openspaceman

Nope but I have made lye from filtering water through wood ash

not only heath, a lot of good market gardens have become golf courses round here, as well as the dairy farm where I started work, terrific waste of space but I'm biased as I don't play.

save your nightwater and wood ash then

It's a subject most people don't pay attention to but it's fundamental to English public areas, all land is owned and the public have rights over some of it. Landowners often try and remove this right and under current government we are about to lose access to some old paths. For the purposed of our current topic ; common land was often used by itinerant agricultural workers and families. The one where I lived had regular seasonal visits by travellers as there was a "sweet water" spring, (which has since been contaminated by invasive pond plants and general rubbish) and when they left there was no mess. The men worked on local horticultural holdings and the women sold pegs and white heather as late as the 60s. It was unlawful then to camp on the common (law of property act and local bye-laws) but they were tolerated. The common was open. Then in the 70s groups of Irish tinkers appeared en masse and made a complete mess which cost the charity who owned the land tens of thousands of pounds, so ditches where dug, changing the character of the open space. The thing is there is no point having laws if you do not intend to enforce them and the police do not wish to enforce them . The problem is this abuse then becomes an excuse to remove public rights. Common land was manorial land that either fell out of use by agriculture or was never part of an agricultural field system, over time locals made use of it for fuel, grazing or even surface mining, Over a period they gained the right to do this as the land owner had not prevented them. So this right (under the ancient laws of prescription) belonged to local householders, not Tom Dick or Harry. By victorian times these rights had become general and the open spaces act made certain of these areas open to the public. Later in 1925 commons in urban areas were also made open to the public. However certain commons should have been registered in 1965 but many councils who had inherited them failed to register them and twenty years later closed them to the public, many were subsequently developed. Yes Scotland has different laws and so does Eire but they have much lower population densities and that is reflected in being able to tolerate such things. Lest you think I have any racial bias against travellers I could post a picture of my wife's grandmother that surprised me as she appeared to be from a white middle class family , father a self made businessman and pillar of the tory council and apart from his tan and curly black hair who would have known...

Which commons would those be? Most commons with public access are are covered by the law of property act, latterly others by CRoW, both of which say ban vehicles.

Buy the bags stitched at one end and fill from the other then fold over and staple, this is what we did with charcoal.

That's a bit like saying stop all people throwing litter for a week and seeing the effect. There should be obvious seasonal differences and a cold snap should see a spike but I see no way of distinguishing that produced from a non defra approved stove or burning wet wood. Also there should be a correlation with NOx and diesel particulates and I'd like to see real time NOx figures since we have had little rain and then directly after heavy rain.

It's a good rant but please correct me if I am wrong; isn't VAT the spawn of the common market? Prior to that we had various forms of purchase tax which were far more pragmatic as they were taxed at the point of production. In a global economy that favours large multinationals it must be easier to levy a tax on a few big companies rather than having to police every small producer.

It's actually very hard to get a good handle on this and yest both the government report cited by the bbc and the stoves alliance are likely to be biased. If you want to delve deeper: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/681445/Emissions_of_air_pollutants_statistical_release_FINALv4.pdf I marvel at the claimed accuracy of the amounts of pollutants

This is mostly true but it tends to be a result of size and separation between combustion and heat exchange. A large , say 500kW(t) chip stoker will accept 30% mc wwb chip and it's flue temperature will be around 110C, so it extracts far more usable heat out of the wood chemical energy. Also heat losses decrease with the cube of the size of the device, so it's easier to keep the combustion hot. What the politicians are going for is that dry wood is an indicator of clean burning, in fact high temperature is what is necessary, probably over 800C for a couple of seconds to prevent PICs forming (and it's difficult to burn out PICS once they are beyond a flame) and in a small device with large heat losses this becomes difficult if you have to evaporate large amounts of moisture. Now I don't want to deny particulates from wood burning are bad for health and I want to see wood burned cleanly but here is a classic case of skewing statistics to make a case for causality. Some of the protagonists are young medical researchers who can see that respiratory problems are a cause of premature death, after cancer (time will tell if cancers other than lung and scrotum cancer are caused by inhaled particulates, it seems likely)and diseases linked with obesity and think eliminating inhalation of particulates will address this. Unfortunately studies in far worse polluted places than britain do not bear this out but there is a scramble for research budgets which makes it worthwhile to hype things up. Also they have a blairite politician hanging his hat on pollution being an issue. The simple fact is that most particulates in the atmosphere are from mans' activities, those from combustion are probably, almost certainly, more damaging than other types prevalent in current air, but note the dramatic decrease in pollutants in less than fifty years. So the cohort dying now are people that were exposed to much worse pollution than most born more recently. @Woodworkshas already linked to the rebuttal from the stoves alliance and their reasonable claim that stoves are a much smaller contributor than 30% with the lumped in burning of waste, bonfires and open fires making up the bulk.

You'll need to get the ticket assessed on another machine as these older winches that don't stop with a deadman control cannot be accepted for assessment.

That'll be quite old, a mk1, the mk2s have kubota engines and quite a few better features. We had five and I wouldn't say reliability was particularly poor.

I cannot be certain of cause but can see the effect. The fact that the remainder of the hawthorn hedge is fine, even though areas have died out on individual plants where the ivy was, prior to being severed, and that the part where the two plants died was completely inundated with ivy... As I said I never had the notion ivy was particularly bad, apart from making trees difficult to inspect and increasing the wintertime sail area, I valued it for the habitat it offered as well as its looks. Cattle love it too.

