Gathering Winter Fuel

Our county is very green. If you don’t like green you had better not come. I am not referring to politics but to the many woods and green pastures we have. That said our communities try to be green and wood burners of various types are popular. Likewise growing your own vegetables and trying to confine shopping trips to either market days or the local shops are other green habits. Although 25% of the nation’s gas passes us by just a few miles away, we don’t have mains gas. Electricity arrived up here in 1963 so solid fuel, especially wood and coal for Rayburn Regents was very popular. There contemporaries are usually oil fired now with bottled gas and electricity being the other choices. We have several heating and cooking facilities. We have storage heaters for background heating, a Clearview wood burner which provides the bulk of our space heating and a fifty year old York Stove. We also have a solar panel. All these sources will soon feeding a five foot tall heat store which has two Economy 7 immersion heaters for times when one or more of the other inputs are not working. We are hoping that our plumbing system which was installed 50 years ago when we had a gravity fed system from a well across the fields will now make more sense. Ever since we went onto the mains in 1977/8 it has been rather eccentric.

The Yorkist was designed to burn house coal, not anthracite, and will heat water, run a main oven, a warming oven, and will convert to an open fire from a closed stove when it has a hotplate. We have a lot of soup and stews in winter as a result. This very efficient miracle was installed before the electric came and when Welsh coal was available. Unfortunately, coal is no longer cheap and has never been green and so we now burn well seasoned wood and dried shredded hedge cuttings. The only problem is keeping it in at night, especially when a strong westerly is blowing. The solution is to use about 250 kilos of coal per winter, but the guilt weighs much more. There are wood fuels manufactured from waste wood but these are still very expensive (barbecue premium really) and so until the price comes down we will still burn a mix of wood and coal in extreme weather.

For this winter we will be trying some Forest of Dean coal. It is a bit greener in that it won’t have come far, unlike some coal which could, it seems, have come from anywhere on the planet. For years I have been searching in vain for any statement of origin on house coal bags. I can hear the less compromising green folk tut tutting from here and I don’t like using even this small amount, much like I am sure many of you don’t like using gas from Quatar or Oil from Alaska, Nigeria and anywhere else. Not to mention the coal fired power stations and nuclear plants that account for much of your electricity bill. But until a good slow burning recycled product arrives at a reasonable price, we have little alternative for our much loved stove when there is a high wind coming at us from off the hill.

It is estimated that some 70% of our woodland is not being managed and that present supplies could be increased by 2 million tonnes. Although wood is not supposed to go to landfill, there is still a lot of wood being wasted. It is particularly distressing to see developers’ and foresters burning timber rather than putting it into the green energy market. We have a lot of such fuel going to waste and such is the stupidity of the system, if you want to make arrangements to collect such material from factories etc you will have to buy a licence to keep within the law.

Meanwhile, as all kinds of alternative fuels are sough, thousands of old houses are wasting fuel and the costs of doing something about it are a major discouragement to occupiers. The answer lies not in meeting demand per se but in reducing it along with reducing waste. This involves both avoiding wasted heat and wasted potential fuel. But all the promoters of environmental tokenism can do is promote wind and nuclear power, while cutting grants and increasing the complexities and costs for those of us who would like to be micro generators. Even simpler, would be a wide spread subsidy for all types of insulation, including double glazing. However, this is unlikely while environmental tokenism stalks the corridors of Whitehall and bankers’ bonuses need to be paid. Even worse, nothing much is said of the water power which powered so many industries before the shift to fossil fuels and the path to global warming was taken.

Dacier