openspaceman

My Massi verynears were issued to my morcycling mate in the mid fifties, for measuring the diameter of polythene fuel tube as it fell from the die, the diameter varied by the height it fell into a bucket of water to cool it, one of his jobs was to set the height of the water. He passed them to me when he retired over 40 years ago. I don't have a 3d printer but the idea of printing obsolete parts like this is fantastic, will it be strong as original?

I love it, of course with double drum winches on the A55 you could pull with one up to the butt plate and then lift with the other. I wonder if a pedestrian version could handle a decent sized log?

I don't know, Lamberhurst Equipment used to be good for them.

Shame as I got one going for a friend to use on a job which didn't come off. Yes, if you inadvertently turn forward down hill the centre of gravity moves downhill too and as there is more weight at the front it moves forward too, so the back uphill wheel loses weight. In the worst case the CoG moves downhill of the line between the front and back wheels and can turn over. In practice i is not a problem because you can normally avoid such a turn with a bit of shunting. The only time I had a near accident was when I had a load behind that pushed the back round .

We don't have very steep ground in Surrey but I used my two A55 Holders for early thinnings and loved them but be aware a rigid machine with 4 wheel steering is more stable on a slope. The one I had hydratongs on was particularly useful for bunching up loads before the long haul out but in those days we had premium markets for Post, Stake and Rail material and I think this PSR market has gone so thinning for chip or pulp wouldn't pay for these small trees. Having said that it would pull .5m3 poles if necessary. Though you risked breaking an ankle if you had both difflocks in it would waddle out of soft ground. Where are you?

...and that's because they often served a purpose here as a long lived boundary marker.

Yes, on a personal domestic level the battery made all the difference as we no longer bought electricity in the evenings for nearly 8 months of the year. That was two years ago and since then there have been significant changes, the first one being the costs have dropped, such that for £2000/kW I got a full battery and PV kit at my daughter's which is outperforming my 12 year old system by 50% though it is about the same size at 6kW rooftop PV. She is too cautious to try the best tariffs available but even so she only pays 11p/kWh for all her electricity for the EV and home, even if you allow an 85% battery loss and ~7P/kWh amortising the battery that is 30% below current prices. If she were a little more daring she could buy cheaper as EV owners are being touted by special deals which make it better to buy cheap offpeak and sell back at double for the PV generated during the day. Some people gaming the system are ending up with free electricity and an income from the electricity provider. The economics favouring batteries and solar PV seem to be because we pay more for our electricity than other countries.

I have no empirical proof and it's not something easily checked with a moisture meter as mine maxes out above 30% and it doesn't exactly match with figures from oven drying but we do know that in winter sap has to become more concentrated (hence less water) to resist freezing and rupturing living cells. I do have a memory of a piece of pine heartwood having a surprisingly low moisture content when cut in winter. As to ash the only figure I can find that I measured green was 34%mc wwb, oak and birch cut at the same time were 44%. One thing I have been seeing this year which intrigues me is the long dead, large, standing oak I am burning now. It had lost all bark and sapwood, the heartwood is riddled with worm holes, is producing less than half the amount of ash I get from freshly felled hardwoods I otherwise burn. This makes me think that mineral salts in the sap which normally end up as ash have leached out. Also the flames are very short and red/blue which is what I expect if the volatile solids have gone. Oak never has a lively flame like freshly felled then dried birch.

The type of inverter will influence whether a battery is the best course (it normally is). Also your electricity tariff and whether you have an EV makes a difference.

No way

Her site is good but for a quick look at a glance I prefer https://energynumbers.info/gbgrid

Yes and big investors don't want to deal with lots of roofs, it's a bit like forestry where small woods are unattractive for harvesting machines. In principle I agree roofs first especially on new builds.

We are such a long way off having enough renewables that it is hard to see what might happen, I think we will depend on imports of LNG for a long while. Currently we rely on gas because it can load follow when wind and solar cannot provide. From a personal level I can manage without grid electricity for 8 months of the year,I need to import about 1MWh from mid November to March, just with solar PV and it has been fairly consistent for 12 years. In summer I export more than 1MWh so I am a net exporter. I would bet that if the money paid out bailing out electricity companies and consumers had been invested in rooftop solar PV and domestic storage the energy crisis would have been a mere blip, plus we might have doubled our PV production. I am off grid now because my supplier is running a saving session 17:30 to 18:30 as wind has fallen to 8GW and gas is nearly maxed out at 24GW. My daughter is exporting 2.5kW from her battery ( for a reward of ~£5) but I cannot do that. Imagine if 25% of households could do this. I heat by wood which makes a big difference for me because my house is poorly insulated but even here the technology exists to make electricity in a micro chp generator which would guarantee I would never need grid electricity, except the technology never got developed for domestic use.

