openspaceman

Ours are forever back to the main dealer to get them reprogrammed after injectors or pump changed I wish we could do simple jobs like this in house but apparently too difficult. Anyone heard of megasquirts for ford diesels??

As far as I can see they are great till the temperature outside falls below about 10C. My brother installed one in a retrofit for a block of flats and I think they calculated the surface area of the radiators too small so whilst the heat pump can produce the required heat the radiators don't dish it out. As has been said they suit underfloor systems as these have lower return temperatures, I reckon they would be good for background heat with a small stove bringing the comfort level up when the place is occupied.

Greenmech morphed from Turner

I used green sycamore and beech and have some in use for 35 years now Top one from a 1974 windblown beech Shere middle one oak bottom Sycamore IIRC from alongside Bluebell railway ~76

First is a venue management second is temps for something sounds like an escort or nursing business. Either way if you sign you've lost any rights to compensation.

I see, the flights look too tight and the metal too thin for chips, ok for pellet or grain. Similarly the round tube won't have any give for slivers, square is better. Also the hopper will need some sealing to decrease the risk of a burn back up the tube into the hopper. A virtual friend of mine, we've been in online discussion for 13 years, has produced this: And he has modified it to run on dry woodchip (gasification needs drier material in general). In Canada they have very low temperatures to contend with and in his day job he looks after a large woodchip stoker heating glasshouses and has ingenious remedies for loading poor quality, but dry chip, his is stored outside under a breathable membrane but I get the impression they have low rainfall in winter because it is too cold. As you see the wedge fits into a standard stove with a side opening door, the chimney draught then sucks in the gasification air through the venturi at the bottom of the hopper and secondary air is aspirated into the offgas stream with full combustion taking place in the wood stove.

I got mine as a 6 year old ex mod soft top V8 in 96, used it every day in a 20 mile radius from home till 2009, only bought hardtop tyres, petrol tank and a lpg conversion and crudely repaired two accidents' damage. It's not pretty. Yes it has some rust in chassis and top of bulk head but all repairable. Because I haven't used it for 4 years it has to go but I would expect it to give a fair few more years use.

I guess 30% mc wwb would be dry for this burner but as you say if it gets too wet for the burner to maintain temperature then the chip smoulders as the char burns but the offgas and moisture just pass to the heat exchanger (firetubes in my case) and clog the system. Essentially the heat is just from burning char, the remaining 50-70% of the wood energy is leaving unburnt. So systems burning moister materials usually control primary and secondary air independently, have increase insulated combustion chambers with longer flame paths and often some means of feeding heat back to the incoming material. You need to keep combustion exit temperatures up to around 800C and the indicator of that for mine is a flue gas exit temperature of 140C, keep it up to this and burn is clean. Unfortunately with 40-50% material it falls below 100 and leads to s significant blue smoke. Yes I have seen flights bent back but not on stokers, this was on a chip transfer system. Mine modulates the feed from the hopper but the stoking auger sweeps itself clean continuously to maintain a fire check. The stoking augers on mine are far more substantial, they pass long straggly bits but these usually trigger a safety hatch and cause a burn out. The problems with non homogeneous feedstocks in the combustion area , on mine at least, are uneven burning and ratholing allowing excess air through the combustion, this is what moving grates control but mines a fixed stepped grate, ideal for joinery waste. I'm used to working on austrian boilers with better engineering and design but this poor british model came at the right price and is usable. I've recently seen another offered for sale as "hardly used" which some wag on another forum suggested was an euphemism for "doesn't work".

No but mine's 150kW when burning dryish chip, falls to 40kW when it's too wet to get up to temperature.

When I read the original post I thought laying would be the best way of recovery but was unsure how box would react, personally I don't like privet hedges much but box hedges...

Actually not quite so quiet as I expected.

Chap from the dealer suggested using an inverter but the charger is rated at 330W max, and has a cooling fan to boot. Now 330W from a 12V inverter calls for 27.5A (equivalent to 6 headlights) at 100% efficient and I doubt you'll manage 80% so you will need a high current connection and keep the engine running for the 30 minutes.

