Artificial fire logs

[Nurseandy]

I know a guy who lives alone and very off grid who cuts the top off plastic milk bottles, fills them with sawdust and used engine oil and burns them in his Rayburn. Oddly enough he had a chimney fire a wee while ago

Inventive but it's people like that make it hard for those who do burn well dried clean wood.

Very true.

[shocker]

Charcoal briquettes seem to use some sort of starch glue. Wallpaper paste maybe? I do not have a woidstove so can't play myself but have thought about this a bit too

Tried wallpaper paste with chainsaw dust, not a great result. I think when we pressed out the water we lost the adhesive. Maybe less pressing? Or a longer soak, to break down the wood fibre more?
But we were using chunky chainsaw waste...maybe a finer sawdust would be more porous, as charcoal would be.

[grenfell]

Most of my waste is from things like planing machines and as such is a similar size to chainsaw dust so presumably I would get a similar result. One thing I have noticed is the difference between those chippings loose verses the same chippings stuffed in a box. I try as much as possible put the waste into any old cardboard box , just pushed in by hand , as it's less messy more than anything else. They seem to burn ok , well like a quick burning log really but if I just shovel the waste in it can sometimes burn on the surface but then smoulder as if the air contained in the mix is exhausted . We had a similar experience some time ago trying to fire a bread oven with straw. Put a large handful in and it wouldn't burn , only works if a very small amount was chucked in every few seconds.

[grenfell]

One other thing , which may be straight from the annuls of captain obvious , but if you have a greenhouse then it can be used even in the winter to help the drying process when it's otherwise underused for growing stuff. When we made the paper logs they would be placed on wire drying racks in the greenhouse which would heat up enough to aid the drying and of course greenhouses aren't really airtight so there's some airflow too. The logs would later be moved to a louvered "shed" for drying when space in the greenhouse became more useful for plants. While I don't make the logs anymore I still use the greenhouses in winter for similar purposes.

[Vitamin c]

Most of the homes and farms have open fires in my village and over the years different people have tried paper logs and the like but to my knowledge nobody has ever stuck to it .

The only people to benefit were the folks selling those log makeing kits.

[grenfell]

Yes having tried and given up I'd have to agree and like you don't know anyone who still does it. Seems a shame really as even though we don't get the free newspapers there's still a considerable amount of paper that comes into the house. Incidentally I'm not sure how widespread it is but in Staffordshire we will soon have to seperate paper and card from the general recycling and will be given a bag of around 20 litres capacity in which to put it. The talk on social media is how the bags are too small for the amount of paper waste most people produce which would seem to indicate there is still considerable quanties around.
Last night I fed three buckets of chippings into our woodburner. No processing involved other than shovelling it up off the workshop floor.

[Nurseandy]

The other simpler quicker option for newspapers & magazines is to simply roll two or three of them up together really tight and secure with a piece of wire then throw straight onto the fire.

[grenfell]

So in summary , probably worth it if there's no access to "proper" logs but generally only viable with the minimum of effort put in at the processing side.
One related question. Paper does seem to make an awful lot of ash at least compared to wood. Wood ash is a useful commodity in the garden but is paper ash any good. I know paper is made from wood but my gut feeling is that there's probably less nutrients in the ash and I'm not sure about the presence of inks or whatever...

[shocker]

Ash is good for making lye and thus soap. Paper ash? Not sure as so much paper is made of rags etc, plus all the ink residues may have a chemic effect....anyone?

My organic chemistry is v basic and of the "I will just go look that up" standard

[jansman]

Would this help?

https://sciencing.com/test-ink-newspape ... 99090.html