turbines and managed a bit less than 40% but the generators had low operating and maintenance costs. Some standby plants were diesel and had better thermal conversion efficiency but high O&M costs, then there were peaking plants which cost a fortune to run, often open cycle gas turbines based on early jet engines, at a time when the consumer paid 7p/kWh these cost about 50p/kWh to run. When the internal fire museum acquired one of these after 30 years in service, from Princetown IIRC, it had only a few hundred hours on the clock. Nowadays the best combined cycle gas turbine sets, which supply the bulk of our fossil fueled power manage just short of 60% thermal conversion efficiency. We still get about 15% of our power from our nuclear power (plus quite a lot we import from France which is mostly nuclear powered) and these have a lower thermal conversion efficiency than coal fired as the boilers are run more conservatively . That's a marketing thing, power generators pay way less for gas then we do and most of their costs are in sales and distribution. I currently pay about a quarter of the price of a kWh of electricity for my gas but they do different jobs.

It's a simple economic proposition, if the dried wood attains a higher price in the market place than the cost of the drying, the heat source is immaterial. Anyway the waste from a logging operation probably amounts to over 5% of the raw material so burning it for a kiln makes sense. Actually about 15 years ago a government agency was burning gasoil to dry wood for Tilbury power station in order to get renewable Obligation Certificates and that was naughty. I wonder how much sawnwood kilning requires in the scheme of things, obviously I think it should be done with sawmill waste. It's a bit of a no brainer but there's good reason to use waste wood at the point of production in any case where its heat can be used. I agree with the first part and think I can answer the second; power loss in the grid and distribution runs at about 7.7% but this shouldn't impact any consumer as the voltage will be maintained at the substation, any circuits further from the substation will tap the transformer at a higher voltage to make up for losses.

I'd need to see some figures for particulates per MJ of heat at various power settings released before I'd accept there were benefits in wood this dry. From what I remember wood at 12% mc wwb can be burned the cleanest but it's not BATNEEC

I'm sure it is and equally sure it stems from use of high moisture content wood and the habit of turning down the fire to "keep it in".

Firstly I am a fan of using the natural drying processes, especially making use of the greenhouse effect of a transparent kiln but I did conceptualise a high temperature kiln which we built for a supplier of firewood. I still think this is a way forward but making more use of waste heat. Not necessarily, and as has been pointed out we use little coal for electricity. the effluent from a coal plant can be cleaned and because it is running constantly the thermal conversion efficiency is optimised. When the electricity is used to charge a battery and then discharged to drive a car's motor I guess the conversion from power station to wheel is around 70% and is fairly constant. Whereas a IC engined car is operating at lower efficiency overall unless at constant speed.

I was thinking more of IBC crates or potato boxes, I have no experience myself as I cut split and stack mine by hand for my own use and seem to have no problem getting them dry enough in a summer season. When I sold logs 30 years ago they were nowhere near 20% but then it was common to see a wisp of blue smoke from chimneys, a lot has changed in pollution awareness since.