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LadyG

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10 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

Maybe he soaks them in old engine oil. That would probably get them to light! 

 

 

Maybe he does but I'm not going to mess about with tea bags and flammable liquids, though I have used a light smear of cooking oil to get my hardwood logs to burn when I am just starting from cold. It's convenient and clean 

 

 

Edited by LadyG
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12 hours ago, LadyG said:

So that's you sorted two days a year?

I get them from the garage I used to own, most cars have them nowadays. As winter comes on the stove remains on 24/7, but I have a front  stove I light occasionally, if it's very cold or I have been away from the boat

10 hours ago, MtB said:

 

 

Maybe he soaks them in old engine oil. That would probably get them to light! 

 

 

They come pre soaked and dry plus free! Really do work well, they ignite anthracite without wood additions 

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Interesting all these methods of lighting a fire ! I just roll up and knot a couple of sheets of towpath Talk, put 3 or 4 bits of kindling on top then  some bigger bits of wood then light the paper with the bottom door of the squirrel open. I then place about half a dozen bits of Excell on top and close the top door. When I think the wood is burning, the bottom door is closed and the vent is used to adjust the rate of burning.

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14 hours ago, Ronaldo47 said:

The cast iron pot-bellied stove that used to provide the heating for one of the signal boxes at the heritage steam railway where I volunteer, was recently condemned. It developed  a crack starting from the boss for the flue and extending part way around the access plate on the horizontsl top  Excessively high temperature produced by burning coal rather than wood was blamed. And now it is impossible to buy a (new) replacement because that type of heater does not meet current regulations, so this winter they will have to make do with a fan heater. 

 

Although we have central heating, we still have an open fire in our living room that we use occasionallly. For getting fires started I use pieces of corrugated cardboard, small thin pieces of wood carefully split  using a sharp hand axe, and the wax covering from Babybel cheeses.  The local industrial park provides an inexhaustable supply of non-returnable wooden pallets that  they are glad to give away, and which  when cut up,  make excellent kindling.

Pallets are very good fuel, the only drawback is all the nails!

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I'm using up a crate of ex MoD hexamine fuel as firelighters. it's the stuff they used to issue to cook on out in the field, but they have changed over to an alcohol fuel and I've got tons of it left. Same stuff as they sell in go outdoors as 'festival cookers'. Goes up a treat, holds a flame for about 5 minutes so things really get going.

 

We also occasionally do a top down light. Put the solid fuel on the bottom of the grate, then the kindling on top. I didn't believe it would work, but it really does as it warms the chimney up fast to get a really good draw then as the burning kindling drops down it ignites the solid. As taught in the book 'Norwegian wood' which is a must for anyone with a proper fire!

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I recently tried a bit of B&Q lumpwood charcoal in one of my fires and it was brilliant. It even stayed in overnight with just a single layer of fuel on the grate.

 

Both of the fires are small (basically made from 8 inch square tube section 5mm steel) with grates so they don't need much fuel to fill the box. 

 

i was pleasantly surprised and went back and got 50kg of the charcoal which is now under the floor as emergency backup fuel.

 

It is quite clean burning with not much smoke and huge heat from just a small amount of fuel.

 

Probably not ideal for continual burning or being left unattended.

 

I tend to relight the fire quite often so it can work ok.

 

Small diameter flues (70mm and 80mm).

 

Clean burning is always welcomed.

 

Shorter sentences needed.

 

Thank you

 

.

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3 hours ago, Stilllearning said:

Pallets are very good fuel, the only drawback is all the nails!

 

 

No, the main drawback is the seriously poisonous fumes the wood creates from the chemicals they are impregnated with, to prevent rotting.

 

Or so I've read on here in the past. Maybe it is rubbish...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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UK pallets haven't been treated with chemicals for years. They are Heat Treated these days.

 

As for the nails they are fine if you have a non moving grate. Of course they will screw up something like a Squirrel which has the rotary riddler but if the fire is basic with a fixed grate and just a wire hook or something for raking the ash down then nails rarely become problematic. Slightly irritating at times if there is a big headed nail which hangs down and catches on the ash tray but not a real problem.

 

 

As for encouraging a fire to start I am a Diesel man. To be precise red diesel in an olive oil sprayer. Just make sure not to spray the pizza with it.

 

Also heard that dried out tea bags soaked in diesel are okay.

 

I do wonder about hair sprays as was quite into hair spray flamethrowers as a teenager but not sure if it is any cheaper than diesel.

 

Atomised diesel is wicked.

Edited by magnetman
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8 hours ago, peterboat said:

I get them from the garage I used to own, most cars have them nowadays. As winter comes on the stove remains on 24/7, but I have a front  stove I light occasionally, if it's very cold or I have been away from the boat

 

There is not a sudden switch from summer to winter, IMHO. In the autumn (and spring) our stove is on during the evening/night/morning, but we want it down or off in the daytime otherwise its too hot (and wastes fuel). So the stove is lit every day. Sure, once winter comes it will be kept running continuously.

