Help moisture content in logs

Greenfires

Robwiz wrote: »

A retailer recommending a more expensive product – quelle surprise!

My experience is the opposite of your customers. I started off with Verdo briquettes and found them perfectly satisfactory. Verdo is probably the number one manufacturer of wood pellets and their briquettes are produced in the same factories from the same raw materials.

The Verdo briquettes give off good heat (4.8 kW/kg) and I'm very happy with how long they burn. I personally don't see any reason to buy a more expensive product which would result in a higher cost per kilowatt hour of heat output. I'd guess that the higher prices go mostly towards marketing and dealer profit margins.

It might be worth bearing in mind that I'm a user as well - and I pay EXACTLY the same for my briquettes as you or anybody else would. We've been dealing with briquettes for over ten years, and as I said, we've only ever sold varieties we'd be happy to use ourselves. As a retailer we are contacted all the time by companies wishing us to sell their products - so we've tried pretty much everything that's commonly available. Much of it is poor or average - but if we had found one we thought was better value then we'd be burning and selling that instead - simple as that - we're not tied to any sort of agreement or contract with the factory.

We have a fair few regular customers who have come to us from Verdo - including one a couple of weeks back who lived very close to one of their factories. He was even happy to pay the delivery surcharge for a Scottish delivery that the hauliers impose on us.

As for dealer profit margins - you're having a laugh mate! If we were in it purely for the money we'd have got out of the game years back - in business terms it's hardly worth bothering with at all - but we've been doing it for so long now it's just become part of the furniture sort of thing. But honestly - I can assure you we make absolute peanuts on briquette sales.

SG27

suestew wrote: »

right very interesting thanks all.

I am using a moisture metre and we do split the logs and the readings are from 30-38 still. I don't stick it in the end of the log either.

So can someone advise, if our logs are currently at around say 35% approximately how much longer should they be outside to get down to a suitable moisture level?

And lastly do you get a good flame with the briquettes?

They will need another year. You can stack them in the open if you don't have a log store yet. It won't do any harm. Build a log store in the summer and stick them in ready for next year.