Billhook

As my father used to say “. ‘tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good “ and the Lockdowns were painful but at least they made me look for something to do so the Lockdown Splitter and a good heap of split Ash and Sycamore are drying nicely in the old grain store. The great thing about wood is that the work has been done and you can really enjoy the heat without having to keep monitoring dials and thermostats

So I just thought I would try and work out the cost of heating our house with natural gas per hour. Simple I thought, just read the meter. My meter is relatively modern and measures in M3 or cubic meters. Some people will have to do another conversion if their box still measures in cubic feet. Even the meter box is not that clear! You wonder at first whether the red numbers are units or fractions of units and why the number in the right hand box is shown in a bigger red box So I ran our Saunier condensing boiler for seven hours. It is linked to the wood boiler via a Dunsley Neutraliser so that when the wood fire dies down over night the gas automatically cuts in. Therefore the house is already warm and all the gas boiler has to do is maintain the temperature. So they really make it easy to calculate the cost of heating your home per hour or per unit In our case the unit is in M3 or cubic metres and that is shown in the first five numbers on the dial You then have to know the calorific value of the gas which can be anywhere between 37 and 40 but which should be shown on the bill Multiply that number say it is 38 by one M3 So 38 X 1.02264. = 38.86 Divide by 3.6 = 10.79 X price per Kw say 10.3 pence ( should be on bill). =111.18p per unit plus 5% VAT = 5.56p Total 116.7 pence per cubic metre or unit So we used 6.5 units on Monday night which I calculate cost £7.58 or a fraction over a pound an hour if we ran it for seven hours. it seems to me in conclusion that the suppliers of gas try to hide the running costs by making the calculation so difficult, just pay your bill and be thankful that you have any gas at all! We have not used our gas for some time but I just thought I would try the boiler to make sure it still works and also give me more incentive to keep on with the wood! And it certainly has as we are still on a fixed tariff till next year when the price may be goodness knows where!

I don't know what Fleetwood has been taking, but he looks as though he is on another planet!

I think that people underestimate the Winter conditions in the UK. By saying that we do not know what cold is all about by comparing us to conditions in Norway/Sweden/Canada. In those countries Winter is usually predictable, it sets in , people prepare, roads vehicles and heating are all in order. Here in the UK hovering around the freezing mark, conditions are highly changeable, together with occasional high winds. Months of moderate temperatures mean a change to Winter tyres is unnecessary, so when a cold snap comes chaos follows. But the cold snap is never usually long enough to warrant taking Scandinavian precautions, so we are where we are...

Thanks for that, good to know that it happens elsewhere

Slightly more explanation here

We live on top of a hill in a very exposed position. When I built the house in 1983, I was very aware of this and doubled the amount of fibreglass in the loft. The first floor is a dormer roof and the regulations said that I had to have soffit vents all round. The force of the winds actually forced cold air through the soffit vents and under the fibreglass insulation, freezing the ceiling panels and the secondary double glazing was moving away from the seals due to the air pressure difference on either side of the house. Marriage does concentrate the mind and I had my orders! I filled a 12 ton trailer with all the fibreglass , a lot of which had turned black with mould and having done much research into foam, went for the icynene. open cell. The closed cell foams are the ones the insurance companies and mortgage people become exited about. But my goodness what a difference that made. The whole house was just like it had been wrapped in an eider down! Further down the line put some Scandinavian quality double glazing in. But the main lesson here was that insulation is no good unless you control the draughts. You need a tiny amount,of air movement, hence the icynene as the wood in the roof needs to breathe,

Thanks for that Big J, She was under anaesthetic for over an hour and it seems to be lingering in her brain leaving her feeling too dizzy to drive, even though the op was some time ago. Anyone else know someone who has been affected in a similar way?

This was taken in March so there has been as much again so I hope not to run short this Winter!

