openspaceman

A late friend used to reuse old tubes and for those where the cable tie had pulled through he would simultaneously pierce a new pair of holes and feed the cable tie through with a tool he called a McCloud, named after the guy who thought it up. I made one from the small diameter aluminium tube from of a TV aerial, one angled cut to produce a sharp end and bent to curve back out as it produced the second hole, cable tie then passed into the sharp end fully and the tool withdrawn , leaving the tie in place.

A long time ago I decided I would use a secondhand tracked dumper if the firm did it again.

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Yes Sir

That's right, one of the frst jobs I had in forestry was pruning the first lift to 8ft on poplars and removing spiral guards planted under the Briant and May match scheme, new planting had stopped by then but as the cost of this first pruning was sort of 98% tax relieved EFG pursued it. No further work was done and I saw many of the ones visible from the road buldozed and burned about 20 years after. Yes knotty poplar is pretty worthless because the whole point was that poplar could be sliced green with no wastage. A local market garden where my mother worked in the war years planted poplars for punnet making to package their vegetables. Unfortunately we went down the route of plastic packaging, which was more attractive to large scale capital investment, so they never got used as intended and were felled when a racing car manufacturer took over the site, the coppice regrowth is still to be seen. Yes it is the wax that keeps the flame going but the reason for using poplar for this was as above but also that it doesn't splinter.Similarly for its use as wagon flooring. The one and only wood drying kiln we built was used for drying 2" boards of poplar that had failed to reach the grade, these were then cross cut, split and packaged in cardboard boxes, covered with polythene and sold in Sainsburys.

Reminds me of me in my last job, rug being pulled from under my feet regularly.

?

I Have no experience but it seems a likely candidate, bacterial canker.

Not pinnate then and definitely cherry family. Not as I have seen silver leaf which is where the leaf surface has sort of de-laminated to give a silver sheen to the surface

25 years ago I was trying to get to grips with new fangled common knowledge crane controls on a forwarder working a clear fell for open cast working of old mines. My mentor said he watched as the top layers of soil were carefully removed and as they got to old galleries the surface opened up like a zip to reveal trains of old coal wagons still sitting on tracks.

They are pinnate leaves but holed, so a leaf eating bug is having a go. No idea on tree identity.

It is a the result of a woodpecker boring in after grubs, the eggs would have been laid, probably by a moth, when the wood was already under stress.

Same experience here and unless you have the old fashioned solid brass pins on the plug you will find it gets very hot above 10A.

a sort of love/hate

Can you weigh a fresh one?

Light pollution here is already so bad I can barely make out the Plough or Orion.

I need to revise that figure as I just measured my log store at 3.4m by 1.6m by 1.6m so 8.7m3 of carefully stacked wood, allowing 30% air space that is 6m3 of solid wood. With an average basic density (hardwood which is the bulk) of 400kg dry wood per m3 that makes it that I burn it to produce 12,000kWh of heat, that is a bit much for a small house but it leaks heat. It would cost me £1750 extra to do it with gas.

I would doubt that. True most green wood hovers around 1m3 to the tonne but cut and split, then jumbled into a 1000 litre container there will be 50% air space which will only weigh about 700 grams.

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I wasn't aware of that, I did read some of the book, mainly about DDT and dieldrin. I was planning a different career path, so took little notice of trees, but was aware of the disease from seeing the trees dying as I drove west through Wiltshire in 1969, by !972 it was over with virtually all mature elms dead. Later we were still felling them in 76, I felt very guilty about felling one that was in rude health, it was isolated and on RAF Kenley. At the time we were told the runway was unused, so guess where we parked the lorry? On the second day and as we arrived to start work a plane landed.

Which is much what I said, there is a big difference between air and seawater. All transmission lines can be modeled as a pair of wires with resistors and inductors along each wire and capacitors between them in a ladder like formation, with AC there is always reactive power involved and that causes increased I2R losses. HVDC only suffers resistance losses but the cost of the equipment for inverting HVDC to HVAC is much greater and was near enough impossible when the grid was built from 1931 onward. Transformers for stepping up and down AC were well understood (as were the losses). It's 55 years since I studied transmission lines and that was mostly to do with high frequency signals transmission. It's a strange thing but before the gas and electricity grids homes had to manage their own energy requirements, with the economies of scale of fossil fueled generation we became dependent on pipes and cables across the country and into our homes. Now with the advent of cheap PV panels and lithium phosphate batteries a high degree of independence is possible.

Good on Pete, I suppose I fit into that age class but half a day wears me out, I find the main problem is keeping the heart rate below 160, but then I was always nerdy rather than athletic.

"Long undersea or underground high-voltage cables have a high electrical capacitance compared with overhead transmission lines since the live conductors within the cable are surrounded by a relatively thin layer of insulation (the dielectric), and a metal sheath. The geometry is that of a long coaxial capacitor. The total capacitance increases with the length of the cable. This capacitance is in a parallel circuit with the load. Where alternating current is used for cable transmission, additional current must flow in the cable to charge this cable capacitance. This extra current flow causes added energy loss via dissipation of heat in the conductors of the cable, raising its temperature. Additional energy losses also occur as a result of dielectric losses in the cable insulation. For a sufficiently long AC cable, the entire current-carrying ability of the conductor would be needed to supply the charging current alone. This cable capacitance issue limits the length and power-carrying ability of AC power cables" Donald G. Fink, H. Wayne Beatty, Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers 11th Edition, McGraw Hill, 1978, ISBN 0-07-020974-X, pages 15-57 and 15-58 via wikipedia

The under sea ones are all HVDC because the capacitance of the water would increase losses for AC. The buzzing from HVAC is worse in wet weather and represents transmission losses. I think AC is cheaper overland up to1000km but because of planning concerns there will be undersea cables to avoid some overland connections from the north.

The beetles carry the fungus, the females lay eggs under the bark and the larva eat their way out, so the phloem layer has to be thick enough. Once hatched out the beetles then eat the leaf stalks and this infects a new part of the elm. The presence of the fungus triggers a response from the tree to block the fungus spreading, If the infection is present throughout the annual ring this response prevents sap flowing, hence the parts of the tree upstream wilt and die.