Here's the UK
I do believe I have more trees than all of the UK
Posted on 10/01/2022 2:06:37 AM PDT by dennisw
Retail giant Toolstation revealed that sales have rocketed by a third recently The news comes as people have been finding cheaper ways to heat their homes Experts warn the rise in woodburning could lead to higher pollution levels
The energy crisis is leading cash-strapped Britons to explore new ways to generate heat.
First, sales of woodburning stoves soared by 40 per cent. Now, it has emerged that chainsaws have seen a surge in demand – to cut wood for the stoves.
Retail giant Toolstation yesterday revealed that sales have rocketed by a third in recent weeks. The firm believes the increase is driven by customers using them to cut logs up for woodburners.
A spokesman for the firm, which has more than 500 UK stores, said: ‘During the last few weeks we’ve seen sales of chainsaws increase by a third.
‘We suspect the demand is being driven by customers firing up their chainsaws to cut logs and timber for woodburners as many try to soften the impact of energy hikes.’
The rush to buy chainsaws comes as families face the prospect of energy bills hitting record highs despite the new £2,500 price cap for a typical household. Woodburning stove sales leapt by 40 per cent between April to June to over 35,000 compared to 25,000 for the same period last year.
The Stove Industry Alliance said the trend ‘clearly indicates that consumers are taking action to help cushion themselves against spiralling home heating bills’.
The rush to buy chainsaws comes as people across the country have been exploring cheaper alternatives to gas to heat their homes following an announcement by UK watchdog Ofgem that it would increase the energy price cap.
Energy bills were set to rise to £3,549 from tomorrow for the typical household,
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Here's the UK
I do believe I have more trees than all of the UK
The conditions you describe were what led to the notorious ‘smogs’ in London and other large cities - generated by the burning of coal, not wood, in open fires. They ended rapidly with the Clean Air Acts of the 1950s, which banned the use of untreated coal as a domestic fuel in urban areas. However, wood-burning stoves have become fashionable in recent years, not for essential heating but as a chic accessory. There are now so many of them that they’re once more affecting air quality, particularly in London.
Coming to California soon. CARB is going to have to hire and arm 50,000 new officers and tree huggers to prevent it.
They still do and the zone covers all of Puget Sound. But they also have a caveat to the burn bans if that's your only source of heat.
I have a gas furnace but choose to heat with wood as much as possible. So when my furnace broke down a few years ago necessitating the replacement of an electronic controller board I kept the old part and swap it into the furnace to temporarily disable it.
So far I haven't had any menacing knocks at the door or goon shaped thugs demanding I explain myself ;'}
Back in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, we burned wood. Since I was working as a logger, getting wood was no problem. But I didn’t always stock up in the summer. If I ran short in the winter, I could always scrounge dried snags, or old-growth bark. Either pick up the chunks that popped off the logs as they were loaded onto trucks, or go out and find a large fir stump and chip the bark off. It burned like coal - hot and slow. No matter what one burned, there remained disposing of all the ash, and rattling a chain gently around in the chimney flue to debride the creosote - AH! THOSE were the days. Except I much prefer our nat-gas fireplace now.
Every house should have a well kept chain saw. At least, that is what my father-in-law said to me, when he gave me it for a wedding present.
It regulates them pretty highly, although not as tightly as firearms. There have been a couple of strict limits placed on particulate emissions. The first one was rather easily met; the second is tougher, and some manufacturers have had to use catalytic inserts to meet them.
Personally, I detest catalytic inserts, because they clog, they are non-standard, and they only work well for the part of the burn that is both hot and producing a lot of VOCs.
I was fortunate enough to upgrade my stove in 2019, when the first set of regulations was in effect, but not the second. The burn (which is much cleaner than any stove I've had in the past, but still leaves creosote over the course of a winter) was improved by the creation of secondary air paths over the top of the flame.
Yeah, 10s of 1000s of people using a chain saw for the first time? That’s not good.
Just went out and marked dead trees a couple of weeks ago and will start cutting here this week. Mostly white oaks here, pin oak, post oak. Some black jack and some true red oak. Bit of hickory too but that’s mostly for the smoker. Got on big hickory to cut down this year so some will be for the stove.
I’ve got thick woods, regrowth from several decades ago, so most of what I cut is 4-8”. They get cut to 6-8 foot in the woods and loaded onto a trailer. I cut them to stove length off the back of the trailer up here and they drop into a cart. Then some go straight into the house and the rest on pallet racks.
Got a neighbor who always said if you don’t know how to burn green wood, you got no business using a wood stove. His place was never all that warm and he usually has to clean out his stove pipe once in the middle of Winter. He’s got an old stove in his kitchen that doesn’t shut down tight enough to make it through the night with dry wood. It’s not a cook stove. It’s one of those old ones from the 50s or 60s that is wrapped in a sheet metal case.
He got a little air tight a couple of years for his living room so he now appreciates dry wood for that and figured out how to make it last through morning.
My stove’s hardly new but I can put the fire out if I shut down the vents. It’s a Fisher Papa Bear.
In the Uk a huge number of homes, especially in the cities, have coal fire places. It wasn’t so long ago that people had coal delivered to their homes and was the primary means of heat during the winter.
I wouldn’t like to guess a figure, but the number still retaining open fireplaces is now quite small. They haven’t been fitted in new houses for years, and most of the existing ones have either been filled in or the flues converted to various kinds of stove. However, quite a lot of those conversions could fairly easily be reversed.
“Got a neighbor who always said if you don’t know how to burn green wood, you got no business using a wood stove.”
I burned only green wood one winter out in the stix. The land across the street had all the trees taken out and pushed (bulldozed) into a brush pile. They were making it into pasture. I took only branches that were 1-3” diameter. Then cut them at home with a regular old circular saw. So maybe being thin diameter, they burned hotter and better. I checked the stove pipe once a month and only saw the bare minimal of black creosote that starts stove pipe fires.
Free fire wood! With no labor on my part except for taking it and cutting it up to cast iron stove size.
Yup—I would expect to see a lot more home fires as wood stove newbies start learning lessons the hard way.
I know one house that burned to a cinder because the wood stove newbie crammed it full of wood, opened up the flu all the way—lit it before leaving for work in the morning—and returned to an empty lot!
When I see a single emergency utility company truck, or an EV ambulance on the road, I will know that there is a possibility that EV will work.
I saw a graphic ... dispatch operator saying “I’m sorry, sir - we are unable to send the fire department to your house fire ... our trucks are charging up”.
NEW JOB OPENINGS:
CHIMNEY SWEEPS !!!!!
Bought chainsaw to clear 5 acres in 1993.
Had NEVER used one prior.
Used up 7 chains in under 3 years.
Am on 13th GALLON of chain oil.
Was 53/54/55/56 THEN.
FEMALE
I heated a 2553 sq ft house in N Calif-—with cold temps/snow every winter with ONLY a LOPI wood stove.
IF I ever have another house, I want another LOPI wood stove.
This house doesn’t have the room-—only 51% size of larger house.
Reminds me of a scene from BECKET in which King Henry has been drenched in a rain storm, goes to a hovel and demands fire and warmth.
Becket: You will find no fire here sire. Each hovel is allowed two measures of wood a year. One stick more and they are hanged.
Henry: MY edict?
Becket: Your edict sire.
****
And then there is this when the people start looting due to cold...
“I told myself it was beneath my dignity to arrest a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the Party is beneath the dignity of any man. And the Party was right: one man desperate for a bit of fuel is pathetic; five million people desperate for fuel will destroy a city. “ —from Dr Zhivago
They need to go back to the old British standby COAL!
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