openspaceman

Can you get a year's logs in it? To my mind this looks a very good use of solar energy to season wood. Would it be worth erecting one of these on piers to increase capacity or would the wind loading be too great? How many years use out of the covering? Can you reckon a cost per M3 of solid wood seasoned? The thing about seasoning a luxury good like firewood logs is the increased value can easily exceed the change in fuel value. On the industrial scale the plant design allows for clean burning and the energy cost of venting steam up the chimney is a small proportion of the whole. As far as I can see there is little incentive to supply dry woodchip to the big users, who pay about £30/tonne as long as the wood is <45%mc wwb. So little incentive to dry this now. When NFFOs were first announced a large wood burning power station did commission a gas oil powered converted grain dryer because the premium on electricity generated from wood was great and gasoil relatively cheap. How much it's worth spending per M3 solid wood for a luxury market is the interesting question. At the small scale the polytunnel looks appealing, get larger and the logistics all change. The physics stays the same though and the simple fact is 0.7kWh of energy leaves the system with every kg of moisture that leaves the logs. If you want big scale then you need an accelerated process to get the water out and match your throughput. A big business wants to keep output up to meet demand whatever the vagaries of the weather for drying. At this end of the business we decided the capital cost of the containment meant the drying cycle had to be less than 24 hours, the only quick way of meeting this was high temperatures because the limit wasn't the ability to move the water vapour away from the logs but the rate of migration of the moisture from the logs and the ability to deliver the necessary energy into the log. Having a client that was adept with the grant system was the crux.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise, consider a car engine, it works at near a perfect mix of fuel and air but there are only milliseconds to complete the combustion. As there is not quite perfect consumption the hot gases ( about 500C) travel on to the catalytic converter. Now as I said previously the catalyst just seems to lower the threshold at which a chemical reaction takes place. So any surviving oxygen molecules and any remaining part burned fuel can have a second chance to meet on the catalyst and combine. Of courser then their energy is given up as heat in the catalytic converter. A couple of points here, if one cylinder misfires persistently then all its fuel and oxygen end up burning in the cat, which will get very hot. The other is that prior to cats being mandatory lean burn petrol engines were being developed, these were challenging diesel engines for economy. However a catalytic converter would be receiving far too much oxygen to fuel gases from a lean burn and hence legislation made put paid to their development. Running on from this you'll begin to see that fuels burn in fixed ratios of fuel to air, e.g. one carbon atom requires 1 oxygen molecule (this is two oxygen atoms) but because air consists of 21% oxygen and 78% Nitrogen you have to supply 5 times more volume of air to get the right amount of oxygen. The correct ratio of fuel to air is known as the stoichiometric ratio. This stoichiometric mix is what is needed for a car engine. Wood is more difficult to burn but we have much more space and time to complete the combustion, we don't want smoke ( which is products of incomplete combustion) so we increase the opportunity for an oxygen molecule meeting a fuel molecule. We do this by adding excess air and maximising the three Ts, retention Time for the reactions to complete in the burner, Turbulence to increase mixing and the chances of an oxygen molecule to meet the fuel and Temperature to provide the energy to dissociate the molecules and facilitate complete combustion.

If by burn you mean a fast oxidising process giving off heat then there are many instances of this where there is no flame. A flame is an area of combining gases and from that one can deduce that most flames from a woodfire will be secondary combustion. So yes if you allow fuel gases out of the stove/fire and up the flue then they can burn on top of the chimney pot when they meet air. The conditions would have to be right though and this means either some sort of flame holding or temperatures above the auto ignition point. I posted a little while back about a blue flame on the pot from CO being produced in a chimney fire. In the absence of high temperature or flame holding, then you need something to drop the temperature threshold at which the reaction can take place (actually you can add a support fuel but that;s even more wasteful). This is what a catalyst does. Thermal oxidisers for reducing organic smells from factories or waste treatment facilities seem to be surface effect combustion using catalysts. I think the videos show a rather simple effect, the before smoke is black, implying lack of air in the fire, the simple solution is to add more secondary air at the stove. I cannot see further oxidation taking place above the stack without it getting very hot and this would imply a colossal waste of fuel. The other thing is the device is shown above a chimney pot that already has some sort of air entry at its base. If this device does do any good it's to do with controlling draught rather than any combustion effect. The smoke indications are fairly simple: If you see white smoke it's small droplets of condensed vapour, mostly water but if the fire is hot but smouldering then some pyrolysis products as well. As it turns yellowish then you are getting pyrolysis products probably with some Products of Incomplete Combustion. Brown to black and you are sending lots of PICs up the flue because the hot fire is pyrolysing the wood and the products for this are starting to burn in a secondary flame but are starved of air. Looking at the flame it will be purpley near the tip and tailing off into black. As the air conditions get better the sooty PICs decline but are still emitted as a blue haze. Even with a good air supply it's difficult to do better than this with wet wood and natural draught because the flame is being quenched before it can complete. No smoke indicates good combustion temperatures but not necessarilly complete combustion as a lot of CO may still be present. I see there has been another death from CO poisoning from a barbecue left near a tent door which shows how insidious CO poisoning can be. The dangers from burning charcoal are exacerbated because all the normal warnings from woodsmoke, the acrid smell, are missing.

