cornish wood burner

I think we are all agreed that education is the key so I would like to add to the Spacemans post. The theroretical energy loss due to moisture is far different to the actual one. Apart from the energy needed to evaporate the water, the flue needs to be of sufficient temperature to prevent creosote forming so as he says the fire needs to run hot resulting in a lot of heat going up the chimney. A modern efficient wood burner running on 30% MC wood burning hot with an insulated flue should be able to achieve high enough temperatures. The problems come with uninsulated flues, stoves that are shut down, inefficient appliances or worse still open fires. Dry wood is definitely desirable for the less than perfect burning conditions and equipment.

Do you not think that if you can educate customers and give them honest accurate information then they might realise the difference between wood ''seasoned'' to 35% at the bottom of a Cornish valley and wood from a merchant who has seasoned his timber on high ground to 20%, stores it undercover in a warm dry barn and delivers the advertised quantity and quality. Both may have been cut for the same length of time but a reading of the moisture content would demonstrate why some logs are better than others before going in the fire. From this follows that advice from their local supplier about the suitability of his/her product be it hard or soft wood will more likely to be trusted rather than believing the hype of a foreign importer.

We have just started to look at the possibility of a drier. What would you consider to be the right machine.

Especially at night. As the temperature drops the air cannot hold so much water vapour. RH gets to 100% and the water is dumped. Condensation on your car in the morning is an obvious sign.

Try F R Jones

How about a small plate under the rear of the tipper body with captive nuts then the vice can be easily bolted down when needed.

Logsnstuff what I am saying is meters can be inaccurate and also will vary with how hard the spikes are pushed into the wood. We sometimes buy chip in for our biomass boiler so we need to know accurately what the MC is. The meter I use for chip reads right between 25 and 35%. Above and below this band it reads drier than the wood actually is. I have checked it with microwave and scales many times so I know what to allow to obtain a fairly accurate MC. Round wood is a different ball game. We use about 3000 tons of soft wood a year and after a couple of years stacked on a windy site at the end of the summer it gets down to about 25%, slab wood goes down to about 18% . Winter both rise about 5%. However I can get several % difference depending how far and where the spikes are pushed into the wood. Therefore I am suggesting we calibrate our meters and operating method. I can see all here try to sell a quality product and it must be frustrating to be undercut by the beer money brigade but if you demonstrate to your customer that the MC of your logs is better than the completion then you should be confident in the accuracy of your meter and method.

I would agree with this to a certain extent depending on the definition of warm. What surprises me is the comments about misleading people and then talking about MC in single figures or very low teens, presumably not kiln dried but going from a meter. If you suggest these sort of figures to your customers without verification are you not as guilty as the OP's importer?

I presume we all know that moisture meters are only a guide and even if accurate vary with how they are used. Does anyone check with scales and drying by oven or microwave?

I can see your point but picture this. You are not a farmer but have a small strip of land beside a road, you have spent a dogs age clearing up the results of flytipping, put a locked gate on the field to prevent the repeat dumping of bricks, blocks, tree stumps, asbestos sheets and considerable amounts of garden clearance type material, then put stone down to make a clean and tidy entrance. Two days later you find a heap of green waste dumped on the freshly laid stone entrance.

So that's where that rubbish came from!!!! Over the hedge is bad enough but keep away from the gateway please. Have had both.

Agreed. I've bought several machines for home and work. 3 off 185mm circular saws, 355 metal chop saw 355 disc cutter and a cheap 355 chop saw that I cut firewood up with at home. All have been fine cutting metal and wood. One small problem with a trigger which evolution sorted. After a three years I would rate the saws higher than the makita ones for build quality and ease of use. Makita is still operational but no one likes to use it.y

Similar age so I second that. So much easier and copes with the knots.

