openspaceman

cryptomeria japonica

Famously the entertainer Roy Castle was devastated that he had lung cancer yet never smoked but he played in clubs and venues where he was subjected to tobacco smoke. His foundation campaigned for the smoking in public places ban which came into effect ten years after his death. Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation – The UK's only charity solely dedicated to supporting everyone affected by lung cancer ROYCASTLE.ORG Lung cancer incidence statistics WWW.CANCERRESEARCHUK.ORG The latest lung cancer incidence statistics for the UK for Health Professionals. See data for sex, age, trends over time and more. This does not yet indicate and increase in lung cancer in women of that age group

Yup

I would say there is something fundamentally wrong then, to burn wood cleanly you must have a good flame and a good draught, Yes never let it slumber as slumbering just burns char, the heat that this gives off pyrolyses the remaining wood and the offgas from this rises into the chimney unburned where it cools off and deposits soot and tars in the chimney which eventually block it, but it usually catches fire in the chimney with often damaging results.

It is a CO monitor for combustion devices because CO, carbon monoxide, is very poisonous as it combines better with blood than oxygen CO molecule is about 28 gram per mole and air is mostly nitrogen 28 and oxygen 32 so all roughly the same, as you say CO2 at 44 is heavier.

Since I realised the tea bags contained plastic not that may years ago I took to using tea infusers and still brewing in the cup as I had previously with tea bags, I suspect I use a bit more tea per cup.

There is a farm adjacent to the railway at Milford station, Surrey, blueberries in tubs are set out for the summer season and I think they overwinter them packed tight into poly tunnels.

I was thinking one of the acacias, black wattle perhaps.

I would guess the wood was smouldering with no flame and that is why smoke came out when the door was opened. Do not close a flue damper if there is one and always supply enough air so there is a bright flame, Do not attempt to keep the fire in by "slumbering" it with the vents closed. If this is not the reason and the CO alarm went off then I would suspect a leak from the flue into the room which must be rectified.

The farm I started milking on got sold off after the owner died a few years later. A private sports complex got built on some of the fields and they decided to make a running track in the oak woodland adjacent, several trees were felled and prepared for extraction then they put down the black, woven geotextile and surfaces it with 6" of woodchip from the underwood and tops. I then got the job of forwarding out the shortwood. Coming up along the track with a short rise to the car park I couldn't understand why I was slowing down yet the wheels were going round, the whole track and topping was being dragged toward me as it slid on the clay subsoil.

Which is why they can pass through a mucous membrane and into the blood

I suspect you were still in primary school at the time @Mick Dempsey

You would not have been happy watching me sequentially pull a line of dead elms into a vacant carpark with the wife's MGB then 😉, it saved a lot of effort banging wedges in.

It is an interesting question as currently I do not think they are exempted under the waste regulations. They can identify whether particulates come from combustion of biomass or hydrocarbon and differentiate them from non combustion particulates but I wonder how they allocate the various size classes, as someone said earlier in the thread it has only been fairly recently that the technology has existed for differentiating PM 2.5 from PM 10, and remember there are 64 times as many PM 2.5 per microgram as PM 10. It amuses me when I collect kids from a forest school there is always a fire pit burning with blue smoke wafting around and a long while back my particulate detector minding its own business sniffing for fugitive particulates from my stove went wild when I lit a joss stick to identify draughts. Not that I would under state the problem of particulates, products of incomplete combustion, their effects are insidious, think how long it took to link lung cancer with smouldering biomass, but it is difficult to quantify how life limiting they are, After all it is only recently the median age of death has fallen yet there is less air pollution now than in the 40s during which the current cohort of people of that age were growing up.

Yes it is the new root growth you are trying to support and the stem will put on optimum growth for support as it flexes

The spike in temperature that precipitated the combustion of the aluminium containment was due in large part to the release of Wigner energy, this was energy stored in the distortion of the graphite core and had built up from the neutron absorption to the extent it suddenly released like an earthquake does. The reason it happened was because the joint research that had discovered this was in america and their fear of the "communist" labour government resulted in them not allowing the british researchers who had returned home access to it. The core should have been heated up periodically to "anneal" the graphite back to its resting state.

That later technology is too recent for my understanding but yes the idea is you have a reaction that has a negative temperature coefficient, as the temperature goes up the neutrons that are released by the earlier fission are not moderated so continue out of the core too fast to strike another fuel molecule.

It was an air cooled graphite core, I cannot remember what the fuel rods and control were but probably uranium and boron. Because the core was just air cooled and the hot air was vented to atmosphere there was no scope for raising steam and producing power. Calder Hall was the world's first reactor to produce commercial power by steam turbines but the primary reason for building it was to produce plutonium for bombs by bombarding the aluminium cased raw materials with neutrons. It was the aluminium that burned to release radio isotopes, iodine being a prime one that contaminated dairy cows in the Wiscale disaster, not the graphite core as claimed IIRC.

Adiabatic flame temperature of wood is 1600C, allowing for excess air and 1200C is about all you can achieve, which is why charcoal was necessary for smelting iron and later coke and hydrocarbons were used for the 2000C plus.

I do have as it was my conceptual design, perfected by a colleague that supplied the first kiln to the county's biggest log supplier.

Wood will always dry down to it's equilibrium water content (below 17% wwb in England) given time and once this dry as long as it is not re wetted it will not degrade further by microbes eating it. Yes bark is largely waterproof and yest a big round log will not dry in a summer, which is why crosscut and split so you can pick them up on and end one handed they will dry in a summer if there is enough air flow. I have filled the log store I used between October and December 22 and half filled the January february one and they will dry out easily. The ash I am burning (or was as I let the stove out as it is warm) is showing at 12% on my meter and burns with a very lively flame.

I'm sorry Neil I was confusing you with @nepia. Yes the only reason the post war labour government went down the magnox route was to produce plutonium (because the air cooled core at windscale overheated due to the graphite core suddenly releasing its stress and burning the uranium being bombarded with neutrons. It is doubtful that any of these and the later Dounreay fast breeder ever covered their build and operating costs let alone their decommissioning.

Funny you should say that as I have turned my thoughts to a simple electrostatic filter that you switch on when you light the fire and it switches off when the flue temperature drops to show the fire is out. Servicing it at the chimney pot is the biggest problem plus the only firm that sells them wanted £1800 some years ago. The thing is the percentage of particulates in the air due to wood fires was bound to go up as other sources of combustion derived particulates were reduced. Think back to 1990 (if you are old enough) when straw burning filled the air with smoke in late summer, now not done, garden green waste collections have cut bonfires and then we have diesel particulate filters, adblue and catalytic converters reducing pollution from transport plus EVs becoming popular. I am adding insulation to my house, mostly because I may not be able to collect logs and when I am gone my partner definitely won't. I have left it too late really as it has been amazing how much my gas and electricity consumption has dropped.

Good post with some interesting thoughts but you don't qualify as an urban dweller. I do and have received comments from locals about how bad I am to burn wood, so I am paranoid about emitting smoke. Luckily I supply both near neighbours with illicit logs.

I don't believe so, the faster you dry the log the less dry matter is respired by bugs and the more energy is available for combustion. Wood essentially burns to carbon dioxide and water as long as the three Ts are catered for Time for the combustion to complete (in the order of a second for a flame) Turbulence to allow for better mixing to increase the chance of a fuel molecule meeting an oxygen molecule (within the time above). Temperature in the combustion zone which every molecule is subject to (in the time above) and its 850C. Plus supplying enough air to do the job (about 200% of stoichiometric for a simple stove).