Muddy42

you’ve lost me there, no idea.

Agreed. Not hard to remove/reinstall that. Regarding external air, just so people are talking about the same thing, this is where you have pipe cold air from the outside directly to the stove. You need this if you live in a properly air tight house built after about 2008. Personally I think that modern living (breathing, showering, boiling kettles and cooking) creates air born moisture that needs to be expelled somehow - extractor fans, opening windows. You cannot just heat this up in an airtight home and expect the moisture to go away.

It sounds like you are a tinkerer aswell. I use open fires, stoves and an eco angus boiler, the house insurers have photos of them all. If I waited for a HETAS approved installers to do everything, nothing would happen and it would be too expensive. A certified bloke give me a bit of paper every summer saying he has serviced the biomass and cleaned the chimneys and checked the stoves, this is too keep the insurers happy, but honestly I get the chimneys cleaner and the biomass operating better than they do. Having had professionally installed Clearviews and an eco design esse stove, I would 100% rather have the former.

I agree the OP! I also have struggled with an eco design stove am not in a smoke control zone and have also adapted my stove to provide more control over the air flow and to 'open up the exhaust' area of the flue. Its hard to explain, but I have drilled holes in the slider to allow in more air if required. It also had a square vermiculite panel in the roof that acted as a baffle, but with only an inch wide gap for the smoke to escape. I made a new smaller roof panel that allows more smoke to escape. In my opinion Eco design stoves were designed by scientists to work efficiently in a very narrow perfect set of circumstances and probably only in a modern house. If something is slightly out, the draw slightly lower or stronger or there is a downdraft or the flue is too long etc, the stove will play up. What's the point of a stove that sends very clean smoke to the outside world but smokes into my house?

Yes they smell different, but Ive never really noticed any side effects. I use fresh petrol pump E5 in the strimmer and MS261. The thinking is they are newer, get used a lot, and were built after the introduction of ethanol. I start the strimmer up with aspen in January to flush things out a bit. The larger, older saws that get used infrequently just use aspen. I can't ignore Aspen is double the price. Back to storage, always try to store machines in the dry up off damp floors etc.

The closed season for male deer has been removed in Scotland so you can shoot them all year (if you want, lots of people prefer to stick to the normal seasons). The seasons for female deer have not formally changed although a lot of semi-public organisations intend on exterminating deer get a dispensation to start the season early (the welfare justification for this is questionable - orphaned dependant young etc.)

Scotland recently permitted a range of digital scopes, thermal and light intensifying etc. but I think this is for daytime shooting (or up to an hour after sunset). Night time shooting (after this time) requires a special authorisation.

I just think some of the modern stoves are very fussy in terms of their operating conditions - perfectly straight flue liner of the exact length, insulation, cowel, register plate etc. The internal design and baffles may actually reduce draft, to help recirculate and reburn smoke, extracting maximum heat from the wood, maximum efficiency, cooler smoke etc. I get all that but if anything is slightly not right, you can get smoke in the room or other operating difficulties. Whereas Ive had several older that will work anywhere in any old unlined chimney. They light instantly and roar like a train within seconds and I've never had issues like with this eco design one. Yes you use slightly more logs but my firewood is free aside from labour and fuel.

Agreed, in one area I'm still pulling up seedlings 10 years after the bonfires went cold. In the early years we used glphosate to tackle the regrowth but seedlings keep sprouting for years to come.

Agreed. I suspect eco design (with an external independent air supply and perfectly set up flue liner) has been designed for a modern air tight house. Mine certainly isn't air tight and oxygen starvation isn't a problem.

It just shows how precious stoves have become that this is a consideration, but yes its a double skinned liner surrounded by some overpriced insulation beads. I dunno a stove should be so simple, but yet there has been this whole industry created to sell extra stuff, services and installation that wasn't required in the past. One of my Clearviews works fine and doesn't even have a flue liner. And before you ask, I clean it twice a year and have seen the CCTV footage and its spotless with no creosote. I also have various carbon monoxide testers, yawn.

Sorry I mean the opposite. My stove has a rectangular vermiculite baffle in its roof. Originally this baffle was of a size that left about a half inch wide gap for smoke to exit. I had some spare vermiculite board lying around so I made a smaller rectangle to give a bigger gap. All experimental and totally reversible. The flue has a 5 inch x 7 m liner fitted so plenty long enough. Yes what I do is lay the fire normally then put some rolled up newspaper on top to provide a flare up. People talk about 'bottom-up" or top down fire lighting - this is the best of both! Don't worry I've tried all the tricks - this eco design stove is just a bit sh!t compered to my other older stoves.