We buy a lot from screwfix including evolution power tools. Good service from both. We bought a new 305 rexon sliding mitre saw from screwfix and after using it almost solidly for 2 weeks a little spring on the guard broke. We had a replacement saw delivered the next day. We were quite prepared to fit a new spring but screwfix sent a new saw and picked up the old one. Can't fault them. Be careful the motor output shaft on that evolution doesn't stand a lot of abuse or do you know that now?

Professional complainers. Back in my younger days I rebuilt a Rotavator for a fairly well to do nursery owner. When I presented my bill for the considerable work he complained about the price. As he was a new customer I knocked a little off for goodwill . When the cheque was signed and in my hand he said 'A tip for you, always complain and you will get money off.' Last time I do anything for you I thought and with perfect timing his son came in with an urgent problem I could have fixed there and then. Still smile about that 30 years on.

Stihl do a nice kit in a roll as well. File holder is better than oregon IMO.

Thanks for the clarification Openspaceman. I presume you meant 300kw not MW. We have 4 MW total so are in the 300KW to 20MW band. Not burning leaves makes sense and I imagine difficult to exclude. This is a fairly new area for me so thanks to all for the info. I don't think I shall be on the list.

Thanks for that info. While it looks like our boilers would comply with the regs with some extra monitoring, I don't think we would want to go down that route. Too much hassle for a small quantity of chip. I have always considered waste wood to be waste from a manufacturing process or recycling, totally different to normal biomass wood fuel. Unless I am missing something arb waste is clean wood but named waste by those who cut it. As I understand it wood chip from virgin timber can be burnt in biomass boilers only subject to the clean air act. So if the 'arb waste' chip is from virgin timber surely it follows that it is allowed to be burnt in biomass boilers without a waste wood permit.

All seems to be geared towards sub 400KW boilers not the 990 and bigger that we have. As I read it a T6 exemption allows for waste wood to be chipped for ease of transport or conversion into wood fuel for biomass boilers. If I am interperating this correctly then all the tree surgeon needs is a T6 and he can dispose of his chip at a nearby biomass plant.

I think we will need to look into this. However thinking logically the only difference I can see between our bought in round wood and chip compared to arb waste logs and chip is the fact that have paid money for ours. We store many hundreds of tons of chip and many thousands of tons of round wood so storage should not be an issue. We would be happy to get free or very cheap wood or chip and I think other large biomass users would feel the same. So if anyone is working in the Saltash area anyone would like to sell us some chip for our boiler, lengths of round wood for chipping or logs for my Rayburn please pm me. I wouldn't want to pay much but we would then be dealing with a product rather than waste so presumably no hassles with permits.

So we are allowed to burn diseased larch but need another certificate to burn clean Arb waste?

So what would you need to burn the tipped product in a biomass boiler or domestic fire?

Gas maybe reasonably cheap at this point in time but like all energy sources price is governed by supply and demand so there is only one way the price will go. My point is that if you have a good wood supply then the obvious thing to do is use it. If you have read my post you will have a rough idea how much air you need to move but running ducting and fans to move that amount of air is not without its problems. Simplist system is a good back boiler feeding the central heating via a dhw tank/heat store. However it sounds like you might be past this point so you need to decide if you are going to live with the gas bills, install fans and ducting, or add something like a log boiler or another system outside to drive your heating. If you have gone down the instant hot water route then you would of course need a heat store as well.

As wrsni says. Also another guide is motor wattage which will be related to flow and pressure. So for wattage /power read cleaning ability, that's why the PTO and petrol models are better. It might be worth keeping an eye on screwfix offers. I had About £70 off normal price when I bought mine

Depends how much you want to spend I have a nilfisk 150 bar 2.9 kw at home. Hose reel which means much easier to store. Lance has a quick fit connection. Heavy duty domestic. Done about 30 hours so far with no problems. At work we have a couple of TX 100s. One is about 10 years old. No casing left. Runs for days on end. Total running time must be many months. Only problems a few filters new lance, new hose and 2x3 start capacitors. Indestructible but expensive. Not so easy to use from a kit storage point of view.