tbh my stance doesn't have much to do with the accident, it has more to do with trying to feed my log burners for 8 yrs
I started out like many of you with rose tinted glasses and ideas about cheap heating, it never worked out that way.
For the first few yrs we had access to the recycling center run by my mate, I'd go twice a week and fill a trailer after hours from the wood skip, it would take me half a day to process 1 trailer of scrap wood into log size lengths with a chop saw and stack it. I burnt out 3 chopsaws doing this (an awful lot of wood). Then the council H&S brigade put cameras up, which put a stop to climbing in the skips.
I went round collecting pallets and "free" wood from trading estates (getting permission for the pallets etc.) when you've cut up a few hundred pallets come back and tell me you still think it's worth it, cos I'm here to tell you it ain't!
I also have chainsaws and mates in the hedge-laying game who I would help by removing a lot of the brash on really old hedges, taking anything log size with me, burning the rest on site. (this is bloody hard work, half a days labor for a trailer full of logs = 1.2cube you still have to process). After a 2" blackthorn thorn sprung back and went right through my cheek, almost blinding me, I soon gave up on that for a game of "free" firewood.
I had contacts on big building sites, I'd pay a 6 wheeler driver some beer tokens to drop a tipper load of building site scrap wood in my garden, and then spend a week processing it and stacking it. Soul destroying work, lots of little stuff, lots of crap, big bonfires making a mess of the garden to get rid of the ****e, all for a few weeks fuel, it really wasn't worth the effort.
I got the big 32" circular saw run by a lister engine to save buying more chopsaws, and we know how that turned out
When I recovered I employed a climber to come and top a load of big willow and Poplar trees we had on our site (they needed doing anyway), got a bunch of "free" wood from that, climber was paid £100 a day (which is very cheap) I paid a groundie £60 a day to help, and I worked for nothing, for 32 full fecking hard days work, we beat the nearest quote from a tree firm to do it, but only just if you count the cost of the chipper i had to buy to do it (I already had the tractor it fitted on) and it nearly killed me working that hard in Jan when it was bloody freezing. I had to buy a hydraulic splitter for the tractor to process the huge chunks of wood (£500) 1 days splitting gets me 6 cube :/
I have no big barn to put it all in, I can store about 12 cube in my woodstores, so i had to buy 50 cubic meter vented bags (£8 each) I stacked em 3 high (with a JCB) and put a tarp over them after summer to try to keep them dry, it looks like the wood is sweating under there, so it may turn into very expensive compost before I get to burn it :/
I also advertised a free tipping site for tree surgeons, I get about 50 ton of woodchip (makes great compost eventually) and about 6 cube of "rounds" a year, rounds are all the big chunks of wood (usually gnarly knotty conifer but also some nice stuff) that don't fit through the chipper. It's a good deal for them as it saves tipping costs, and it works for me, but it does involve moving/turning/spreading 50 ton of chip a year for a few "free" logs I still have to process, most of which is hard fecking work because it's all the gnarly stuff.
Since I have now lived and learned, I will share the secret of "Cheap" firewood with you.
When the current pile of willow/pop is gone, I will be buying in hardwood chord by the 26 ton load, prices are rising now, I expect to pay about £1800-£2200 for 26 ton, which will equate to about 45 cube, works out about £40-£50 per cube before processing, I'll have invested £4k in a tractor, £500 in a log splitter, about £900 in chainsaws, and about £400 in vented bags, we won't count the quad bike and trailer to move it all, or the JCB to stack the bags up
Yeah, no such thing as free logs, no such thing as cheap logs either.
But being self reliant, and the fact I don't have to take out a mortgage to get gas piped down here = Priceless
free wood? Cheap logs? Wood cheaper than gas? My arse.
And that's before you start cutting bits off yourself :lol: