Heating a house on junk mail?

turnitaround_3

Hello,

What a brilliant forum you have here; so many topics and so many people. :-)

Anyways ..I was wondering about how practical it would be to heat your house using junk mail.

We have this friend over in Norfolk who has this all-fuel-burner thing on the side of his farmhouse into which he throws literally anything he can find which well, burns.

Here we've recently invested in a shredder and the amount of space the strips of paper take up in a rubbish bag is ridiculous. We can sometimes go out in the morning and come home to quite a reasonable pile of newspapers, leaflets and general rubbish on our hall mat.

Now if someone was to go into total overdrive inviting every type of catalogue, mail listing junk and so forth, surely it could be possible to heat an entire house with one of these all-fuel-burner thingies?

Has anyone done this or thought about it? 20 years ago this wouldn't have been possible as there wasn't that many of these flippin marketing companies about, but now???

DSmiffy

It certainly would be money saving, especially if you bought one one of those log maker machines that converts the old paper into compressed bricks.

We use ours to make bricks in the summer to burn on the chiminea in the garden and they burn very well. Takes a little effort and some time to dry them out initially, but, after the cost of the log maker, fuel is free!!

Let us know how you get on, I will be watching this thread with interest. :T

black-saturn

Sounds like a good idea. If it burns why not use it? No need to shred then :T

highguyuk

Might get a few vouchers in that "junk" as well...

black-saturn

I reckon I could have heated the whole street with just the junk mail I got today.

Mula_2

In practice, to heat the whole house for the whole winter, you'll need tons of paper waste (literally) so it's not a realistic solution unless you collect all the paper waste from all your neighbours etc.

Burning newspaper / catalogues / old books or yellow pages directly without processing them creates a lot of "flakey" ash on the outside with unburnt pages in the middle, and is surprisingly difficult to burn completely - it tends to extinguish the fire.

Making enough paper "bricks" will take inpractical amount of time and you'll need a very large shed or a barn to store enough of it to keep it dry.

So unless you live in a farm or next to a warehouse / factory from where you can easily collect combustable biomass / waste product, then it's not a viable proposition.

However, you can still enjoy a "real" fire with a few bricks that you make in an open fire or logburner for those cosy winter evenings. ....

save-a-lot

Hi

Another option here. Saw-mills, joiners etc will probably give you off-cuts of wood for free that you can burn if you are prepared to take it off their hands. If you have a garden all 'woody' cuttings etc will burn. Better off burning wood, it burns longer and storage would not be as much a problem. Use the junk mail as a firestarter

Phil

Poppycat

I agree paper is hard to burn. Last year I had a stack full of papers I had which were 3 years worth of correspondence, my shredder was a hand wind up one and would have taken ages to shred. I burnt the papers in the backyard, boy what a job it was the burn paper and lots wasn't burnt properly despite in being in the middle of the fire. Then there's the smoke and ash all over the place.

I am glad I now got a electric shredder but agree that it takes a stack of space, compared with the amount if did prior to shred.

calmgirl

paper does not give out much heat as it burns there is a nice flame yes but the heat is miniscual compare to that of let say wood

Malestrom

turnitaround wrote:

Here we've recently invested in a shredder and the amount of space the strips of paper take up in a rubbish bag is ridiculous.

Cross-cut shredders produce little flakes of paper, a bit like confetti, which takes up far less space than the waste produced by a strip-cut shredder. Cross-cut shredders are also far more secure in that your correspondence is far, far harder to reassemble.

SnapFish_2

Excellent idea - :T

Whatever you decide to burn, make sure you get your chimney gets cleaned regularly - you should account for this in your cost saving. My parents had a MORS0 multi-fuel burner and choose to use wood/paper - whatever they had to burn. They were saving a fortune in heating bills but it all came to an end when the chimney cought on fire, now they've had to switch to gas as the chimney can no longer be used.

Anyway would be interested to hear how it works out - send on your address and I'll forward you my junk mail

HTH, SnapFish