openspaceman

So if you remove the bark and slabwood and burn them you can keep the cant for milling off site?

The orange looks like it may be a lichen, if so it is harmless. More significant is the basal damage which looks like a strimmer has frapped it.

Marcus, Marcus quite contrary how does your garden grow?

904

Definitely, when I only had one saw I would take a sharp axe too in case I got stuck but later I would always take two just in case something went wrong.

Not for me but then I went off Fleetwood Mac after Peter left too.

So does the house temperature drop too far overnight? Back to your original post you want the fire to stay in overnight, I don't think that is worthwhile with wood for a number of reasons but in my case the chimney breast retains enough heat even when the fire goes out, to keep the house warm enough to get up and do chores as the stove is relit. On the narrow boat it was very necessary to keep the fire in all the time and that was done with smokeless coal. As @neiln says the carbon in these smokeless coals can be from the coke left over from cracking petroleum nowadays. It is still a fossil fuel and puts the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere as anthracite but so what? I burn wood purely because it is cheaper for me to do so. If you want to burn smokeless briquettes then fit the right grate or drill more holes in yours. I could explain the reason why you need under grate air but it would wear my two fingers out more. It should be in full view now for a number of reasons if you have the ready cash for PV but not for heat.

It was softer music before Gilmour

You'll lose your mind and play...

Not at all unusual, I grew up in a new build (1953) 4 bed detached with single glazed, Crittal windows, 2" cavity, no loft inulation till I helped my dad put 2" rolls of fibreglass in about 6 years later, I have disliked handling the stuff ever since. and the only heating was a rayburn with one radiator and an open fire in the lounge. Average house temperature in winter other than the lounge or kitchen was about 13C and my sister and I would scratch pictures in the ice formed on the windows from our breathing. There was only one house in the street with central heating and that was coal fired, even though that house had town gas piped in.

TEGS designed for the job, rather than Peltier coolers pinched for things like stope top fans, will work up to 300C because they are joined with a harder solder. Petier devices can be used as TEGS but tend to be made with softer solder that melts at around 200C. Peltier coolers are available at nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than proper TEGS. It's a compromise whether one should go with a much larger array of Peltier coolers and arrange for the same heat flux to go through a lower delta T (say 200 through to 40C) or stump up for a smaller number of higher temperature TEGs and a smaller surface area with the heat flux fro 300 down to maybe 70C and heat water for traditional DHW or radiators. I don't understand the science enough really. What I would like to see is a stove manufacturer to design a wood burner incorporating a Stirling genset, like the free piston Microgen one British Gas were trialing. I think this was developed originally by Sunpower to sit at the focus of a parabolic mirror. Harwell actually had a long life Stirling which was further developed for powering light buoys, which had no sliding surfaces, using a diaphragm instead of a piston, One apparently ran for nearly three years with only re-gassing (helium) required every 6 months, it converted 10% of the heat flux to electricity so again the stove wouldn't give out heat directly but a traditional wet system could circulate hot water from it. It hummed rather loudly.

I wish, I have tried to raise discussion on this in another thread; AFAICS at best a TEG converts 4% of the heat flux through it to electricity. A 5kW (t) woodburner will keep my house warm down to nought C outside, despite having solid walls. The stove goes out about midnight but the warmth stays in the house till morning when it is re-lit, I have not seen internal temperatures fall to below 13C. 4% of 5kW is 200W(e) but all the 3800W of heat has passed through the TEG and that extra surface area has to be cooled (preferably to below 50C as the maximum temperature a semiconductor designed for the job will stand, cheaper ones designed for cooling tend to be a bit lower. 200W for 16 hours is 3.2kWh, not to be sneezed at but probably still a few kWh I need to make up for lack of sun in midwinter. My issue is that I would need a dedicated TEG woodburner and for safety of the semiconductors it would probably need to be water cooled. Your thought are welcome.

It actually says "easy cleaning by chimney sweep" which isn't quite the same thing. I'm not knocking the idea but it's just too expensive for me. Yes 30W is a small amount but 80% of the time I don't buy electricity and the months when I use a woodburner tend to be when I am short of electricity by about 200W so it becomes significant to me.

I know what you mean but given a bit of time VID-20220407-WA0000.mp4 I felt like that 50s song "High Hopes" when I started but it only put 2.3 machine hours on the clock. There looks like scope to get this type of grinder 100mm narrower to get it through a narrow door.

Doesn't it cost £2k, need annual servicing and constantly consume 30 Watt though? I'd love one but don't want to be like Rod Hull and getting people in negates the benefit of free heat from wood.

Yes I'm not advocating using a piston if the skirt is worn. When I get around to stripping my 262 I will measure the piston and post pictures on here. I'm hoping the piston will not be badly worn.

Congratulations

I've never had that but I have had a 026, IIRC, where the skirt was worn so thin it was a sharp edge. If the saw is just old and worn putting a ring on the old piston restores a lot of compression. I have two Husky 262s which were the last saws I bought new when I was contracting in about 1995 and they are both sound except they have poor compression, I have every intention of just replacing the rings. This is why I suggest putting an old ring in the bore and pushing it square with the piston, then checking the ring gap. The rings wear much worse than the nikasil bore which hardly shows any wear at all when you measure the ring at various depths of the bore.

https://www.lsengineers.co.uk/piston-assembly-50mm-dia-for-stihl-038-chainsaws-replaces-1119-030-2001.html NON genuine Says it is out of stock but not that it is unavailable

That's my thoughts too. Diesel and petrol are ideal fuels to collect tax on because there are so few refineries to deal with. Also gas oil is less likely to be used in domestic premises compared with kerosene and few modern engines will run well on kerosene.

If there are really no other options I'd try it. The problem is the piston skirts wear front and back, also if the piston has seized the lands that the rings sit in may be bad. The land needs to be clean for the gases to push the ring against them and seal. In the old days when car engines lasted about 50k miles there were firms that recovered then from slapping by putting an expander inside them and spreading the skirt front to back, they would also turn them on a lathe and knurl the bottoms to bring the hatchings proud and in spec again, never heard it done for 2T pistons.

I have an earlier version of that that I dug up ages ago. It needs a new handle and pivot bolt as the current one is too worn for the gripper to operate, I have never used it. It strikes me it depends on stapling the wire hard onto the post and I prefer to run the wire back on itself and running through the staple.

I have never seen brown coal briquettes but brown coal is generally just one step on from peat and not a smokeless fuel. I think germany burns a lot in power stations.

My first point is although the heat in the flue gas is wasted heat in that it doesn't get into the room it is necessary waste heat because it give the flue gas buoyancy to rise on up out of the chimney and it also prevents any condensation of the vapours on the chimney walls. My take is the problem boiler stoves have in meeting pollution standards is that the water cools combustion and quenches flames before they are full burned out whereas chip stokers and advanced gasifier boilers heat the water after secondary combustion has fully completed.

Will you be able to explain how the 600 metre range can be had?