Which is a problem about 10 days a year around now, as I said we are burning coal and gas today as well as the Drax pellets. Drax burns 7.5 million tonnes of dry pellets a year, I think our total harvest of wood is only 13 million tonnes of green wood. We lost production from 3 nuclear power stations since Xmas which exacerbated the problem. A lot more foreign owned wind turbines are coming online this year to add to the french government owned nuclear power stations. I wonder how French prices for electricity compare with ours? Yes storage is a bottleneck to more renewables as are new electricity grid lines

This is a lesser worry for me as shipping is so efficient per tonne mile and I don't think UK could supply the demand, let alone manufactur the pellets. Drax is a coal fired design and pellets can be crushed and blown in in much the same way coal was, so it re uses the power station which otherwise would be demolished. Radcliff is the only other coal fired power station, running flat out atm but that will be gone next year. The thing is the 3GW Drax produces becomes insignificant (although currently essentail) in the face of 20GW of wind and 6GW of solar PV for most of the year. It is the current hungry gap that is the problem where we are dependent on 25GW of gas. We have imported the vast bulk of our wood since before Nelson's time which was fine when we could rip off our colonies and therein lies the problem of why our leaders' business culture has never managed to adapt to the competitive world we live in. Re wilding is becoming a worry, it all seems to be grant dependent, and it detracts from food as well as timber production. It looks like the latest problems with pesticides for break crops will lead to farmers accepting public money to not plant 30% of arable which would previously been down to wheat the next year. We already import over 50% of our food and a lot of that is wheat. With the war in Ukraine, a big wheat producer, disrupting exports we will be buying it from the global market and affecting the supply to poorer countries.

Yes I think that is done with purpose built masonry stoves but impractical in my case as there is always some air passage open to my stove and even if I could plug the top of the chimney there would be an increased risk from carbon monoxide. Here is a picture from the same spot in the morning, before the fire is lit and some 8 hours since the stove was left to go out.

American homes tend to be much bigger than UK and the masonry stove is built in to a central position, we couldn't afford the loss of space. Old houses, like mine do have substantial brick chimney breasts. I have said a number of times about my cement lined chimney retaining heat which keeps the two reception rooms above 18C even with the fire not being kept in between 23:00 and 07:30. It also keeps the bedroom above warm (as well as the loft). Picture of the chimney in the above bedroom with the solid uninsulated wall to the far left and outside temperature -3C.

Have a search on masonry stoves which are becoming popular in north America and Canada. Same principle in that you load them with dry wood and burn fast and clean but without the ceramic tiles. The flue takes a torturous path through the substantial brickwork which allows the bricks to absorb all the heat and then deliver it into the room over several hours, and at end of burn the air inlet is sealed so air cannot carry the heat out of the chimney. Soapstone is also used instead of tiles as you get into asia as this can stand the heat without cracking.

Would you expand on that? My inference is that you required an owner to replant, which was done, and hence there was no need to take the matter further.

As I said at the beginning it's a challenge which I just have a go at when I have some spare time between all the other retirement projects I have started and may not finish. When I took the saw repair on I expected it to be just a matter of adjusting the Hi and Lo screws. As to buying another saw, I have plenty which I will never wear out.

I was wrong, main jet pushed out and it has a functioning check valve. I'll reassemble the carb and try again but this time I'll clamp the tube to the purge bulb.

So right

Your earning to expenses ratio is too low

That's my thought too, IF the logs have been dried to below 20%mc wwb they won't sprout mould and inside the garage they will gradually reach an equilibrium with the Rh of the air in the garage. In most of UK this will be below 17% . In the SE logs in my open sided store go down to below this, much at 15% now (air dried over one summer) You only need airflow around the logs if they are damper than the equilibrium mc of the garage.

My £10/month smarty sim is 60GB ( goes down to 30GB after 6 months) on the 3 network . I can use it on my PC by making my samsung tablet a hotspot in an upstairs window and with a usb wifi dongle in the pc. For some reason I cannot get it working with the purpose made router with its external antenna.