Free Wood

Ken68

Hi Bevster,...good luck with your new woodburner, just a year or two payback time. Good buy, tho they do take a lot of work.
Sawing, carting, logging, chopping.
Had a Rayburn for 30 years, miss it still, but now have gas central heating.(with an oap heating allowance :-).Not the same but the warmth is more uniform.
Nothing like a living fire, beats watching television.

elsien

Be careful about using treated wood - my mother nearly gassed herself using timber she thought was ok, but had been treated. with something that made her ill for a couple of days. She'd been given some planks that had probably been creosoted or something, so be careful if its not just fallen off a tree.

Unity

The bad news is that the green coloured treated wood you get (from builders' merchants or B&Q or whoever) that will resist water and damp - what's known as tanalised timber - what it's treated with is actually ARSENIC. I kid you not. You'll probably find if you buy some at say B&Q they'll not be able to cut it for you on their powersaw - the sawdust that comes off is toxic, as you can imagine.

I would say burning green treated (tanalised) timber is NOT a good idea. Remember the arsenic in his wallpaper did poor Napoleon in.

Just a word to the wise.

- Unity

howardtog

Two comments
1 Post 20 mpet. You cannot have wood that is too dry. If it burns quickly reduce the air supply so it burns less quickly.If a 3lb log is 33% wet then you have to burn off around a lb of water before you get any heat.Weigh a lb of water and you'll see what I mean
2 ALWAYS ask permission before collecting anywhere.Its usually given and often even more will be offered.As a rule people are happy to agree collection of fallen timber.Never ever cut down standing timber without permission (and usually payment)

Igol

Pallets. Go to any business park and you'll see em stacked up ready for the taking.
Owners will be only too glad to let you have them when you ask as they have to pay to get rid of them. I'm off to restock myself in a bit

k4ssie

As a deeply tightfisted newbie woodburner owner, i read this thread with a lot of interest :cool:

I live in rural Suffolk, there are masses of public access forests (owned by the council i think, and the nearest one to me is owned by Anglia Water as it's next to a sewerage farm but is open to the public). I can't take more than a half-trailer of logs at a time due to lack of storage space, so the logs we got at the start of summer, now nicely seasoned, are precious. For ages we'd walk in the woods looking longingly at all the fallen stuff, and a few weeks back gave in to temptation....in about 10 minutes once a week we can pick up enough wood to make our logs go about 1/3 further. And believe me there's nothing to beat a free evening's heat!!

Now i know this may be illegal, but i don't believe the owners of the woods would care at all - having said that there is a contact number on the signage near the wood and i was intending to call them and check.

Then i saw this on the news last week - looks like in some places we ALL had the right to do this - just i didn't know about it until they took it away :-(
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Now_health_and_safety_trumps_Magna_Carta&in_article_id=373485&in_page_id=34&in_a_source=

Isn't it amazing that the Forestry Commission's sudden realisation that we're all risking our lives picking up twigs, just HAPPENS to coincide with high fuel prices and therefore more value for the wood itself? But i'm sure they won't end up making a tidy profit selling licenses to companies for wood clearance, who can then sell it to the consumer at an inflated cost, no.

It's all crazy. What could be better (for individuals AND the environment) than for people to be able to supply a proportion of their fuel needs in a carbon-neutral way by collecting from within walking distance of their home.

<sigh>

make_life_easier

I love it when I see a dead branch, this also makes good kindling as the branch breaks into small pieces in you hand and I feel I have tidyed up behind me as the contents go into my carrier bag:rotfl:

PennyForThem_2

lol - I do that as well - pick up fallen twigs and branches to use for kindling (after drying). However I make sure I leave some for bugs and creepy crawlies (food chain).