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2 hours ago, magnetman said:

UK pallets haven't been treated with chemicals for years. They are Heat Treated these days.

 

The issue might be the resins that softwoods release when burnt. Certainly our sweep reckons that burning softwood means the chimney needs sweeping at least twice as often compared with burning hardwood.

Against that I will happily use a small amount of softwood to get the fire going.

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In another couple of weeks the fire will be on 24/7 so there will be no need for kindling more than once every few weeks, but in the interim weather I've been trying out charcoal as kindling. 

This is a bit nuts if I'm honest, because the lumpwood charcoal lights fairly easily anyway, but I add a few quirts of barbecue lighting fluid over the charcoal just to make sure its all lit quickly and evenly. 

Then I immediately add about 7-10 coal briquettes, allowing spaces for the air to move, and I leave the stove door ajar until I can see the charcoal is glowing red.

Once its glowing, I know the coal will eventually catch fire. 

Due to incompetence I have had a few times when the wood kindling burnt out before the coal was properly lit, and I had to start all over again. 

Charcoal seems to burn longer than kindling wood, and a 5kg bag will be enough to start at least 7-10 fires, so at the moment I'm using it in lieu of wood kindling.

 

 

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On 13/10/2022 at 15:00, MtB said:

No, the main drawback is the seriously poisonous fumes the wood creates from the chemicals they are impregnated with, to prevent rotting.

 

Or so I've read on here in the past. Maybe it is rubbish...

I don't know about pallets, but the preservatives used in modern structural timber are highly toxic when burned. There was a report in the papers a couple of years ago of fatalities when someone had used timber offcuts as fuel for a family barbecue.  

 

I can see that reusable pallets might use preservative-treated timber,  but these days  many are non-returnable, and so probably not worth treating with preservatives.

Edited by Ronaldo47
typo
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Since the demise of creosote, timber is treated with chemicals which may include, arsenic, chromium, and copper.  These are released in the smoke and ash. They are particularly poisonous and can be inhaled or absorbed through contact.  Hence, the advice not to burn treated timber.  Given the amount of smoke and ash that gets everywhere in a boat, it is probably best not to, unless you fancy a little heavy metal or arsenic poisoning.

 

I believe pallets are heat treated nowadays as it is cheaper.

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2 hours ago, Peanut said:

Since the demise of creosote, timber is treated with chemicals which may include, arsenic, chromium, and copper.  These are released in the smoke and ash. They are particularly poisonous and can be inhaled or absorbed through contact.  Hence, the advice not to burn treated timber.  Given the amount of smoke and ash that gets everywhere in a boat, it is probably best not to, unless you fancy a little heavy metal or arsenic poisoning.

 

I believe pallets are heat treated nowadays as it is cheaper.

Sort of, but not quite in that order.

 

The 2003 Biocide Directive resulted in the withdrawal of a lot of treatment options. This included copper chrome arsenate (CCA) which until then had become very common for pressure treatment, and also the more benign copper-based treatments such as Cuprinol, which is Swedish for 'copper oil', the original being a blend of copper naphthanate, linseed oil and genuine turpentine but the final version being copper octanoate in white spirit. Cuprinol treated timber does not produce hazardous products directly when burned, but at particular oxygen levels the copper can catalyse the formation of dioxins, which are distinctly hazardous.

 

Creosote was withdrawn from applications where people were likely to come in contact with it due to certain components in the coal tar being identified as carcinogenic. It is still available for heritage and professional use.

 

Since 2003, the biocides still available have largely been either organic (many based on permethrins) or boron-based. The issue in terms of performance is that the organic biocides degrade naturally so have a fairly short life, and the boron-based ones are water soluble so leach out when exposed to damp. The good news is that the organic type fully combusts and the boron-based type is not as hazardous (borax has long been used as a household cleaner). The withdrawal from the market of most treatments which worked has resulted in a rise of heat treatment because if you aren't going to extend service life you may as well use a cheaper treatment and regard packaging as disposable. Any pallets or similar which are heat treated should be marked HT.

 

The downside is that timber installed in the 1970s-2003 will last decades whereas timber installed after that date will have a much shorter life. Timber installed shortly after 2003 has already reached end of service life in many cases.

 

Alec

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1 hour ago, agg221 said:

Sort of, but not quite in that order.

 

Well, thank-you Ale, I wouldn't claim to be an expert in timber treatment, it is good to know someone is.

 

What happened to the arsenic compounds then

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19 minutes ago, Peanut said:

 

Well, thank-you Ale, I wouldn't claim to be an expert in timber treatment, it is good to know someone is.

