Mr. Ed

Oh, and agreed about the knots 100%.

Ah, thanks for that. I'm not doing the carpentering myself so will take advice - the only such project I've been involved with was using reclaimed pitchpine, where they were secret nailed as well as T&Gd to avoid cupping and suchlike

Oo, that is nice. I'm going to enjoy this. I see you're not bothered about knots. May I ask how dry you got it before fitting? And did you tongue and groove it? I was hoping we'd get something a bit wilder out of them, along these lines, but maybe I should be careful what I wish for.

Oo, that is nice. I'm going to enjoy this. I see you're not bothered about knots. May I ask how dry you got it before fitting? And did you tongue and groove it?

Hi Paul Did you do this in the end, and did it work out - I have a similar plan for bedroom flooring in our rebuild. I'm unclear also about how persistent the orange colour will be - I have cut one stem which has been down for only a couple of months but the ones I'm proposing have probably been down for some time (a year or two?) - I've only seem them from fresh cut ends, which don't seem overly punky but do promise some wild colouring. If they're not rotten but turn out to be too wild we can always just paint them. And it's known as Irish mahogany here, not Scotch! E

That's lovely. Herself has taken to turning bowls, and we got lucky with some holly that was at a lovely stage of decomposition - this is it before finishing: it actually sanded very well

We had bats flying at noon yesterday - is that normal?

What size are they? They might be best as a bit of wall art.

Wow! Can I buy one? My brainbox wife is a neuroscientist and they look a bit like brain cells. Where are you?

What does it smell like? Douglas seems to have a very characteristic citrussy smell. Even a bit marmaladey, like a very old dry Riesling I once drank in fact - burnt marmalade, in fact but I was ver ver drunk at the time of course

And if you stack em two high you get back to my quarter figure. Best of all you do get this ghostly army of Chinese warrior statues protecting your soul. At Bealtaine they come to life and patrol the fences.

Ace tip Paul! I hadn’t thought of that geometry. Still only gets rid of 1/4 of ‘em though. Many thanks.

I want to buy a half dozen iBC cages for firewood, but the only local ones I can find still have the plastic tank inserts. I assume they’re not too difficult to extract but what would I do with them afterwards? I can see myself haunted by their ghostly presences for decades, like rather static great white whales.

Mr and Mrs Oakley having a genteel waltz.

I did not know that. I cut one of them in four today and moved it down to the yard.

I’m a sailing boat nut and it’s big for spars. That and something called Columbian pine? Howard Hughes’ bizarrely big plane was known as the Spruce Goose wasn’t it? Whoops - someone got there before me.

Mosquitoes apparently used balsa (in a sandwich construction with birch ply for the skin), ash off structural bits, and Douglas for stringers and other bits, and Sitka for the wing spar.

This sounds very exotic! A 4 metre beam for the vessel and a live, non round axle?

Foregive my ignorance on this matter, but is that more wasteful than a combi since unused heated water just cools to waste? Why don't I always have the hot water on a combi - which can be situated at the end of the house where all the kitchen and bathroom stuff is? The cost for heating must be much higher than for the odd bath. Quicker hot supply too - the boiler is going to be some distance - something like 70 metres I think, from there. That way we wouldn't have to run the wood boiler at all during the warmer months.

I'm getting intimidated by the likely costs of a good GSHP installation, and by being committed to significant electricity bills. We have bulk Calor here already, and now we've stopped the leak (an unknown-of spur previously leading to the neighbour's house) which had been left with the tap open, leaking gas into the woods somewhere, the bills are likelier to be much less scary. Is it a thing to have the log boiler system with a combi for backup? This would help with the problem of me travelling (anyone remember that?) for work, or if we had guests here while we were away who might not fancy the daily hewing.

Cool! Very thorough. Will digest. Great log store.

Hi Works Many thanks for this. Is it too personal to ask what order of money the GSHP installation set you back, and whether you use a deep or shallow ground source? Best Ed

Thanks for this interesting account. I take it that’s 15-20 cubes of loose packed logs? Softwood/hardwood?

Thanks everyone for these really useful pointers. I’m going to try and do some sums now - based on a thinning we have coming up which will produce some 60 tons of spruce and sycamore and what we would get for that (not a lot) compared with what we pay for calor gas (quite a lot) versus the cost of heat pumps. I notice no one’s biggjng up air heat pumps (if that’s what they’re called - the things that look like air conditioners.) back with you soon Ed

Thanks K - sounds sounds very similar to our project: about a 1200 square foot house, most of which is an old stone farmhouse with a badly built extension. We're going to do away with the old extension and do a new timber frame one (with our own timber d.v.) which would bring the footage up to 1500 or so. I'd been hoping to get away with a smaller unit than yours but will take advice. I do wonder if I'm committing myself to a life sentence . . . Also I'm going to have to travel to England quite a bit for work, when travel starts happening again, and I don't know how happy herself will be about the prospect - we have calor gas here as well, so maybe we could have a little on-demand hot water boiler as well for the summer? I'm just back from the shops 100 Eur poorer thanks to chainsaw fuel, bar oil and a couple of new chains . . . Honestly now (for I've read conflicting accounts) how often do you load it?