openspaceman

My bad I thought you were in the area when the firm diversified into chippers.

My LR cost £1200 but I was asking if you remembered the name of Lucy's chippers

That's not the name of the conversion I remember. A firm called arboreater (I think @Mick Dempsey may remember better) equipped some small chippers about 15 years ago and it seemed such a good idea but never took off. The thing is that a cylinder of propane weighs a lot more than a tank of the same calories of petrol. Also back then the only economic size to buy was 47kg ( or a liquid draw off tank to fuel a hot air balloon, thius being the cheapest propane I'm told). Otherwise you can fill a portable tank at an autogas pump for just under 70p/litre. Thereby lies a problem, a litre of lpg only contains 70% of the calories of petrol whereas a kilo of lpg contains more calories than a kilo of petrol. Once you draw off more than a few kW of power the propane freezes in the tank, this is why propane converted cars have a liquid draw off which is then vapourised by the coolant. So a 13hp air cooled engine may draw a bit much, I wonder if an exhaust heated vaporiser exists. There are advantages in that the oil will stay golden, I ran a V8 LR 110 for nealy two decades on LPG and only changed the oil at 20k mile intervals and it was still gold. A chap on a forum I belonged to sent his oil to be analysed and it was in spec at 25k miles but the detergent level had dropped and it was a bit more acid. The thing I never got round to doing was increasing the compression ratio, thermal conversion efficiency is directly proportional to compression ratio and as lpg has a high octane equivalent it should pay to up the compression ratio. What you are looking at is what I would like to do at home but running on natural gas and a small water cooled Honda 420cc lawnmower engine

Yup, once it's in the grid there's no telling where the elctrons are from. So @aesmiththe plant you saw was an electrolysis plant? We were supposed to have 3 new nuclear fission plants, Hinckley, Sizewell and one other run by EDF but built and funded by China but there are delays and cost overruns. The idea was these would at over 6GW 24/7 capacity and hence be able to supply a lot of spare electricity off peak in addition to the non scheduled renewables.

I agree; cars are so integrated in their systems that even a minor fault can make them uneconomic to repair, with leasing you essentially spread the risk of a catastrophic failure early in a vehicle's life. It will be interesting to see how EVs devalue, I can see the first generation, like Leafs and Zoes falling fast because their range is half a current generation one . After that my guess is they will drop slowly for 6 or 7 years and then crash as battery capacity falls. Loss of tax revenue will be an issue that the government will wish to address so the cost of electricity will go up alongside some form of road/mileage toll. As to shortages of lithium, didn't I used to pump it into pins and bearings on a total loss basis each day? Also how come disposable vaping devices contain 1 Amp Hour cells if the stuff is scarce?

Strange I wonder if different browsers render the image flipped, the cherry is bottom right in my view

You do lead an interesting life Stuart

Neil seeing himself out with the inspiration for my monicker

My mistake, sorry.

Well sort of, it started out as just pyrolysis of coal with coke being exported to steel mills and such but at the end was a sophisticated two stage swing gasification conversion of nearly all the input coal to gas. The contamination of the town gas sites was a different matter and I suspect was mostly down to poor disposal of the chemicals derived from the gas scrubbers. Indeed the gas was poisonous and often used in suicides, stuff your head in the oven. Often with further consequences when someone entered the house and switched on a light. My father refused to have gas laid to his new build house in 1953 and told the story of a family gassed to death in the home town of Plymouth when rats chewed through the lead gas pipe. He relented in 1969 when north sea gas arrived. Not really pointless as it reduces the CO2 emitted whilst keeping the calorific value up, as @Woodworks says it uses existing infrastructure. I wonder if the reason they only replace 20% is to do with the hydrogen having a higher flame speed, it will certainly find leaks more easily and will diffuse through steel pipes over time. I had thought it was more likely that methane would be synthesised and added to natural gas so this is news to me. Not disagreeing with either point but my house is a 1862 build cottage with solid walls, a combed roof and solid floor so other than the double glazing not much I can easily do without changing the character. Mind a 4kW modern woodburner and 100W electric fan is managing all the space heating so far this winter, getting through the wood though.

Why should the water be dusty? One thing I know about fuel cells is that the hydrogen and oxygen has to be pure as the cells don't last if contaminated and that's one thing that worries me, their life. My LA has had a fuel cell at the leisure centre pool since before 2002, it provides 250kW of heat and 200kW of electricity to run the place with excess electricity exported to the LA owned dubious enterprise's private grid. The hydrogen is all reformed from natural gas and I think this is likely for most hydrogen projects currently.

