We had a vision to create a business that complemented our existing tree surgery business. We wanted to sell logs. We weren’t reinventing the wheel, most tree surgeons sell firewood in the winter months to provide a little more income, it’s a no-brainer as they say. But we wanted to take it a few steps further than most tree surgery outfits. Our aim was to sell kiln dried firewood, if we were going to sell logs, they had to be the best quality logs money could buy. We definitely did not want to buy kiln dried product from eastern Europe like most of the UK suppliers do. We wanted to produce our own, do it all ourselves.
We also decided that whatever processes we set up to provide this product it had to be environmentally friendly and to utilise all the different types of hardwoods and softwoods we produce as a by product of our tree surgery operations.
We decided to buy a biomass boiler. The initial outlay for these boilers is high but we qualified for the RHI scheme (Renewable Heat Initiative) that Ofgem offered. If you can find the money to buy the boiler Ofgem will sign you up to a scheme that lasts 20 years and pays you a small amount of money every quarter for the heat you produce. Its an incentive scheme designed to promote boilers that release very little harmful deposits (such as carbon) into the atmosphere compared to traditional electric or gas boilers. The boiler we decided to buy had one of the lowest emission profiles on the market. So this satisfied our environmental approach.
The idea was to chip up all the softwood we produce such as conifer, pine, poplar, spruce and willow and that’s what the biomass boiler will burn to produce the heat we need to heat the kiln up to the temperature required to effectively dry the logs.
All the hardwood we produced such as oak, ash, beech, birch, cherry to name but a few would be kept in a different pile. This would be split into logs, loaded into stillages and then placed into the kiln to dry.
The lovely dry logs would come out of the kiln a week later and be delivered to local residents all over surrey.
What could go wrong?
Well, quite a few things as it turned out.
The kiln wasn’t big enough. We had a 20ft shipping container. It didn’t hold nearly enough logs.
We bought a bigger kiln. We got a 40ft shipping container.
The new bigger kiln wasn’t getting up to a suitable temperature, it needed to be above 50 degrees. We were only achieving about 40 degrees, not hot enough to encourage the moisture out of the logs. It was too big and our small biomass boiler wasn’t designed to heat a space this big.
So we insulated the sides, the top and the underside to help retain the heat. It worked. We got the internal temp back up to around 60 degrees.
The kiln was very good at encouraging the moisture to migrate out from the logs but then very poor at extracting the moisture out of the kiln, which turns out to be a very important thing. To dry logs properly you need to get a few basic things right. You need a large volume of linear airflow travelling through the logs and you need high temperatures. The linear air flow is needed to pick up and transport the moisture away from the logs so they continue to lose more moisture. If the air in the kiln reaches saturation point and no new air is coming in the drying process stalls. Our kiln resembled a tropical rain forest after a few hours!. There was literally water dripping off the roof and it was 65 degrees in there so the water was hot!!. This meant the logs were going mouldy and not drying properly. If anything, they were worse than before they went in! Luckily, we had a really great team of plumbing engineers to help us overcome these problems. We upgraded the kiln to incorporate a much improved heat recovery and moisture extraction system.
De-stratification turns out to be the next problem. Never heard of that word before?, neither had we. The dried logs varied in quality. Most were lovely and dry but some, (about 20%) weren’t quite good enough. So we placed temperature monitors in the kiln on the floor, halfway up and at the top. The difference in temperature was amazing. The floor temp was only about 40 degrees and the roof temp was in the mid 60’s!. This, apparently is called de-stratification as the hot air quickly rises. The logs at the bottom of the stillages weren’t drying properly due to the low temp.
So we sourced some big fans from a specialist supplier in Sweden. They were the only company we could find that produce fans that work at high temperatures. We mounted these fans on metal stands to sit right at the top of the kiln near the roof and blast all that lovely hot air downwards. It worked. This helped level out the temperature across the kiln. We had logs that dried evenly and properly wherever they sat in the stillages.
We finally had a system that worked properly. We were producing top quality kiln dried logs, albeit not exactly on an industrial scale, but top quality none the less.
We have now pretty much what we set out to do. We sell kiln dried mixed species hardwood in 3 different bag sizes. A small bag with 100 logs, a medium size bag with 200 logs and a large bag with 300 logs. As far as we know, we are the only supplier that literally counts the logs into the bags. When we were trying to research our competitor’s prices we found it really difficult. Some sold in bags with approximate amounts of logs, some sold in volume, some sold in loose loads, some sold in weight and some sold bags that didn’t even indicate what quantity was in them or how big the bags were!. It was all very unclear. We wanted to be completely transparent and the only way we could think of was to guarantee the exact quantity of logs per bag. So if you buy a bag of logs from Logworld you’ll know exactly how many logs you’re getting for your money. Simple.
We noticed that if our lovely kiln dried logs weren’t sat around for a while the quality slowly but surely starts to deteriorate. That is to say the logs start to absorb moisture from the atmosphere and their moisture content creeps up a little. The logs are still loads better than naturally seasoned logs but there is a slight compromise on quality. So we don’t keep large stock. We pretty much dry to order. A typical batch of logs takes about a week to dry in the kiln and then they are bagged and delivered to the customer within one week, ensuring the logs reach the customer in tip top condition.
We impose quite a hefty delivery charge for any orders outside of our local free delivery area as we want to try to keep our operations as local as possible to our yard in Buckland, Reigate. This is to help manage our carbon footprint. All our hardwood and softwood from our tree surgery operations is produced locally. We want everything kept local.
So if you live in KT, RH or SM postcodes and you have a log burner, open fire, fire pit or pizza oven then please give us a try. You’ll get a top quality product which has been produced locally.
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