What worries me about these, compared with asulam (which I thought some consortium had got a special licence for continuing special use) is that the bruising will be done in the nesting season, their site shows heather and the three main indicator species are all ground or near ground nesting. Mind when we were motor manual harvesting just the rolling of car tyres favoured grass over bracken for the season. I once attended a lecture by a bracken "expert" he reckoned he had sample plots that had been cut for 18 years and still bracken persisted.

No but most treated softwood is done badly. The stake fails and gets abandoned or worse burned. At least chestnut degrades gracefully. Old chestnit fencing is also good firewodd as though it dries slowly it resists re wetting, so the above ground bit remains dry. I'm burning some old pales at home now. Surprising for a May bank holiday. I reiterate charring is likely to reduce the life of the stake.

Heath and the populations it supports is globally rare, as are bluebell woods, just a band in northern Europe. Would it? In SE England it would be predominantly pine for centuries and this is a species that hardly was planted before the Jacobite era. It had been displaced by broadleaves a few thousand years before. Different species and that's what biodiversity is all about.

Whilst it's true char is recalcitrant and resists rotting, and that's why it is a good candidate for reverting atmospheric CO2, it is also porous and shrinks tangentially and radially by over 10%, depending on heat and species, this means fresh wood is exposed to microbes via cracks.

With or without butt plate? Would a loan suit?

Given the same ply rating I think radials beat crossplies for most things, like economy and grip There is one advantage of crossplies and that is they withstand sidewall damage better.

Wendy house?

I made a cheap one that differed slightly from this in that I used a ford coundty wheel with a bush in the middle. A length of car exhaust wass free to slide in this and air from an old cylinder vacuum blew down into a hole created by boring with a saw. As it burned the pipe fell to the soil beneath. Trouble was it took quite a while to burn and stump gobblers were readilly available by 1984. Also fires in general were frowned upon by then. The big dead pine stump it was most successful on gave the householder a fright as we left it running overnight and he was awakened about 4:00 by the noise of a roaring jet and an orange glow filling his room. There was a long flame from the flue ( I had no termination on it and the plastic hose attached to the exhaust pipe was reduced tothe helical wire reinforcement) by the time we turned in to work the stump was gone, even tunneled out some laterals. The soil had turned from grey bagshot sand to red which I guess was the iron in the soil changing valecy.

I had much the same, long time back as we move to this house in 1979. I was cosy in front of the open fire with the latest of several scotch in my hand thinking the fire was drawing well. A passing motorist came to the door to show me the blue flame. This is a difusion flame from carbon gasifying in the flue, once it gets hot enough any CO produced lowere down is reduced by hot char to CO, and then combining with air at the chimney. There used to be a good display of this as you entered Swansea via Jersey Marine, the carbon black company had a pure CO flare which you could see at night. Anyway I was too merry to do much, little chance of blocking the throat, so I called the fire service. They pushed a spray head up on ordinary chimney/drain rods trailing a garden hose which was supplied by a stirrup pump in a bucket of water. Little drama or mess. The chief danger is from the flue being damaged, ultimately making the chimney unstable but more insidiously allowing combustion products through cracks into a room upstairs, not applicable then as it was a bungalow.

Mine was a Danarm DDA110, though branded british they looked the same as Pioneers from Canada, just painted yellow instead of blue. Bit of a pig up a tree. Moved on to a new Husqvarna 280cd then for daily running 162s and 240s and ended up with 262s with 268, 272, 288, 2100, 084 as occasional saws in between.

