Oxfordshire Woodland Group

The visit made to NT Coleshill, West Oxfordshire on Saturday 31st August 2013

provided an opportunity to inspect the Grade II* listed model Farm buildings and barn together with the nearbye steel framed firewood drying and storage barns.

Adjacent to the barn is a small boiler room in which a Froling air downdraft furnace and warm water accumulator has been installed. The payback period for this wood fired boiler installation is estimated by the NT to be 6 years, however this takes no account of the cost of the capital equipment required to harvest and process the firewood, the existing storage facilities needed to dry and season the wood, nor the operating costs for labour & fuel involved to process this fuel.

The logs are harvested from NT Coleshill policy woodlands and are extracted using a tractor forwarder fitted with a hydraulic lifting arm.

The logs are brought to a collection point in the woodland where they are manually cut to length using a chainsaw. These billets are then stacked ready for cleaving into firewood logs using a hydraulically powered log splitter. The Log splitter is PTO driven and mounts onto a McCormick X60.40 tractor that cost in the region of £45,000.

The logs are split using a Browns 10 Ton hydraulic ram log splitter that costs in the region of £1000.

Not seen on the day was the trailer needed to collect and deliver the split firewood to the firewood drying and storage barns.

It would have made more sense to conduct this whole operation adjacent to or in one of the large storage barns which would have eliminated the need for a delivery trailer and double handling of the firewood, however firewood is also supplied to the local NT Coleshill community homes and so a trailer would be needed to provide this service.

All in all it seems that a subsidised marginal costing approach has been adopted in calculating operating costs and thus the payback period quoted is likely to be over optimisitic.

Ken Hume - Executive Trustee - Oxfordshire Woodland Group