We always used to have a blend of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and nitrogen before 1967

You are a man of few words @donnk, best wishes to you and a peaceful and content new year to arbtalk. There is more granularity in the Green Energy tariff in that it has two standard day times with a cost of 12p/kWh, a "penalty" tariff between 4pm and 7 pm weekdays of 25p/kWh and an offpeak rate of 5p/kWh between 11pm and 6am, with a peak lopping battery to avoid the penalty and charging that an an EV during the low rate it could work as long as the amortisation of the battery per kWh and the losses incurred during the charge discharge process work, especially as the battery capacity changes over time. The octopus tariff works slightly differently during the offpeak as it is a variable rate, so on a windy night the price drops, indeed the surplus has been so great that consumers have been paid a small amount to absorb the excess. I'm not sure if a smart charger can yet access the supplier to figure when the cheapest rate is offered and guaranteeing a full charge. I think the 14000 charge discharge cycle is theoretical and predicted if using an ideal battery management system. My daughter's Kona is leased by her employer and she enjoys a bigger tax break than if it was an IC engined car, but she would normally have had a car at 2/3 the cost. It will be interesting to see the offer price in 4 years, I bought my current fiesta after her lease at half its new cost with some 80k miles on it, I passed on the Qashqai she used for the last 4 years.. I calculated her electricity cost per mile would fall below 2p if she moved to a cheap tariff like octopus though she can often charge for free.

This battery stuff is very interesting, I would never have thought Lithium ion batteries could be so good after my first experience with laptops 30ish years ago when they were poor after a year. Now I'm sold on EVs after my daughter got her Kona, and even let me drive it! The battery is warranted to still have 80% capacity after 7 years, if it were a smaller car I would buy it off her leasing company after her 4 years are up if I am still able to drive then ;-). Some sites I've googled even suggest with proper battery management (liquid cooling) and limiting charging between the bottom limit and 80% some 14000 cycles will be possible, that's getting on for 40 years of daily cycling. Mind I would be aiming to do the opposite from you, buying cheap off peak electricity for the car (Octopus half hourly tariff) and a CHP unit to heat the home and charge the car in winter.

I ran a V8 on LPG for about 100k miles without any signs of valve seat recession, similarly the MGB I have driven for 47 years has spent most of its life on unleaded with no sign of valve stem clearances closing. Mind I don't thrash it.

I wonder how that will impact the car's battery warranty??

I'd do the same Anyway haven't recent studies abroad come out against tubes as an aid to establishment? Locally we no longer have the rabbit problem we did in the 60s and 70s and the stalkers seem to control Roe.

Isn't it possible to retrofit an electric lighter and a timer? They're fairly basic and if the stove has an induced draught fan wouldn't need their own? Then the stove could be cleaned out and loaded up at the same time. It's not a job I did on the two I dealt with (a Kob cordwood gasifier and a Kunzel logwood gasifier running on oak offcuts from a timber framer) as the boss came down from Scotland once a year to service those but on the big Talbot and Kobs I always intended to use the electric drill but sweated it out and did it by hand instead, about an hour on the 1MW and 500kW Kob at Milton Keynes IKEA. I don't disagree with the rest of your post, especially about the installers, we had one who cost the council that installed one of the Kob 500KW over £300k by poor specifying and workmanship plus fiddling with the ignition sequence, it was decommissioned and sold for £8k at 4 years old, when the site was redeveloped. The big problems were where biomass burners had been dictated from above and the people on site hated them, where people had wanted them (this all being prior to grants) we had few problems other than routine maintenance.

I was assuming he meant it was tripping a RCD that had to be reset each time. What I was thinking was the switch on current was inducing a spike in a floating earth conductor.

Is the drill earthed or is it double insulated? Are you using an extension? Does it act the same whether the drill lead is coiled or stretched out?

This is basically so for a domestic fire unless you cause a lot of smoke. Commercial premises, including a workshop used for your business at your home is different and if burning waste (engine oil for example) you will need a permit. untreated wood arising from your working still is waste and requires an exemption from EA. Burning just about any other waste (cardboard for instance) commercially comes under the waste incineration directive and you don't want the expense of running an incinerator.

They can take action for emitting " dark smoke" even if not in a smoke control area or using an exempt wood burner. I can see them not wanting to tackle the issue though as there is a caravan/mobile home park near me that regularly has bonfires containing tyres and plastics. Environmental health at the LA is more likely to do something than the EA who are scared to take on anything that might have legal costs.

I agree, if you don't feed them they have nothing to use against you. As long as you don't produce smoke and only burn wood (which is best achieved by only burning dry wood with a hot flaming firebox and not trying to burn overnight) you are not doing anything wrong, the environment agency position statement on virgin wood is that it is outside the waste regulations even though it may be waste under their definition. To get anywhere they would have to take enforcement action so don't give them ammunition.

Back in the early days of biomass power generation under NFFO Mike Edwards had a contract to chip tops from FC's own harvesting around Thetford and run the chip into power stations. He used Fastracs when I was lecturing to wayleave officers up there. Later when I was machine driving for another firm the owner told me he had lost a big court case over using agricultural registered tractors to haul the woodchip. My then boss said Mike told him it was the best thing that happened to him as it caused him to move to lorries on DERV which were much lower overall cost per tonne delivered. The conversation came about because I asked about a machine sat rusting at the bottom of the yard, it was a scandinavian terrain chip harvester that had come from the thetford operation, the drum chipper was flat belt driven from the engine!

Have you tried weighing each blade and then repositioning them? They would normally go on as matched sets and the manual give minimum diameter and weight blades can be sharpened to. Fitting disc blades which are only slightly undersized caused slivers and chute jamming plus me to fall out with a dealer in North Wales.