openspaceman

I've got the Mk 1 from 76

I wouldn't expect any to survive oxidation in the fire. I also wouldn't advise anyone to be in the back of an enclosed truck with laurel foliage being chipped into it, though I have heard no incidents of poisoning from it. Crushed laurel was used by entomologist to kill insects in jars.

I cannot remember but probably one of Oliver Rackams books

Yes this is the hydraulic motor running a cage which clamps down between the wheels, never seen it but the big drawback with mine is the tyres being marked not suitable for highway use. The original timberliner from the 80s was pto drive to a driven bogey, a lorry drum brake varied the drive ( as a clutch) which the driver modulated from the cab, largely to prevent the trailer jackknifing the outfit. It was quite impressive and with a big tractor was more capable then a lot of forwarders available at the time ( which tended to be ~150hp). It lacked all the other attributes a purpose built machine has over an agri based outfit and was heavy.

Or was it that generally animals were not allowed to graze in churchyards, were often herded rather than folded or enclosed, and yew is poisonous. Yew woods were the province of the monarch even though by tudor times most bow wood was imported.

Yes and this retting step was similar to how linen fibres were extracted from flax ( frown for seed aka linseed).

For England I thought the low point was after the iron age and pre roman occupation. One of the attractions of south britain was that it was good arable land for export of ceral crops to replace land over cropped and ruined in North Africa.

What sort of cement boards are they? May be best painted and left in place.

One would need to define "better" there is little doubt in my mind that a polytunnel with mesh sides that can be rolled up, as used for lambing sheds is very energy efficient in making use of the solar drying by radiant heat and ambient air. During the summer it will dry split logs in a few weeks if the airflow through the stack is homogeneous. As I said drying logs to their fibre saturation point can be quick given the right conditions and poking in enough energy. Delivering energy is the key because you always need 0.7kWhr of heat to turn a kilo of water in wood to vapour to be carried away from the surface and in practice you have to be very good to do this with 50% efficiency. Cash flow and profit may dictate something else, consider a large commercial log producer selling into retail stores in bags with a sophisticated production site. He buys in suitable firewood at between £30-40, splits and packs it for £10 and gets £750 for it when the retail chain wants it. He can process fast enough to match demand but that's only really between November and January. Does he process an average amount throughout the year and store material in a large shed or is it worth going "just in time" using casual labour, lots of energy and no cash flow problem.

You are changing tack too quickly for me. The dehumidifier may not be a bad option and any extra heat will benefit but as I said currently you are wasting a lot of energy through the container walls. I'd go for insulation and keep it dry. Solar passive is great but should be a separate box on the side and configured not to lose heat at night. For the small extra electricity cost active solar with using a black cloth absorber is likely worthwhile, probably better suited to cold dry climates than UK. Unlike drying planks you don't have problems with checks and splits but you tend to have greater cross sections and there in is the limiting factor. The 19 gram piece of ash I took and hung in this study this morning has already lost 4 grams because it has a large surface area to lose moisture from and a small distance for the moisture to migrate through. As a log gets bigger this ratio gets worse and drying slows down. The only thing that speeds it up is temperature. So you have a complicate equation to work out, firstly to supply enough energy to evaporate the total amount of water you need to remove per hour, then the necessary airflow to carry this water away, and the power to drive it and then the amount of log surface area you present to the airflow. The more logs you have to blow through the higher the back pressure and more electricity used. This tends to mean that fan electricty is the highest cost as low grade heat is cheap, which is why the Border Biofuels chip dryer ran air at about 40C, it was designed to use waste engine heat. I've got a feeling its not worth blowing air less than ~25C and you get much more useful work at higher temperatures, so insulation is a must. The dehumidifier has the great advantage that the latent heat of evaporation isn't lost to the outside air as is with a through flow dryer but I'd like to know the inlet temperature and outlet temperature plus water condensed to see how efficient it was.

