openspaceman

Very wise and a requirement under building regs for a new installation. After all these years my battery powered one is time expired so I could do with a recommendation for a modern one. Anyway it must be better to avoid the risk of CO buildup rather than wait for an alarm.

Apart from chimney fires this is the real danger of soot and tar restricting the flue. You will notice if the room fills up with smoke because the acrid smell may wake you up but if you have just the char embers burning in the reduced oxygen of the firebox then it's carbon monoxide that seeps into the room, odourless. I have a picture somewhere of a gas termination cowl almost completely blocked by soot where a pellet boiler had been fitted. For this reason alone it's good practice to sweep the chimney, although I tend to do mine every 2 years as I need to take the Jotul out of its alcove. I'd brefer to do as Fred Dibnah and sweep from the top... What one needs to consider is that wood burns as offgas, from pyrolysis products, and char. The offgas can only burn as a flame (by definition) and it's over 50% of the calorific value of the wood, so a smouldering fire is wasting half the energy in the wood as well as depositing PICs, CO, methane and other polutants into the atmosphere. It's burning char that powers the process.

The Goodyear gasification one near Birmingham failed. One of the problems was dealing with the solidified black goo when the process stopped unexpectedly. It's licence was very limited and possibly only used for Goodyear tyres. Cement manufacturers are allowed to burn tyre derived fuels (tyres have a higher calorific value than coal pound for pound) but even they are limited to what % they may use.

Because of the difficulty in relighting it was a punishment to put someone's fire out. Again in order to keep some embers for the morning the night watchman would call out to couvre feu (curfew) to remind people to gather embers up and cover with an upturned pot. I'm also of the burn fast and hot persuasion as leaving a smouldering log is inefficient and polluting.

It isn't biting yet in Sussex, they pay cash up to £100, if it's more weight they do two transactions just to avoid their paperwork. I've used two local places and they were both the same. It's a problem in that I would prefer a BACS transaction and to issue a proper VAT receipt as I have to account for the scrap.

Poplars were planted as setts, short lengths with a bud put in a dibbed hole and backfilled with sand.

Why did Greenmech stop producing the larger jack leg model? Also whilst the quadchip takes square blades why not the 1928?

What's to look out for on one? They still have manual gear change over the torque converter don't they. I'm seriously looking at one festering in a wood but don't know what it will take to get it accepted by clients, lack of provable conformity made my 1164 unacceptable to all but small landowners.

Played with one for a day in 2000, my mate had it leased from FC and I wanted to see what common knowledge controls were all about, being used to 6 levers on the Counties. I cannot remember much about it except the lack of "seat of your pants" feel and that we went where no county would dare to go. It was a clear fell for some opencast mining and apparently not unusual to fall down an old shaft.

I wonder how it could be excluded if all the heat involved ended up being consumed in a bona fide consumer's premises. Just consider how we use heat, we burn dry logs at temperatures of 1100C and use it to heat a space at 25C. There's lots of scope for doing something in between these temperatures. When we built out frst dryer we looked to green house heating to take the waste heat but found no takers. I don't even know if the tomato growing enterprise which used the waste heat from a whiskey distillery is still in operation. I still think a farmhouse with a large heat load could be heated by a drying business but in our case we needed to dump some 6MWh of heat for each 18 tonne batch dried from 60% to 25%

My mate fitted a german shredder at an IKEA store, it took whole pallets, had tungsten carbide teeth and a magnetic separator on the outfeed. It wasn't big and it cost all of your budget. I should still have the service manual for it on cd.

Yes I saw that on BBC news, I'd still like to complete the circuit though, but not in bad light or bad weather.

Nor me but I'd take a punt at it too if it were closer. Mind it would be a good excuse to finish the walk to Helvellyn, which I abandoned at Hole-in-the-wall with my 11 year old granddaughter due to poor weather 7 years ago.

Sorted now, I shortened the fuel pipe, as I think it was sucking air, and bent the fuel chamber valve actuating fork up a bit so it opened the valve a bit earlier.

I've just put the recoil spring in and tried to start it. Sparks good and it fires on petroil syringed into the carb but nought otherwise. I,ve got the carb off but in doing so I notice that the reed plate doesn't have retaining screws, should it? Or is it just held by the carb screws?

Nice area, I'm waiting to hear if I have a job helping felling some limes there, I'll be looking for a B&B recommendation. I like that idea too, I don't like dismantling these little saws and I thought you needed to take off both side covers to get at the exhaust.

What a bother! when I had similar issues with the contacts shorting on the dip switch on an old escort I simply wired a switch on the dash for the lights as the indicator-light switch cluster was so expensive.

It's haynes 4292 and it says it covers the ci engine as well, best be careful about using oil burner term it seems to be misunderstood,. It was a fast, effortless limo and I'm gutted the engine became uneconomic at below 100k, what was it about these later Rover si engines that became so problemsome?

Sounds like a dickie indicator/flasher stalk. I've just scrapped my 75 auto V6 (camshaft oil seal went at 98k and the cost of belts and gaskets was more than the car was worth though it was a lovely car) so I have the Haynes book if you are interested, you pay postage.

He can come and split some of my mate's waste, pick and chose what he wants and run it over a weighbridge for 20% of that price.

Yes, IIRC the sawdust went in at about 12% and came out at 10 and quite hot. Pellet making 10 years ago was a bit of a black art, I've not had any experience since. If you leave a bag of pellets open in a cold damp place they revert to sawdust so the fact that it's still a pellet is a good indication it's dry. There were some small scale pellet producers who used modified versions of the old Lister cuber. These were ok pelleting grain and dried grass with a bit of molasses for a binder but didn't reach the pressures the big machines could. To make sawdust pellets they used a binder made from a waste from the paper making industry, something like calcium lignosulphonate which glued the particles rather than depend on hydrogen bonding in the high pressure system, this did increase the ash content.

Yes the rule of thumb was that the biggest particle going into the die mustn't exceed 40% of the die diameter. Hammer mills and dryers use a lot of expensive power but it's the capital cost of the equipment that seemed to be the biggest part of the running cost (where the sawdust was essentially free).

This depends on the relative humidity of the air and the temperature, genrally when it's cold and damp there's not much capacity for more water vapour in the air, so unless you have a cheap way of blowing a howling gale through the pile you need to add some heat. The polytunnel will still have solar gain in the winter but in a battle of fan power verses cheap heat the heat wins in this climate.

Too true, I think the Sprout Matador ones which were installed in Bridgend (refurbished) needed a new substation even though they were nominally 300hp and 5 tonne/hour. The thing is you are essentially reducing the volume of a lump of wood to 1/3 of its original size by squeezing all the air spaces out and crushing the fibres, try doing that in a vice. They need to run fairly continuously to get a consistent product and all the pellets have to be expelled at the end of the run or they dry solid in the die, that gave a guy a few days work with a drill afterwards.

In which case I have a seized 288 which is otherwise in fair nick if you want to look at it I can dig it out.