As I am frugal person, a nice way of saying I am tight. If there is an opportunity to save a bit of money I don't mind putting in a bit of extra work in e.g. I cycle to work instead of drive saving me the fuel costs.
Since having an open fire at home I have saved wood from the garden. This means I don't have to buy in wood to start a fire or indeed to have a wood fire running at almost zero cost.
As I prune back trees, vines or even the raspberry canes in the garden there are two bags that are used. One bag is for the bits that can be used to light or make a fire. The other one is anything for the compost bins, as I try to compost as much as possible.
If I am cutting back fruit trees, they now all go in their own bags. In the shed there are several bags of Apple, Cherry and Plum wood. This gets used in the wood fired oven sparingly to add nice flavours to the food being cooked in it.
The house recently had a new roof put on it as there was no felt under the tiled roof and the slates all needed replacing. All the original battoning was retained and has been cut into 30cm lengths to help light fires. This wood was some kind of hard wood and burns very well slowly releasing heat that would otherwise ended up in a skip somewhere.
The company I work at has a few pallets delivered weekly with products on, these are surplus to requirements. So when I do drive in I fill up the car with pallets which are used as firewood. All the pallets used for firewood must be untreated, as some pallets are treated with nasty chemicals. See below
Source: Fix.com Blog
The company I work at has a few pallets delivered weekly with products on, these are surplus to requirements. So when I do drive in I fill up the car with pallets which are used as firewood. All the pallets used for firewood must be untreated, as some pallets are treated with nasty chemicals. See below
Source: Fix.com Blog
Anything that has been cut from trees will need to dry and season before it can be used on the fire. So normally what I am cutting back now will not be used for at least a year, so it is very dry and burns well. A cheap wood storage solution that we have in the garden at the moment is a plastic greenhouse/pollytunnel from Ebay. A 3m x 2m model is about £60 or even cheaper a few pallets to keep the wood off the ground and a tarp over the top of the wood to keep the rain off.
As you store the wood its worth storing it in similar sizes, so when you need kindling you can just get a bag of kindling. I keep a plastic dustbin with lid near the house and keep it topped up with seasoned kindling. It saves me getting wet trying to get a bag from under the tarp when the weather is bad.
As you store the wood its worth storing it in similar sizes, so when you need kindling you can just get a bag of kindling. I keep a plastic dustbin with lid near the house and keep it topped up with seasoned kindling. It saves me getting wet trying to get a bag from under the tarp when the weather is bad.
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