Might be wrong, but if I recall correctly, you have a background in engineering… if that is the case then even better for your wood collecting and storing… there are many clips on youtube showing homemade splitters and chunkers… maybe you will probably end up starting a small firewood venture of your own, for neighbours near and far eh :0)
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Ah yes. Civil Engineer so I’m more aligned with building the access roads rather than fire pits etc. That said I do fiddle with anything and everything when time is permitting. maybe 
Remember to watch those digits of yours…! :0)
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Well, there’s thirteen minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
I thought he was going to get an arm amputated or something.
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Probably the most surprising wood I’ve ever had was Holly. The wood the tree surgeon dropped off was about 50cm diameter- I wasn’t even aware Holly could grow that big. But this stuff was also seriously heavy. I had to make several stops just to carry each log, pre-split, into the backyard. Certainly the heaviest wood I’ve ever lifted [insert joke]. The surprise was how extremely easy it was to split. I could have dropped the splitter onto it and I think it would have broken apart.
Btw, the weight was mostly in the water it was carrying as it seasoned to a pretty light weight. Maybe due to being evergreen and not losing the water over the winter months? It was felled in spring.
Ash here has a reputation for being burnable when green but I do wonder what that means. For example, green in winter for deciduous trees, when the water content above ground will naturally be lower is different to green in summer when water is being distributed around the tree for photosynthesis and growth.
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if I had money to invest in a piece of property, would be a campground.
looks like your burning treated pine mate.
be careful
They could add a football pitch and move NUFC there
In Australia, heat pumps really have been the preferred choice for heating and cooling for at least 30 years so it’s weird to hear this discussed in the media as if it’s a new thing. But then the heating and cooling requirements are very different here in the UK vs Aus.
I couldn’t imagine a heat pump being very effective at keeping a 1920’s UK house warm compared to the almost instant heating a gas boiler provides. It should almost be mandatory for new builds to use these though.
Air source heat pumps work just fine for older houses, you just need to pair them with the right controls to manage ramping. They only really struggle with extreme temperatures - hard to extract much energy from the outside air when the temperature gets below - 8 C, though some models can still function down to -25 C.
The reason they absolutely dominate in Oz is they offer both heating and cooling in a single system. That actually drives a lot of their financial logic in Canada too, even when a back-up system is required to deal with lower temperatures.
my house was built in the last 60’s and I believe the dual-flue Chimney has been re-built once. but we still have a natural gas fireplace insert in the basement for independent heating from forced air, and a wood-burning fireplace upstairs in the main room. We use it on occasion, only go through a half-cord of wood a year at most. I store rounds under cover for winter and split in the spring for next winter’s burning. mostly douglas fir, hemlock, red cedar and spruce. hardwoods are difficult to get here.
I don’t think most people realize how disastrous this next COP is likely to be. China is signaling that they have no intention of holding to their path of the past decade. The US is laying the groundwork to render whatever statements the Biden administration makes pointless (AKA normal US climate policy). Making any progress at all will require superlative effort from the host…which this year is a UK government completely incapable of it, the largest story around UK climate policy right now is internal division, mere weeks before the COP.
The whole process seems to be on the cusp of collapse, the only real question being whether the international bureaucracy and NGO cottage industry that exists around the UNFCCC will have the intellectual honesty to admit that that is what just happened.
Agree, I think the summit is at risk of achieving fuck all, perhaps even having a negative impact. The UK absolutely has to ensure its Environment Bill that’s currently going through the Houses of Parliament is passed beforehand but that’s looking increasingly unlikely.
Yeah, I heard a bit of a short discussion about this on the radio this morning. Isn’t it slightly misleading in that the countries involved (apparently Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Australia…and maybe some others) were not arguing that they should be excluded from the greenhouse gas emission targets only that using carbon capture and storing that in rocks underground was a viable approach in circumstances where other technologies cannot be upscaled quickly enough?
I personally don’t like the thought of capturing toxic substances and basically burying them but if that is necessary as an interim measure to tackle CO2 emissions then surely all options need to be considered and pursued as circumstances dictate?
I seem to remember an argument that launching nuclear waste into space would, itself, be too energy inefficient due to the energy required to get the materials out of the Earth’s gravitational pull. I wonder if that calculation has changed in recent years? Would the option of firing nuclear waste into the Sun be viable now, and what might happen if we did? Could it even help the Sun ‘live’ longer or would it be totally inconsequential?