It shouldn't be possible nowadays as winches have to fail safe. Boughton stopped producing a direct drive one in the 80s. Both the incidents I mentioned were before 1986 and involved tractors from the 50s or possibly earlier. It's still a hazardous trade though.

Not to mention drivers' lemonade bottles

I agree And that started a major firewood business Same as most hardwood and a bit less than most conifer weight for weight Matches burn mostly the wax they are dipped in, poplar (aspen) probably chosen for strength:weight ratio and non splintering

When you strain a wire rope it deforms by elongating and squeezing its core, this is energy stored and it is not much IMO. It must give this energy up as unwinding and heat in the core. Older wire ropes used in trawlers were apparently more springy and hence caused much damage when they let go. Breaking wire rope whilst skidding is unspectacular but if it lets go when winching a tree it can be spectacular because the energy is stored in the bowing of the stem. It follows that the danger is in the bit that breaks attached to the tree rather than the winch but in my minds eye I don't recall an incident of this. I was never on site when serious accidents happened and there were only two with guys I worked with because their firms hauled timber for us, both with fordsons and cooks or boughton winches which worked directly off the PTO controlled by the foot clutch, essentially no dead man's handle as required now. I think the spades lost anchor in both incidents. In one the driver got off and the tractor winched its way up the beech stem to the attachment and broke, writing off the tractor. In the other I never found the detail, even though we all met up in the pub on a Friday evening it became taboo because the driver was killed when the tractor crushed him. After that I think only the owner of the firm drove that tractor. When you strain a chain it's stored as deformation of the link, as chains have more shock absorbing capability than wire rope it stores more energy, as it gives up this deformation I suspect it all ends up as movement at the broken bit. Nylon strops are the worst because they store lots of energy as they deform and if they are attached to something that can break off they catapult that broken bit with all the energy. This is why using KERR to debog a vehicle can be dangerous. Polyester strops have little shock absorbing and hence break suddenly without releasing much energy. All above my comment and opinion and open to disagreement.

I'm 3 times your age and a dropout from UCW Swansea, been happy with forestry contracting for the first 20 years but fairly deperate for the last 15, now desk bound. My advice is get the qualification. Plenty of time to change direction after. Cardiff engineering dept was big in biomass combustion, biomass to energy is part of treework. We partnered them in an interesting project to run a gas turbine, it worked but they got all the dosh and nothing left to commercialise it.

I would expect the bigger danger to be from any elastic energy built up in what the choker is attached to. The choker will have a proof load which is about half the expected breaking strain. The choker proof load should exceed the winch bare drum pull. Good 7mm choker chain has a breaking strain of ~6tonnes. Yes we frequently winched trees of all sizes over before 360 excavators became common.

Still have that number in my 'phone. I didn't realise he was hauling again.

I araldited a 135 4 cylinder that had frost damaged at one of the pedestals that the clamp for the injector bore on, 1972 and it was still ok when it got exported to Pakistan some years later. Subsequently I used a local metal stitcher on a Holder gearbox, in those days (1986ish) he charged £10/inch of crack. I see there are several firms offering the service via google. The technique is to clean the crack and pull it together, or indeed insert a new piece. Then a series of pairs of holes are drilled either side of the crack, with a slot machined between them. Into this a tapered dumbbell link of nickel is hammered, these progressively bridge the crak. To make it leak proof overlapping screws are threaded into the line of the crack and sealed in with loctite.

I sent a PM! We found the trouble with the Ryetec was it got so heavy on the back wheels the frequent long trips off the heath made significant ruts. Not to mention the heaps of cuttings dumped under trees.

I doubt you are alone from the trucks I see. In fact I am astounded people I deal with don't attract more attention.

Pine trees off sandy heaths seem to collect sand in their bark, you'll notice the spark as you cut through in dull light, converslly cut smooth barked species like hornbeam or beech coppice on wealden soils and even cutting a bit of clay inclusion doesn't dul, them much.

Watch the line wrap: Planning Portal - Approved Document J First make sure that your local BCO ( or private one such as: Assent Building Control Ltd) will assess the installation for that price, it normally needs to be bundled in with other work to be economic. Schemes like corgi and hetas, whilst being apparently laudable have ended up like the old restrictive practices of guilds. Nominet seems to work the same way, they make it too expensive to register other than through a member and members get a huge discount. They give a commercial advantage in that the fitter can self certify his work. It becomes a form of pyramid where the installer has to have periodic inspections by a verifier and they all have to have a minimum number of installations and attend annual seminars at large expense to maintain their credentials.