This is the position I find myself in, house built 1862, solid walls, 2 up 2 down semi detached for farm workers, subsequent poor quality flat roofed extension for kitchen with bathroom over in 1959. I have 2 woodburners in the downstairs rooms but will soon be too decrepit to gather and convert the couple of m3 wood I burn in the front room. As far as I can see, subject to sorting vapour barriers correctly I can reach current building regs of 0.28Wm2/deg K with 40mm celotex on the inside of the exterior walls which means losing 40mm in width and depth. Problem is the cost of re plastering. I will do it but part L of the building regs requires this to have notification and the local building inspector is being awkward about the 50 year old extension. I can easily afford to lose 100mm on the ceiling ( not worth adding to loft as we have coombed ceilings (slope of roof forms part of the upstairs ceiling). Add £5k of double glazing and a whole house ventilation unit, job done, about £13k I guess plus redecorating. Just need to find someone to do one room at a time to avoid having to move my hoard of junk accumulated over 35 years here all at once. The thing to remember is that most/many people expect to maintain the whole house above 20C regardless of occupancy. I heat the kitchen with a radiator, the sitting room with a radiator and very occasionally a pellet stove and the front room with wood. There is a towel rail in the bathroom but other than that no heating, so my energy input is minimal even though the insulation is poor. Were I to heat it to 20C the energy required would be several times more.

Good to see some agreement here I was against deployment of more nuclear fission generators in 1972, my wife's' car still bears the sticker but its a bit scratched now, because of fears of proliferation of armaments but mostly because events had proved we had got ahead of our ability to manage the technology in the rush, just like with jet planes of the previous decade. Now I am more sanguine as we now know our growth of pollution and consumption is materially affecting the environment and climate in a way not predicted then, we thought we could depend on UK's 300 years of coal underground. It's a matter of balancing the dangers of a now better understood technology with carry on regardless expecting the atmosphere to cope with the waste from fossil fuels.

Thanks Denny, it's good to see someone who is walking the walk can see the disparity with those of us grid connected.

I think you mean kilowatt, power is energy per second, energy is measured in Joules, the amount it takes to move a force of 1 newton through a distance of 1 meter. The sums are fairly straightforward, the power available is the mass flow per second time the velocity squared all divided by 2. On the large scale with the generator optimised for these you may be able to extract 90% of the energy but you disrupt the ecology of the stream if fish cannot get pat etc. So extracting power from a low head flow differs from high head devices are essentially hydrostatic and their power derives from head time massflow times gravity. From an individual family's self sufficiency point of view using electricity just for IT, tv and lighting you could get by with very little electrical energy. Possibly 1 kWhr/day. Modern led lights now challenge fluorescent lighting and come in smaller sizes. LED, LCD screens use less energy than the old cathode ray tubes and of course laptops, PDA, Smart phones use less than desk top pcs. So if you avoid using electricity for heating, can store a couple of day's worth in a battery and have a small free running device in the stream that doesn't impede the flow or wildlife much, possibly with PV in addition then it can be done. Your true costs will likely be far higher than 12p/kWh.

ps using less is our only hope

We had two rams at the place I worked for 20 years, to pump water into the 1700 gallon loft tanks, lovely rhythmic ticking, as our were spring sourced I don't remember issues with clogging, just had to restart them after a dry period. They were abandoned after cars were burned out in the car park 1/2 mile away and contaminated the water. I never did figure out how their conversion of the flow to head worked out as a percentage of the energy available.

What is there to dispute? I didn't say low head didn't work I said that costs goes up with the mass of water that has to pass through the device(s) and to get the same power out you have to pass more water on the lower head device. Barrages do work, Rance is the example, but there are also environmental costs. The small water mills for flour and early industial use were in the orders of kW at most. The average household consumes more than one of these outputs.

I do and I don't agree with some of his conclusions but he's an eminent professor and I chopped trees for a living. I know who's the fool in not getting qualifications so now I just accept free meals from my little brother who chose an academic path and is more than averagely successful in academia. The book is a different approach and it does make one see the limits of technologies.

If you mean self sufficient at current levels of consumption then yes, probably. The delays between decision and commissioning are such that I probably won't see it, however I am in, occasional, receipt of benefits from the efforts to prolong the life and increase the (already magnificent) availability of our ageing nuclear stock.

Not if you've got a dog in the house

I suggest you read David McKay's Renewable Energy Without Hot Air. If we exclude Wales and Scotland, because they are hilly and England already receives hydro power from them, then given an area of 130,396km2 an average fall to sea of 110 metres and average rainfall of 1 metre then dividing energy by seconds in the year I make that an average power of 4.45GW, about a tenth of what we consume on a cold day. Worse this assumes you can intercept all the rainfall on its way to the sea when over half evaporates. I'm not knocking renewables but hydro power has cost limits too. It makes sense to have as high a fall as possible because the energy is related to mass time height(fall) time gravity. If you halve the fall then you have to double the mass to get the same output. It will be appreciated that a structure that intercepts twice the mass of water is going to have to be bigger, costs of "things" are roughly in proportion to their size, all other things being equal, so a MW hydropower device is going to cost more as the fall decreases.

Old pictures in that gallery, guess who's in at least 3 of them

FC have successfully prosecuted ring barking by horses as felling.