More Prep Today

This morning started off like any other morning and this was early as I had quite a task to undertake and this was to demolish several tonnes of seasoned timber as I had a lot of freshly cut timber coming in and even with the space I have this wouldn't be enough and a lot had to be moved quickly and to places where it would be used and I wanted around 5 tonnes for myself to be kept in storge just incase my geothermal heating system failed in the depths of winter and I had no heat, so basically belt and braces.

Many of those using our basic home growing kits are also older people with older houses with fireplaces and some have been capped and others have not been used for years and so it has been around with the boys and they have been up on the roof to remove any old cappings and open up their chimneys and clean then and smoke bomb them to ensure they are safe to use after the summer and provide some of their heat from natural and cheaply available resources and for several people to work together for their and others benefits and for the greater benefit.

Work began by cutting up some of the seasoned wood down into specific sizes and four chainsaws began cutting and sizing this wood and the smaller rounds were put unto one end of the building and loaded onto a lorry while the larger items were cut to length and split in half to make them a manageable size and these were also loaded onto the lorry until it was filled with 1 tonne bags of logs and it went and made its deliveries to many addresses and others went in other vehicles to unload them at their addresses and help stack them. Many of the recipients had already taken steps to provide storage for their wood and other steps such as rescuing old fire guards to stop spitting timber spitting onto their synthetic carpets and others just had log burners which were closed and could spit themselves silly as it didn't matter.

Meanwhile another mate who is a farmer and owns several woods had a lot if timber blown over and said we could have it and it was out to his woods to cut up the felled timber and put it into our vehicles and put it into dry storage to let it season began and as they measuresd their vans they cut the trees into lengths and put them into the trailer and they were pulled out to their vans with the tractor, meanwhile my mate also brought his tractor and trailer and we soon cleared some of the windfalls and had them loaded for transportation. As they got back to our barn it was decided to cut the larger pieces to length and split them as we could store more and they season quicker and many were cut to length and split for storage.

Tomorrow is another day and work will continue on clearing the windfalls in this wood and we can move on to his next wood and begin on those windfalls and cut them ready for seasoning and while a lot of those trees would have been left and rotted they will now be put to good use and hopefully reduce some of our cliques fuel bills next winter.

You will be upsetting Greta

Who cares about thunderbox, just anther useful tool with the emphasis on TOOL as she is a profound idiot lacking in sufficient intelligence to finish school and has the usual excuses of claimed conditions, then insufficient age to have no wisdom at all and no life experience.

Yet it shouts loudly and takes lots of money and was flying around the world with at least one parent and being a major part lof the problem she was shouting about.

HYPOCRITE.

Personally we have a stove , we have had it over 10 years ,
best money saver ever ,
We turned the heating off a month ago and worked out our gas use was £21 in that time ,
You could double that per week before , and it had very little effect ,

Having taken some home off the muck heap which where dry and trying it,

This summer I'll be mostly making fuel out of horse muck !
Free ! Whether you have horses or not , every horse owner wants shut of horse muck .
I get 2 big 200L barrows a day ,
Lots of vids on You Tube showing how to make it ,
Even how to make a press with a bottle jack ,

Wisk it with a plaster mixer
shape into briquettes ,
Set them to dry in the sun ,
Stack them ,
Come winter burn them !

memegirl777 wrote:Personally we have a stove , we have had it over 10 years ,
best money saver ever ,
We turned the heating off a month ago and worked out our gas use was £21 in that time ,
You could double that per week before , and it had very little effect ,

Having taken some home off the muck heap which where dry and trying it,

This summer I'll be mostly making fuel out of horse muck !
Free ! Whether you have horses or not , every horse owner wants shut of horse muck .
I get 2 big 200L barrows a day ,
Lots of vids on You Tube showing how to make it ,
Even how to make a press with a bottle jack ,

Wisk it with a plaster mixer
shape into briquettes ,
Set them to dry in the sun ,
Stack them ,
Come winter burn them !

I use a slightly different recipe and this is two parts horse muck to two parts of mulched paper from the shredder and one part wood shavings from the chainsaw or sawdust from the circular saw and I do it as follows:

Place in an old dustbin and add a large quantity of water and leave for a week to soak and keep covered, keep adding ingredients until the bin is full and mulch regularly throughout the filling process and to do this I have a large drill running a large rod with an old saw blade welded on and a couple of minutes with this every fortnight mixes and mulches the mixture until all the fibres have broken down and you have a nice slop to work with.

