Rob_the_Sparky

Plenty of home users would be interested but, as above, not in those quantities. Look for local tip sites and dump a bit at a time on the way to jobs? Going to hard to shift that lot like that though.

Yeah, the idea was that self driving trucks could draft each other but then people thought about what might go wrong and then they talked about dedicated lanes running with self driving trucks doing the same thing. More efficient but very fragile to anything going wrong. (as seems the case with a lot of more recent business practices)

There is an episode of myth busters where they did this with a car and a semi and they took readings at various distances including driving stupidly close. Conclusion was it works but the closer the better. The downside is obvious, especially at the closer distances they did...

The energy per unit weight (mass) of all wood is pretty similar so the heat you will get from a wood is about its dry weight. Energy per volume is very variable but not by dry mass. Personally I prefer a mix of woods as the lighter less dense ones light faster and if you leave them in bigger chunks they don't need reloading as much as you might think. Also less dense wood dries much faster than the more dense woods. It is not that one wood is better than another in a wood burner, just that they are different. In your case you likely do not have so much storage space so more dense woods might be preferable...

Whether a wood is worth the effort of splitting and drying depends on your supply and what it costs. All wood will burn and give heat (more or less the same amount based on dry weight) but they burn differently as noted. I pay very little and burn everything received, yes some it painful to split and some is a joy and if there was plentiful supply for minimal cash then I'm sure I'd be more picky as well. I.e. what is worth splitting and drying depends on your situation but it will all burn and give heat.

If I had no seasoned wood I'd go find HT (heat treated) pallets (that is most of them) and burn that while putting my green logs on the stack.

When splitting into logs leave it in bigger chunks than you would for a harder wood. This helps reduce the number of trips to the fire. I guess is depends on the willow but I have some lighter wood in my stack, but then I'll take anything that burns If it is available and cheap then burn it. Oh, if you leave the branches long they end to grow on the stack(!) best cut into short lengths sooner rather than later to get it dry to stop this.

Also depends on the log. A large diameter but short log will dry faster than a long small log as the wood dries much faster from the end grain than through the bark. This is also why you should cut into logs and split early, the wood will dry faster.

There is something political going on as technically all this "ban wood burners" doesn't make sense. Why would you not control open fires but you would ban older but cleaner wood burners? Why rather than trying to ban anything would you not look at reducing the particulate emissions? It is not like there are no products out there that do that. A very brief google get you: The ePURO, filter for wood burning stoves - Schiedel Chimney Systems Ltd. SHOP.SCHIEDEL.COM The ePURO, filter for wood burning stoves - The fine dust filter for wood-burning appliances. Electrostatic fine dust separator for effectively reducing flue gas particles in wood-burning... If you applied the same logic the diesel and petrol engine would have been banned may years ago rather than improving their design to reduce emissions!

N.B. as you have to evaporate a lot more water with a wet wood you will struggle to maintain a high fire temperature.

Back to the original question: At home you can burn all woods without problem as long as the fire is kept hot. The problems occur when the fire is hot enough to turn the oils/tars in the wood into gas but not hot enough to ignite them. When that happens, as the gasses cool in the chimney these oils and tars condense on the inside of the chimney. Generally, as softwood has a higher proportion of tars/oils in them than hardwood you can get the problems you are seeing in your tent stove. The same thing can happen at home if the fire is not kept hot enough. It is not unique to softwood but it will happen faster as there is more tar/oil in it. This is not a good thing due to the blocking of the chimney but also as you are storing fuel in the chimney. If the chimney gets hot enough at a later date it can ignite this stored fuel and het presto you have a chimney fire. No fuel = no chimney fires. From an energy point of view, per unit mass of dry wood there is very little difference between types of wood. Hence, softwood makes a good firewood if handled right. Generally it is less dense so you need more of it in terms of volume and it can burn faster so better to leave it in larger chunks than hardwood. On the plus side it is cheaper as many people do not understand the above and it generally dries faster than a more dense wood.

Very pretty but as far as I can see it is a complicated/expensive way to save a small amount of time.

What seems to be going mostly under the radar is the amount of power it takes to run AI programmes. Data centres are already a huge consumer of electricity and this is going to get a lot larger if we are all using AI. In term of good/bad - it depends how it is used an how it is trained. Unfortunately there are plenty out there being trained on the internet and clearly everything on the internet is correct!! It reminds me of the classic of the Russians training dogs to run under tanks in WW2 then getting them to carry mines. The dogs were trained on Russian tanks and as a result they blew up Russian tanks! The ready access of AI tools on line with no control introduces massive problems with fake information being generated. Expect scams to become harder to spot as the scammers get good at using AI tools. Some of that is already happening and the tools to spot them is always going to lag behind the ability to generate the fakes.

The other good technique is to contact local businesses using this approach. Note: if you are after wood ready to burn that is very different from green/wet wood that has just been cut and will not be dry nor cut/split for burning. Green wood is unlikely to be ready to burn until next year now (without a kiln)

Also try contacting local companies, if you want regular supplies then, as above, you need to become a good tip site for a local company and they are best contacted directly. Some tips: Logs are processed into sizes ready to burn once dry, these are not going to be free as that takes work. If you are a going to be a tip site you need to be asking for wood not logs (arb arisings is the term used here). As above be flexible. Despite what the internet will tell you all wood burns(!) and releases the same amount of energy per unit weight when dry (when using a wood burner). Less dense wood does take more space but generally that is not so much of an issue (also soft wood generally dries quicker, which can be handy). In fact some softwoods are really good wood to burn once you figure out how to best split them (leave the faster burning woods in bigger chunks).