Seems like a good deal on firewood....

Nice one Rain, we could be up to around 13 x 2m crates and a 20ft container should fit 15 of them given its 33cbm. And for sure contact your family in Poland and see what is available and at what price.

Id say a small order is possible from the Baltic states, would imagine they are packing it into 40 foot containers rather than 20ft but as you say not many will turn away money. The blocker to this though could be the cost of distribution here after they land at a port but I'll find out what I can and get back to the thread with details.

One thing is for sure, firewood is in big demand this winter and we all know what that means for prices

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0904/1320302-energy-crisis-fuel/

Looks like the idea has building momentum. Would a central drop off point work with people organising their own transport along the lines of the coal warehouse model. Would two crates fit in a car trailer/pickup. We've used Prompto Despatch previously to ship stuff various distances and they've worked out quite reasonable.

I would be the exact same in terms of numbers of crates and location.

The 2m3 crates normally weigh in at ~880Kg, so two of those would be say 1.8 tonnes with a bit of safety margin thrown in. They tend to be tall and thin and would tip fairly rapid in a pickup or trailer I'd say. I've seen some of the ones in Poland be just over the 1m3 height, but with a much larger footprint. Any time I've gotten delivery they were on a truck with either a crane or a forklift.

Hi @Muahahaha I’d be interested in 2 if a reasonable price. Based outside Dundalk.

not to torpedo your plans but your pricing is a bit off, 20ft container from Riga to Dublin is about €2K port to port, plus haulage at either end, min €200 x2.. Got rates last week off one of the biggest operators in that market.. So for shipping your looking €2500ish with 1 drop in Dublin only.. might get a bit cheaper with MSC if you aren’t in a hurry!

Also, you will struggle to fill a 20ft if the crates don’t stack neatly, and will run the risk of having a load of loose timber when you open the doors( if it doesn’t all fall out!)

and finally, you need to have some way to offload a container within 2 hours. Moving 30 crates weighing nearly a tonne a pop is a lot of work.. In the past we delivered fodder in containers to farms(that would have been used to handling bales) and not 1 of them got a full container offloaded without some issues and without incurring waiting time charges(€50/hourish)

I use this company ^^^ and they are very good

You can put me down for 2 crates as well. North Kildare.

@bailey99 @Heighway61 @antomack @Cape Clear @antomack @oleras @stooge @RainInSummer @db @Fighting Tao

Ok some companies got back to me and unfortunately it is not good news either for the Riga to Dublin leg or getting them onwards to peoples houses.

Of three companies for the shipping two got back to me for a 20ft container, one was 3,400 and the other 2,400. That company can also do a 40ft container for 3,750 which works out a bit cheaper per crate. Id almost think with many wanting 2 crates and some more than that we could fill a 40ft container (they are 66 cubic meters so about 30 2m3 crates would fit) but even at that the shipping would be over 100 euro per crate just landed to Dublin Port.

But then the second leg it gets even more expensive. The long and short of it is as people are spread all around the country the costs then go way up. The cheapest quote I could get was an eyewatering 150 per crate dropped, another company was 180. A third company (Pallet Express) I spoke to wouldnt quote becasue of the weight and bulk of these crates and becasue independent lorry drivers they contract dont want to be driving around dropping one or two items at a time, its vastly inefficient for them with the cost of diesel at the moment.

So sorry to get hopes up but I tried. One thing I would say is if anyone here has friends or family who work in supply chain/logistics then if you could ask them to use the search software available to them to see if they can find a better price. But I get the impression the real blocker to a group buy is distributing it to lots of places across Ireland, an idea like this would be more feasible if everyone was within a 20 or 30 mile radius and then you could find an independent lorry driver to do the whole lot on a per drop basis. Thats effectively what the fuel merchants are doing, getting large loads to their yards and then distributing them to a small geographical area in their area.

