Life goes on - Summer 2021

Yes. Shoulder season, weirdness.
I was almost ready to put in the second layer of internal thermal brick to tune down my big wood stove to summer-use. Then using the saved back short lengths wood.
Now clear and wonderful days here means COLD and clear nights. And car windows frost scraping every morning. Ice breaking on all of the animals waters.
Nope. Not yet time for woodstove summer tune downsizing.
S.U.

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Joep, you probably know by now I like picking. Whenever someone complains about that there’s not enough time for this or that, I tell them I have a trick to offer - Speed up! - Hurry! :smile:

The Mazda earned its keep today. Made four 25 mile roundtrips, pulling the trailer. Each trip the trailer was loaded with a 1.5 m3 bag of firewood for a customer. Burned almost three full hoppers of chunks.
The pic shows stopping at the roadside refueling and dumping ash and hopper juice.

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Haha, thats ok. My wife thinks I have adhd and wants to give me some pills. I dont trust her. You never know. WOT all the way, always. Can’t turn that handle twice.

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How do you dump your ash when it is hot!
I always let it cool to cold ash.
Bob

Bob, I have just a rubber cap on the cyclone dump container. Pretty safe to open when there’s still a slight positive pressure.
I don’t have a cleanout door on the gasifier. Both char and dust are caught in the cyclone.

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Oh thats right, I forgot. And a no grate gasifer.
Bob

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Last week was a twinkle of New Hope. But when Easters came, Winter Striked Back. Hopefully we would look forward to Return of The Spring. :nerd_face:

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Today is a beautiful winter morning, Chris changed the subject too quickly :grinning:, we will see what the consequences of frost will be.


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Spring time, time to rinse the pollen off of all the cars on the lot. Last year we couldn’t get rid of cars but now we can’t hold onto any! Today in Detail there was an early 00s Suburban with 230k miles! Looks brand new though. Talk about desperation.

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Just to clarify how bad it is, we used to have two or three rows of the pickup trucks. Now we have 4 new ones ready to be sold. Used cars outnumber the brand new ones.

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Apparently Scotts Foundation Soil Improver contains biochar (along with volcanic ash. ) It says it is pH neutral but they don’t say they are doing anything to the biochar.
https://www.scotts.com/en-us/products/mulch-soil-garden/scotts-foundation-soil-improver

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I suspect that if you were to add fertilizer at the same time as raw char, it would probably not need to be inoculated. I have added raw charcoal to my garden before, and the plants suffered for it. I need to find a good source of manure, because I have like 2 cubic yards of charcoal that I need to do something with!

I assume this is fines, because we have a lot of char gasifiers but…
You can innoculate it with compost tea and our local hydroponics store gives away some stuff which i think is essentially compost tea with the aerobic bacteria.

Interesting spark plug test.

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They are out of the pulstar ones for the vehicle I need to think about replacing plugs in. :frowning:

So I am not following you here are you saying that the dealership can’t get new vehicles now? I remember seeing something on DW News a while back about a shortage or micro chips and it slowing down the automotive industry. I didn’t think much about it at the time.

GM stopped production in Canada because of the chip shortages. I don’t know about anyone else, besides ford/vw/bmw are citing EVs won’t be made because of chip shortages.

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Yup the Joy’s of just in time manufacturing. That was what I thought it must be. I remember when we had to freeze inventory in the warehouse as an automotive supplier it was full panic mode. I think we where hours from shutting down a Toyota line before we got fresh product that passed quality control. I don’t miss that industry at all.

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Just about everything that runs internal combustion with fuel injection is on hold, backorder, and froze right now. At work we can’t get new forklifts they are 6 months out and backorder, can’t buy used ones they have all been bought up as well. Can’t get big rigs or small trucks (freightliner, peterbilt, kenworth,) everything is 4-6 months off because of the chip shortage

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