Firewood loads (again)

[David W.E. Roberts]

Hi,

just reviewed the last thread and closes to a price per volume was (IIRC) £30 for 0.7 cubic m. This is roughly £43 per cubic metre delivered locally. Is this the going price this year?

Just visited a local firewood place and they (probably - the main guy wasn't there) wanted £20 for a small trailer, load yourself.

The trailer is about 0.42 cu m - possibly get it up to 0.5 cu m if I stacked it - so I was trying to work out if this was a fair price. One issue here is how much you pay for delivery.

10 miles each way is about 0.5 gal diesel, I guess - about £2? Then there is the time for loading, unloading and driving (an hour for the round trip?) plus provision and maintenance of the vehicle. Presumably this puts the total cost of delivery to about £10 - £15? Unless they load it by hand, in which case it may take longer.

Deduct this from the £65 for a 4' * 8' trailer load (estimated at 1.5 cu m assuming stacked at least 0.5m high) gives about (£50 *2/3) £35 cu m collected.

Hmm...half of that is about £17.50 and if you stack the trailer you get to pick your own wood and pack it tight. So this could be a reasonable deal if my starting price and approximations are valid.

What does the team think?

Dave R

P.S. they had a load of silver birch there - ISTR that this is very light in weight and therefore not good in 'bangs per buck' for firewood, where denser wood such as oak should burn longer.

[TonyK]

I pay £36 per load, delivered and stacked in the shed. I estimate thats about 1 cubic metre but I might be getting a discount as I always have a double load and have about 3 or 4 deliveries a month so I'm spending about £250-£300 per month on logs through the winter. Damn I need central heating!

Tony

[Bob Mannix]

I suspect it's well under the going price in this area :-(. You don't say where you are from. Round here (south of Oxford) for decent seasoned hardwood I was quoted £52, £55 and £57 for a half load delivered. I went for the £52 and got half a flat bed truck of well seasoned beech. Looks about

0.7cu m, though I haven't measured it, I'll try and do so tonight.

Bob Mannix

[David W.E. Roberts]

I sort of expected a rural county to have cheap firewood, but unfortunately all the bl**ding yuppies have log fires and stoves.

Guess it gets cheaper away from the towns :-)

Strangely, the cheapest load last year was from over the border in Colchester.

Makes £85 for a truck load seem cheaper than I thought at first.

Cheers

Dave R

[Andrew Heggie <andrew.heggie]

If that was the bulk bag then reckon on 50% of the contents being air. I did weigh some and 300kg of relatively unseasoned wood was about average. It was an ex yard price and contained about GBP8 worth of cordwood.

I've not tried this but I would expect to improve the wood to airspace ration from the "jumbled" 50% to better than 70%, maybe as much as 80% if you have a bent for dry stone walls.

From FC mensuration handbook

Basic density birch = 0.53 Green moisture content birch = 76% dwb Basic density oak = 0.56 Green moisture content oak = 89% dwb

So if both are green the birch is the better bet, all other things being equal (and they're not coz the birch will burn faster on an open fire).

AJH

[Andrew Heggie <andrew.heggie]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 19:51:04 +0000, Andrew Heggie

The above only applies is buying by weight, on a volume basis it's the oak that is better, *sadly* I decided to do a rough check and was surprised to find the greater moisture content of the oak did not offset it's higher basic density.

A quick calc suggests 1m3 (solid) of oak unseasoned will have a net calorific value of 9070MJ, birch 8770MJ.

By weight, 1 tonne of the same wood, oak 8569MJ, birch 9402MJ

In practice who knows which would be better, as they season oak is better, especially as birch tends to perish unless cut, split and dried quickly.

AJH

[Bob Mannix]

unfortunately

I measured the stack last night. Mentally replacing the logs I already have used it's a bit less than 1000x2000x400 (8" lsplit logs stacked two deep =

400) ie about 0.7cu m. That's in a stack so I guess it was a bit more jumbled in the truck. This is more than I thought so not such bad value. The problem is that there is no such thing as a standard "load" (AFAICT).

I guess I'm a bl**ding yuppie (except I'm considerably too old and ceased being upwardly mobile some time ago - a sort of oippie, old immobile...), as the log fire is in addition to the normal heating and purely for pleasure. We removed a "coal effect" gas fire and put a "proper" fire back in. I think we derived more pleasure from the proper fire in 1 week than we had from the gas fire in ten years, so that was a result.

Cheers,