OK this is getting too far off topic, I'm happy to take this to a more suitable forum or e-mail but I will comment: Yes it does increase the price of electricity and yes it was a huge incentive which did not take account of the changing costs of solar PV but the cost of failing to have enough installed PV would have been of a similar magnitude. Not having sustainable energy is rapidly becoming a non option especially since pan european public opinion has changed post Fukishima. There is no way the wealthy are willing to have a fairer tax system which is why we are seeing the demise of the NHS. We are governed by wealthy people who believe in the market economy and no limits to growth. Economies depend on success not also rans or lame ducks because capitalism mimics darwinism. Society tries to keep it within bounds. Wealthy people also avoid tax better than most. I've snipped the rest of your post which contains some misconceptions but is too far off topic for here. Have you read Mckay's book "sustainable Energy Without Hot air" it's a no cost download , some very heavy going but well worth trying to understand, I admit much of the maths was beyond me, especially the stuff about flight.

Not at all, though I would be interested in an experiment on the equilibrium moisture content of a 23% mc wwb log in a shed on a rainy cold february. You haven't really given enough details of what cost benefit you are aiming for. Usually the only benefit of drying is to meet a standard or charge a premium. If the latter then you have to cost the operation to see what the premium is. In general firewood is a luxury good and the price paid has little relation to to its competitiveness with other available fuels. Having a product that is easy to light, has a lively smokeless flame and doesn't pollute may justify the cost and secure the premium. On the other hand a large industrial consumer will stomach the ~10% flue losses of burning green whole tree woodchip because the double handling alone doesn't justify a drying stage and he's only paying £25/tonne delivered. Having said that early in one of the NFFO rounds one biomass burning power station ran a big grain dryer with and extra oil burner to get the wood dry enough to cofire with coal because the subsidy was so high.

I cannot help but we had one as a loader tractor on the second dairy farm I was employed, strange thing with a hand clutch and a foot clutch. Anyway I think it was the same engine as the 4 cylinder MF 35 before they changed to the much better 3cylinder perkins.

That's quite a high starting point for ash, it's notoriously difficult to give a general rule for a species moisture content and it can vary between parts of the tree. Anyway to get where you want from 38% to 23% from an initial tonne you need to lose about 200 litres of water. There's still not enough details but a couple of points, the recirculating air affects how saturated it becomes. Theoretically you maximise use of fan power when the air leaving the wood is saturated. At saturation air holds different amounts of water according to its temperature and it isn't linear. Without going into detail if you draw a graph of absolute humidity verses temperature at saturation you will see there is a point around 25C where the moisture carrying capacity starts kicking off. Below this and you have to pay to circulate a lot of air for no great drying effect. A chap posting here on another forum gave some useful figures which illustrate this: http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/milling-forum/38987-kilning-theory-discussion.html#post610301 And this sort of chart contains a lot of useful information if you take the time to figure it out. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/PsychrometricChart-SeaLevel-SI.jpg From this you can see that it your container is uninsulated in a british winter the ~ 20 degree difference is losing you a lot of heat. This has a knock on affect on your dehumidifier, which is really just a heat pump that recovers latent heat from the circulating vapour and dumps it back into the container but the container loses most of this recycled heat because it isn't insulated... Aloso then consider the COP of the heat pump and compare the cost of electricity to drive it with heat from other sources.

I haven't followed RHI recently but as originally proposed the installation will need to be independently assessed and this will include appropriateness. Then the feed in tariff will be paid for so many hours at one rate and the rest at a lower rate, for a maximum of ~1300 hours. If you consider the cost of the equipment, which unlike solar PV is unlikely to fall substantially, and the fact it will have to be new, from a recognised manufacturer and fitted by a certified person there is no great incentive. It has however made secondhand chip stoking boilers rather cheap.

Are you talking about the Renewable Heat Incentive Feed in Tariffs? These will be paid from the exchequer. It's the solar PV and wind generated electricity that are paid from a pool collected by Distribution Network Operators via the Climate Change levy on all fossil generated electricity. No point ranting about it because the over generous incentive was necessary to attract installation of solar pv (in particular) in order to avoid an EU fine for failing to meet our renewable obligation, the fine would have exceeded the cost. As it is it attracted carpet baggers and the government over reacted and cut it off too sharply. We pay for the government so it's a bit semantic.

Might be cheaper to use a 12 tonne digger to hook them out of the ground in a day and windrow them, then pass over with a plaisance mulcher, UK prices about £1200 plus diesel and machinery movement.