 

What happened to the arsenic compounds then

I wouldn't claim to be an expert exactly, but I did lead some development work looking at alternatives to biocides, driven by industrial demand for something better than what was available post-2003 that would not be subject to the biocide directive. By 2007/8 it had become apparent that what was available in the way of biocidal treatments on the market were showing much shorter life than CCA treated timber. The most high profile was a failure on some children's play equipment which had simply rotted straight through and broke off at around 5yrs old. One of my areas of professional expertise is a process called sol-gel which is a way of making ceramics from solution - it works particularly well with silica. There was some work done in Japan in the 1980s which demonstrated that if you impregnate wood with enough silica using sol-gel treatment it ends up unable to take up enough water for fungi to survive and too unpalatable for insects, but unlike a biocide it is chemically inert (equivalent to a glass bottle). This wasn't cost-effective enough to pursue in the 1980s when CCA was cheap and available, but we revisited it in 2009/10 to see whether it was scalable and the changing position made it viable. The answer turned out to be that it was, but because it relied on an alcoholic solution to work, it then fell foul of the 2010 volatile organic content (VOC) directive so it didn't go anywhere as industry deemed it too difficult to introduce, even though complete solvent recovery was possible. Ho hum, on to the next project.

 

The arsenic compounds in CCA are highly toxic and released when burned or when the wood finally rots away. Not a good thing. The main problem is that there is no way for the average person to know whether an old piece of timber has been treated with CCA. You can hazard a good guess - treatment was only used on softwood which needed to last, and mainly on structural timbers, but I wouldn't want to be burning old softwood of unknown origin on an indoor fire and certainly not on a barbeque.

 

Alec

Edited by agg221
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4 hours ago, agg221 said:

Sort of, but not quite in that order.

 

The 2003 Biocide Directive resulted in the withdrawal of a lot of treatment options. This included copper chrome arsenate (CCA) which until then had become very common for pressure treatment, and also the more benign copper-based treatments such as Cuprinol, which is Swedish for 'copper oil', the original being a blend of copper naphthanate, linseed oil and genuine turpentine but the final version being copper octanoate in white spirit. Cuprinol treated timber does not produce hazardous products directly when burned, but at particular oxygen levels the copper can catalyse the formation of dioxins, which are distinctly hazardous.

 

Creosote was withdrawn from applications where people were likely to come in contact with it due to certain components in the coal tar being identified as carcinogenic. It is still available for heritage and professional use.

 

Since 2003, the biocides still available have largely been either organic (many based on permethrins) or boron-based. The issue in terms of performance is that the organic biocides degrade naturally so have a fairly short life, and the boron-based ones are water soluble so leach out when exposed to damp. The good news is that the organic type fully combusts and the boron-based type is not as hazardous (borax has long been used as a household cleaner). The withdrawal from the market of most treatments which worked has resulted in a rise of heat treatment because if you aren't going to extend service life you may as well use a cheaper treatment and regard packaging as disposable. Any pallets or similar which are heat treated should be marked HT.

 

The downside is that timber installed in the 1970s-2003 will last decades whereas timber installed after that date will have a much shorter life. Timber installed shortly after 2003 has already reached end of service life in many cases.

 

Alec

I wondered what had happened to old school cuprinol, I used it extensively in horticultural jobs, tried looking for some recently with no luck and all I could find was the fairly useless "timber stain" type, I did eventually find a proper wood preservative, I forget the brand, which was covered with H&S warnings.

 

I worked alongside a team of fencers in the Lake District for a few months and the old creosote posts (real old school cooked overnight in a vat of creosote) were still solid after nearly 10yrs in the ground but the new copper arsenic types were rotten, plus they were much more brittle than "proper" creosote 

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I have a set ( tipcat and three buttons) of Derek Pearson stern fenders bought and fitted  in 1992.  They are sisal rope on whatever Derek used as middles, probably old tyres.  They were creosoted  when new, and absorbed about  a gallon of creosote, them have been re-treated every year

I have a set ( tipcat and three buttons) of Derek Pearson stern fenders bought and fitted  in 1992.  They are sisal rope on whatever Derek used as middles, probably old tyres.  They were creosoted  when new, and absorbed about  a gallon of creosote, then have been re-treated every year which needs about a Litre.

Good stuff creosote. 

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11 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

But where do you get it from?

 

Agricultural suppliers certainly, builders merchants possibly 

 

 

I'm tempted to buy a few litres just so I can sniff it now and again  :)

Edited by tree monkey
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50 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

Agricultural suppliers certainly, builders merchants possibly 

 

 

I'm tempted to buy a few litres just so I can sniff it now and again  :)

 

If you take a walk to the end of Moor Lane near me, BT have recently installed some new telephone poles which are still.giving off that "newly creosoted" aroma.

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5 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

If you take a walk to the end of Moor Lane near me, BT have recently installed some new telephone poles which are still.giving off that "newly creosoted" aroma.

If you find a strange bloke passed out at the base of the pole it might just be me

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