No its fine when the flu is warm or used the day before. I've also adjusted the stove a bit to help with the through flow or air - smaller vermiculite chimney baffle to help expel the exhaust and open up the air intakes with a dremel. Yes I've used an electric heater before to heat an open fire flu. However I then fixed that flue permanently by reducing the size of the fire opening with a glass strip.

To be fair that job description contained a lot of waffle and nothing about the hard manual graft of annihilating rhododendron. My issue is a broader one, that there is a lot of public money being thrown at the highlands of Scotland to try and "restore" or "improve" it. This new vision of the landscape is drawn up remotely by people behind desks to make the highlands look good for visitors. Yes it provides jobs but the majority of those jobs are again the managers, ecologists and funding farmers not grafters living on the ground. One of the aims is growing more trees. Either this is on a commercial scale which means a monoculture of sitka spruce and huge loss of biodiversity. Or this is Caledonian pine and oak forest which, current thinking requires the extermination of deer by professional contractors at huge public cost. As an example if there are less deer, traditional estate stalkers lose their jobs guiding guests on the hill plus a whole raft of jobs down the line. To that end the Scottish government has a campaign of land and housing reform to end private involvement in the rural economy. A whole way of life is at threat in some areas.

another 'magic' public money rewilding job. Please share with the traditional stalkers, gamekeepers, ghillies and estate workers that are loosing their livelihoods.

Talk to your neighbour, walk along the boundary and agree which branches legally he can cut. As long as you agree on the boundary, this should be factual because its anything overhanging that boundary. Then if you want to control the process and make neater cuts, make this clear and ask his permission to do the work on his side. Find out what is making him tic (lack of sunlight, leaves, the need for firewood etc.) Maybe it would look better to remove some trees entirely and leave others rather that create a 30 ft hedge. There is no point worrying about the past, the branches have zero value and the only people that win from a legal approach are the lawyers..

Agreed, yes I have an old Charnwood that is excellant. Agreed, I use this trick once its going a bit. Don't get me wrong, I can get the eco deisgn esse going eventually with all the usual tricks - lots of paper and kindling, window open a crack to neutralise the air pressure, as its also a nightmare for downdraft and smoking into the room when first lit. The flue is long and fully lined. Its just not the same as my older multifuel Charnwood or Clearview. With these fellas I literally put logs next to a twist of newspaper with one piece of kindling ontop, open the ash tray, open both air vents, door open a crack and they roar like a steam engine on nitrous oxide in seconds.

This doesn't sound right? Going from copper wire to fibreoptic cable will definitely increase your maximum potential speed. Keep bashing away at the Openreach and your ISP. Find out exactly what connection you have, what speed you are paying for and what you are getting. Do you have modern equipment within your house? Changing ISP is a good way to get a new router and the new 'mesh' equipment for bouncing the wifif around the house is great. Use ethernet cables if your house is massive. As above, totally agree

Gotcha, apologies i misunderstood. FTTP will be faster. Myself and many others have had the same experience as you. Just phone them every couple of days and bombard them with repeat emails. Often the engineers just have a handheld machine that you can sign on, just before the work starts.

Sorry I don't understand what work this "permission to work" form is required for? Either you have Fibre to the cabinet (FTTC, the cabinet is the telephone exchange or a green box on your street and then it uses older copper wires to go to your home) or Fibre to the premises (FTTP or to your home). FTTP is the best. Going from FTTC to FTTP would require landowners consent to put in cables, but simply switching providers shouldn't require any permission, and I'm afraid for you in my experience switching providers doesn't result in a speed improvement whatever the fcuk-ers say. Think about it, the cables and infrastructure are the same?

That's once of the reasons I don't like my one modern eco design Esse stove. I'd much rather have an old Clearview with masses of fully controllable air flow and ability to give it a quick blast once in a while or when lighting it. I have to use bellows to get the modern stove going for crying out loud.

The problem with cutting ponticum with a petrol saw is you are permanently putting the saw down to untangle and move things. Id go with an electric saw for this. Even one of the smaller one handed ones in whatever cordless system you already have. I have a makita one like this for bonfiring Beyond that, everyone should have a 50cc petrol chainsaw.

I have tried both supposed 50cc equivalent electric saws and I just cannot see how they can make that equivalence power claim? I think the problem is how electric saws get used - lighter/quieter so treated with less respect, maybe even one handed, less PPE.

I understood stove fans used heat from the stove to create electricity to drive the fan (energy cannot be created or destroyed and all that), so not technically free. But the advocates say this is worth it because it mixes and averages out the air in the room. And yes it will probably have more effect with a higher ceiling like your workshop, but I'm not sure about my tiny home office!

It depends what the owner wants done with the wood. the minimum would be just to cut them off the fence to allow the fence to be repaired. The maximum would be removing all the timber. Access might be much easier in the summer.