So the fan is just recirculating the air within the container? The dehumidifier then cooling the recirculated air to below its dew point and you are collecting the water? How much water are you collecting? The industrial drier we built removed 8 tonne of water from 18 tonne of fresh (60%mc wwb) 50mm boards/day What size and weight, what species? I reckon on as much as 300kg of fresh oak in a 0.7m3 builder's bag so in round figures that would be about 5.5 tonnes of wood with fresh oak or beech, will contain a bit under 2.5 tonnes of water and you need to dry it to 4.25 to average 30% mc wwb, i.e. your dehumidifier needs to dump just under 1250 litres of water.

Homewood have a website, they make in chestnut paling but their cutters will have other sizes. Homewood Fencing I haven't worked with Tony for 15 years or more and I last saw him at the Bentley woodfair, Allan Lang Forestry was at Liphook but he may well be retired, my first harvesting job was on one of his sites. I meant they all specialise in chestnut coppice in one way or another.

Tony Tyrell, Alan Lang or Steve Homewood are all around Haslemere and in the chestnut coppice line

I've not seen a Dunsley Neutraliser but thought it was a simple device that worked on the hot water density of the hottest supply rising. In effect it is a mini accumulator and as long as each heat source has a dedicated pump they can share the same accumulator. I have to be a bit circumspect here as I'm used to commercial sealed systems not pumped vented systems.

It's easier to maintain stratification of hot water sitting above cold water when the return circulation is cold. So an underfloor system that injects and mixes 85C water from the top of the tank to ~35C and then circulates this through the floor loops until it is cooled to ~25C, when in equilibrium, is returning much colder water to the bottom than a traditional radiator system that circulates water at 85 and returns it at 75C. I can't see what difference a specific boiler would make. An advantage of underfloor is that as the weather warms up the temperature difference between room and floor slab decreases so the slab looses less heat and this in turn reduces demand on the heat input. The other big advantage is the room feels warm at a lower temperature because most people are subjectively more comfortable if their feet are warmer than their heads. It's also less clutter on the walls. Underfloor is almost "de rigeur" with ground source heat pump and solar themal systems because they work best when the difference between hot side and cool side is least. Disadvantage is builders and plumbers don't like/understand it and it is best suited to buildings in 24/7 occupation because of the long time constant of heating the slab.

Yes returning cold water to a solid fuel heater is bad, not only because the cold metal quenches the flame but also because it causes acid condensate in the flue, this can eat through stainless because stainless depends on a chrome oxide layer to protect the iron underneath. It's normal to provide back end protection ( just like the thermostat opening on a car) at 60C. Most plumbers will be used to condensing natural gas boilers and look to getting a return at <56C to maximise vapour condensation, this is bad for wood burners ( makes no difference to coke burners as there is no water to condense). This is particularly a problem with underfloor systems which return at low temperatures. The other thing to look at is how the thermal store is filled, it needs to be from top down, which demands a pump rather than thermosyphon.

Traditionally it was used for dairy utensils and treen as it didn't taint the milk/food but inox must have put paid to that, It was also used for brush heads and paint brushes along with birch and alder. My brother made his kitchen with sycamore and very nice it looked too. It's a wood that needs careful seasoning, traditionally standing upright and being very careful to brush loose sawdust off to avoid stain. In larger sizes it was used along with other whitewoods like beech and sometimes lime for furniture framing. Nidd Valley Sawmills were the last big buyers I sold to but I suspect transport was relatively cheaper then. Joinery grade stuff was valuable and even veneered, post war sycamore was the wood panelling in British rail carriages, you might not believe it because it had turned a deep mahogany colour in 30 years. Of course the highest grade was rippled (aka fiddleback) sycamore and the use is obvious. I felled for a veneer buyer and I well remember his disappointment in finding the trees weren't rippled, it turned him into a vandal.

Treequip has answered this, the only realistic option is to fit a tacho, it's not too onerous as long as you remember to switch it to break when you are working on other things and don't drive more than 4 hours on a journey. I tend to forget on the rare occasions I do have a vehicle with one as I mostly drive a small van. You might enjoy the 100km radius exemption for forestry if you haul your logs directly from a woodland which is in your occupation. I expect the majority of people delivering logs in vehicles over 3.5 tonnes combination weight do so without tachos just as many arborists have a burn pile at their yards...