Was he on the corner of Shipley Bridge Lane and Antlands Lane adjacent to the motorway by any chance

Yes I overlooked ISAs, I do have a cash one which I should do something about.

It's up to you to make a decision, or perhaps a little bit of both. Savings: You save from income, if you are a tax payer you have already paid tax but you must pay tax on interest income your savings earn. You can take and spend it as you please at any time. Pension: You save from income but before it is taxed, it is likely to earn more interest, which is ploughed back into the fund, as it is invested into a spread of different investments. It's generally untouchable till you reach 55 years old, you need do nothing till 75 years old.. You can then cash in up to 25% of the pension fund and do what you like with it. You can take the rest but will have to pay interest on anything that this adds to your income over £11080. If it is a large fund you will be taxed at the higher rate if it takes your income above that threshold. You can buy an annuity with the balance of the fund but it will still be taxed if your income is over the threshold .

Yes Yes Unfortunately I was self employed but would have taken advantage if I had been employed Yes Yes plus as long as you pay national insurance you get a state pension, I benefit from this but younger people may not. Has the billiard playing accountant, Inoff, contributed to this thread? In the past the fund you saved with would insist you purchased their annuity at retirement. This is no longer the case, so with the current low interest rates if you are not offered a good deal, you do not have to crystallise the fund into a lump sum plus annuity, in fact you need do nothing with it until you are 75, up till then it does not form part of your estate so you can nominate who it should go to should you die before 75.. If you buy an annuity an peg it early then they keep the balance of your fund. Bear in mind this is a poorly paid job for workers ( I'm excluding those here that run companies) so given the tax threshold is £1180 you can take a 25% cash sum and leave the remaining pension invested till 75 but draw any interest AND/OR capital annually as long as your income (state pension plus odd jobs plus income from private pension satys below £1180 and the fun remains intact and not notice a big loss in disposable income. I'll have to let you know what happens next if I reach 75. I think I can manage okay on this but as said earlier, only because I pay no rent. Yes, in fact I run three cars and two bikes but don't do expensive hobbies. I also found cooking meals from fresh ingredients is way cheaper than the microwave meals I used to eat after work as I have time ( not that they take much more time if you have the ingredients). My biggest saving has come from joining team silky fox 15 months ago.

It doesn't increase the toque, that's dependent on the combustion but it stores inertia so carries power over, sort of smooths out the impulses.. In the old trials cars with fiddle brakes they would have a small engine with an extra flywheel bolted on just to allow it to run slowly but still able to power over obstacles. You want the very opposite in a chainsaw.

I think it was critical for me as if I had to pay a commercial rent it would be £24k a year, so while the house is worth a lot of money it's not an asset I can make use of, in the meanwhile my odd jobs pay for running cots, council tax etc. and my state pension is largely untouched. I couldn't even afford 100/week rent. My wife has retired friends who are staunch labour supporters( this area is very blue) and refused to exercise their right to buy on principal for their council house. The social housing rent, while subsidised, has increased such that they need housing benefit despite both having worked in the public sector.

No I don't think it's impossible, I do think it unlikely if the ecoplug is used at the correct rate for the ivy stem and well above the buttresses. Without going into ecopolitics of whether the ivy should be removed I have seen innumerable efforts to remove heavy ivy growth from mature stems, mostly oaks and there is often significant damage done to the bark of the host tree. The ecoplug will kill the ivy with no physical damage to the tree. Yes I've heard this and always assumed it to be trans-located through root grafts, I'd like to see a bit more of experiments on this. BTW I made the mistake of allowing a handsome fan of ivy to grow up the wall of my 1862 built cottage for 20 years before I realised the damage it was doing to the mortar. I control the ivy now but the dead tentacles are still a visible reminder of my mistake on the brickwork. Similarly I abandoned a small greenhouse which became covered in ivy, I quite like ivy to look at with its berries etc., and migrated into my hawthorn hedge which dates back to before the house was built. Again after 20 years and my retirement I decided to reclaim the garden but the hedge was so heavily entwined with ivy I found it had killed two hawthorns by smothering them completely. I now have large bare areas in the hedge which I am trying to layer hawthorn from adjacent plants into plus I have planted a couple of hollies I found growing elsewhere..

Given that I think ecoplugs are an expensive form of litter I'd hesitate to recommend their use but...

An old schoolmate brought his 026 over saying the starter had jammed. he brings it to me about once a year and in between cuts about 4m3 firewood and occasionally uses it at his work as a roofer, I doubt he puts 10l through it a year so it's generally in good nick. A fin had broken off and become jammed in the inductive pick up. There was no damage on the oustide of the broken fin indicating it had beed striking anything. There was also no sign of anything being poked through the cooling slots norany reason to suggest the starter cover had been removed. I had to slack off the coil and readjust it, put it together and it ran fine. There was no chance it was over revving as the air filter was so dirty it only managed 9k rpm but once cleaned it was 12500 rpm on Hi idle. A quick sharpen and it cut through my little pile of the beginnings of next year's firewood fine.

I failed on three points then

I'm guessing that's ammonia based??. If so it will react with aluminium but probably not as bad as caustic soda based oven cleaner. I'm intrigued with that carbon remover though. Mice chewing into the oil tanks has been a problem for me as I have used OSR for 25 years, more recently I store stuff with mineral oil in the tanks. The only other problem I have had is with fine sawdust and OSR combined drying on the fins, potentially a cause of overheating and seizing. I didn't risk oven cleaner in case it damaged the cylinder so made do with a wire brush and careful use of a dremel.A bit of maintenance with an air gun should prevent this getting serious.

Trouble is they then eat through any plastic parts looking for more.