I have a dedicated press powered by a 50 tonne ram and moulds for 16 cakes and they have a 20mm centre drain pipe drilled with lots of 1mm holes and spacers, the mixture is poured into the moulds and compressed with the ran and a spacer is added and the moulds are refilled and pressed again and repeated a couple more times until each mould has 4 cakes fully pressed and this gives 64 cakes per pressing and I dry them as follows.

I have a geothermally heated poly tunnel which is warm all year round from the pipes buried in the floor, under the bench I have a lot of loose laid slabs and the cakes are placed onto these and they quickly dry the cakes out as the slabs are a form of thermal mass and stay warm, once cooked they go into storage in a brick shed powered by a log burner run on home produced cakes which keeps it warm and the cakes dry and everyone in the village has a log burner and they are distributed as needed.

Cracking idea to heat a polytunnel ,
I was just going to put s small muck heap in ours and keep turning it ..
I have 3 polytunnels I run my buisness from ..
Sadly I don't have a 50 ton press so a halfords bottle jack it is .
I had played with come sort of water pipe heating system heated by the stove flue though ..

I have deep bore geothermal heating which heats my house and to get it flowing correctly it has to have temperature differential and this is achieved by running the brine pipes under my barns and poly tunnel and driveway.

Just a couple of suggestions:

Build a brick or block structure in your poly tunnel with doors top and bottom, fill the bottom with muck and fill through the tops with kitchen waste and other compostable material and as it composts it produces heat and your bricks act as a therml mass and collect this heat and release it slowly into your tunnel so heat and compost, two things at once.

Taking this further, you may have access to fabrication skills and equipment and if so another variant exists and this is the water heating and I did an experimental model as follows. In the composting chamber I installed an old oxygen cylinder on a slant with a top pipe going out and a bottom pipe coming in and these were both made in steel and the composting heated up the water in the old oxygen bottle. This raised the hot water and it went along the top pipe to another vertical steel pipe where it cooled down and travelled back along the lower pipe to be reheated. It wasn't boiling hot but it raised the temperature in his greenhouse to the point it provided useful heat, particularly in the winter and he added anti freeze to it to stop it freezing if part of the system leaked.

If you have the wood burner and the fuel you can indeed make a log burner and to make it more efficient you have to understand the basics of thermodynamics and that is that a thermal mass takes time to heat up and also releases this heat slowly and you can use this knowledge to your advantage if you know how and get more benefit per wood/fuel burn.

Just taking the legs off a basic wood burner and placing it on the ground so the bottom is in contact with the ground means you are heating the ground up; make this base from an excellent thermal mass material and when the fire goes out it cools down quickly but the air cools slower and you still have some useful heat. Put some old slabs under your log burner with its legs removed and the ashes from your burner sit in the bottom and heat your slabs up and you have created a thermal mass which cools even slower and puts out useful heat for even longer or you could go the full bananas.

Build your base from concrete and put a lining of concrete in the bottom and put smashed or old concrete, bricks, tiles, and even smashed glass into it and cover fully with concrete, repeat as many times as you like until it is the size you want and the larger it is the better thermal mass it is, now lets get technical. If you install your fire on your base you have heat while the fire is lit and from the thermal mass after the fire goes out and you can improve this by casting a rear wall and side walls for your fire from concrete and you are using more of the radiated heat and storing it in your ever larger thermal mass and this will give you much more useful heat for longer and it will protect your poly tunnel from localised heat damage.

If you put your log burner at one end of your tunnel you can extract the heat from your chimney flue by running from your fire at a shallow angle along the full length of your poly tunnel and put your chimney at the opposite and and your chimney flue gasses heat the full length of your poly tunnel and once your fire goes out your thermal mass takes over and yu maximise your heat from your fuel.

Brilliant ..
I worked on the counter at a builders merchsnts over 15yrs so understand the above ....
Love this sort of stuff so simple really just requires a bit of work and once done it's done ..
I have a spare stove that would do this ..
Thankyou Assassin ..
Definitely a project for summer evenings ..

Personally I am against the heating from the flue to water idea as it is inefficient as it only uses the heat from the flue and not the combustion heat so IMO why waste it as a flue is only efficient with added pre heated oxygen which burns the wood gasses to give a higher temperature in the flue when both the combustion burn and wood gasses can be used to increase thermal efficiency.

Kick the ideas around and work out costs and get what works for you and remember something which heats the poly tunnel during the spring and autumn months may not heat it sufficiently in the dead of winter with ice and snow on the ground; something else to consider.