Our house is about 240 square metres as well , and has modern insulation, icynene foam in the loft, which is water based and breathable, four lots of underfloor heating, two bathrooms , a conservatory and a kitchen. The Aarrow Stratford is linked to the gas boiler with a Dunsley neutraliser, but we have not had the gas on at all. Two hot water cylinders, one heated by solar tubes which does all our Summer hot water. I am becoming progressively creaky so I need a hot bath every evening. My wife has had an operation and is housebound while she recovers, hence the heating is on most of the time. One benefit of the Lockdowns was giving me time to build the Lockdown Splitter and make a good heap of split Ash and Sycamore

Just been working out our consumption. 25KW boiler stove with 15 radiators. Wife does not like the cold so we are using a 2 cu metre or 72 cu ft box of loose stacked dry Ash which I think would weigh about 750 kg or 3/4 ton a week. Stove is on all day and most of the night.

I just gather all the bits and pieces falling from my box wedge splitter. You can see at the end of the viseo. I have now rigged up a bag for them to fall into rather than picking them up off the floor.

Not only the gravel in the bag, but all that gravel in the tray. Did he mistake them for nuts? Perhaps he was just nuts! (Must have been a He , a She would never have done it!)

Just thought I would add some photos I can understand a mouse putting a supply of nuts in a place for Winter but I cannot understand why it would take the gravel into the bag. There must have been ten pieces a of gravel all taken through a tiny hole which seems to be an unnecessary struggle. At our log cabin down by the lake , I had hung up a pair of chest waders on a nail, ready for use the following year. When I came back to use them, my foot would not go into the left hand boot. I took them off and shook them and a whole load of peanuts came out, stolen from the bird feeder. This I can understand. But the little barsteward had the last laugh as I waded out through the thick mud, which was very slow going. I suddenly felt a chill around my important parts and realised the waders were slowly filling with very cold water. Because oh f the sludge it took me some time to reach the bank and found that the little fella had made a hole right in that vulnerable place out of sight. It was probably having a laugh from the comfort of the cabin saying “that’ll teach ya for nicking my emergency supply!”

Not sure, he died some time ago and it was only from something my father said and I just assumed it was a symptom of mustard gas but I have just looked it up on google which says What are the long term effects of mustard gas? The chronic consequences of SM may be observed as complications even up to 50 years after exposure. These complications mostly affect the respiratory system and can include chronic bronchitis, bronchiectasis, frequent bronchopneumonia, and pulmonary fibrosis, all of which become worse over time.10 Dec 2020

I was at a neighbour’s wood yard yesterday and a couple of spaniels came out barking. I calmed them down by offering them a Baker’s Allsort from a packet I keep in the glove box in my car. I opened the small glovebox and could not understand why it was half full of pea gravel. I opened the Allsort package and it too was half full of pea gravel and there was a small hole at the bottom where presumably a mouse or vole had been swapping a delicious Allsort for a bit of gravel I then reminded myself of a time when I was about six years old and I was in a lot of trouble. We had a dear old gardener called Ernie who was a staff car driver in WW1. He was gassed poor chap and not many people know that the symptoms came back every year, bit like malaria, and his faced turned black and he was bedridden for a couple of weeks. He was never much good as a gardener, but father took him in as his own father, my grandfather, had been wounded at Arras and had to have his leg amputated, so generally there was a lot of sympathy for victims of that War. Of course aged six I knew nothing of that, but what I did know was that Ernie hung his old brown coat up in the tool shed. One day I spied a packet of sweets sticking out of a pocket and on further investigation they turned out to be my favourite pear drops! Not content with stealing his pear drops, after taking one I replaced it with a worm! I do not know what possessed me to do this as I liked Ernie. He used to tell me stories about the trenches and one time he went to sleep in a bunker and woke up to find that a rat had crawled up inside his trousers and was nice and warm on top of his thigh! He than graphically described how he eased it down his trousers but why he never just gave it a Karate chop I’ll never know! But I digress. There was only one possible culprit and when confronted by Ernie and father I had to confess. Father gave me a choice of being beaten or going without sweets for a month and I chose to be beaten, but he never did beat me in the end. So I think Ernie’s spirit has entered the mouse and exacted revenge!

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Any which way but lose (my hinge and it fell on the house)

Gone with the Wind (in the wrong direction!)

What causes this, fungus? stress?

Was she a bit of a beech?

Perhaps one day there will be some lovely slabs for someone from this apparently healthy beech growing in a small meadow