Fair play to you for putting the work into this. The effort alone deserved a better outcome. I'll be talking to a couple of local farmers over the weekend to see if I can source some timber from them. It looks like people have bought logs as a substitute for coal and given that the crowd in Drogheda have stopped importing the crates it puts greater pressure on supply. I've recently been looking at the below facebook group which is mainly UK based posters. A fair bit of information gets shared in terms of what woods are suitable for burning in stoves etc.

Wood Burners and Seasoning Group | Facebook

Fair play @Muahahaha

i have enough wood for a few months already in the shed, but I plan on buying another 2m before the price gets too high. Is ok to keep it outside for a few months and pallet wrap it? I’m waiting for another shed to be installed but it would be December at the earliest.

doesn’t say what hard wood it is and I wouldn’t pay €230 for 2 1tonne bags never mind the €290 it’s the worst way to buy firewood in my opinion

Thanks out of my range also. Am probably looking at adding some sort of a lean to on an existing barna shed.

Thats a difficult question to answer without knowing how well insulated your house is, the space it is heading. They stove make and model, and how efficiently it runs. It really is very subjective.

But all that aside, the question I have for you is have you lit and heated with the stove in recent years and how did you find it (ideally with firewood) . If you were able to maintain a good temperature without burning masses of fuel without much support grom your other hearing system that would tell me your stove is efficient and/or your have a well insulated house. In this scenario it makes sense to use the stove. If not the 1.2m won't last that long and you may as well be burning money.

A high efficiency stove (jotul or morso etc) in a well insulated house will heat much of the property using little fuel for many months of the heating season.

Now I'm different to you in that I have my own close to infinite firewood supply but I've more or less heated three different homes almost exclusively with firewood for last 12 years or so.

One of those is where my mother lives on farm and getting wood to house is trivial; the other two were where I have lived and it involved a bit of work but no big deal.

The energy rating on the house would be C2 at best (it was just tested last month for selling) to maybe C3/D1. All small houses circa 90m-120m.

A few things to note

*we are all soft as fcuk from being reared in centrally heated houses

*all your house doesn't need to be warm; living space is fine and cool bedrooms are not a bad idea

*lots of houses, even recently built can leak air a lot around doors and windows. Assuming you have proper ventilation for your stove and CO alarm you could gain a lot in terms of comfort with checking door/window latching mechanisms, caulking windows for very very small money.

*Regularly clean your stove; a 5mm coating of ash on inside of stove will have an decent effect of stove efficiency.

*Don't buy expensive kiln dried wood and then store in some damp corner of your yard; if possible have inside near stove (obviously not too near) for a few days before burning.

*learn how to utilise your stove to maximise efficiency.

*Going forward buy your wood in the spring when cheapest and ideally in bulk (or unprocessed if you have space/facilities).

I would have quite a few local people buying wood of me and the smart ones buy when I text them and about to take unsplit fresh wood out of the forest. Typically €80/box v €150/box and even better if in lengths. Its only a hobby/forest management for me but people will get better value for most suppliers like that.

If you store it properly; split to expose as much surface area as possible, well vented and covered on top you'll get to 20% MC pretty quickly, which in my experience hasn't caused issues with really heavy use eg my stove was lit about 4 times between Xmas and St Patricks Day!

Some good info in this book

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/16/norwegian-wood-lars-mytting-man-made-things-trees-robert-penn-review

Anyone recall how much these crates were last year?

https://www.coopsuperstores.ie/Fuel--Heating/Fuel-Storage/Oil-Tanks/Calor-Crate-Of-Kiln-Dried-Beech-Logs-430kg-0051916

My first choice would be ash, followed by or beech. Oak can be hard to light and birch burns really quickly.

I've burned nothing but this for four years in my stove. Kiln dried only though, it's far from difficult to get lit.

Ditto, put an order in last week and got a text the next morning asking if wanted to go on the wait list as they had no wood crates of any type in stock for the foreseeable. I ordered a crate of birch from Noblewood instead.

what price was noblewood? And what did you get?