We have our bio-diesel in now, we all smell like chip fat!!! It all came from Biofuel (SW) Ltd on 01626 882801 if you wish to know
It seems good on the performance side of things except the vehicles don’t start quite so easily, they do however smell a lot less offensive and produce less smoke.
I’m still not sure on what I’m supposed to do in the middle of winter, I think we can get additives to stop it becoming solid or maybe add some ordinary diesel??? I also am not sure of which of our more modern vehicles we can use it in, we’ve had so many people say we can’t use it because of one reason or another. Anyone have any experience of this stuff??
Finally we are up and running with our lime mortar production. Our yard area is now complete, we have our telescopic handler and 26 tonnes of quicklime to get through. All we need now is some rain to fill our water tanks!!
Grand Designs featured a build using a limecrete floor and also a ‘How Not To’ guide on how to lay it. When the floor had finally hardened it did give a lovely finish but the environmental credentials may not be what you’d think.
Fully cured lime produces only half of the CO2 that the same quantity of cement does, which is great. However, you do have to use at least twice as much of it as cement, maybe not so great.
Cement has its uses, I wish people would stop thinking it is so terrible. It’s made from natural materials, limestone and sand essentially (with a few additives) so is no less natural than lime. It’s biggest problem is that people have mis-used it for many years and covered everything in sight with it. It is also too stong and inflexible to be sensibly used for mortars and renders. It’s great for foundations and structural work though.
For those who want the strength and rigidity, Hydraulic limes are best. For those who need flexibility and very high porosity then putty limes are best, simple!
We have been in contact with a company who produce a block which is made from recycled plasterboard mixed with clay and which slot together. Plasterboard is no longer allowed in landfill because it changes the pH of the groundwater and generally pollutes it so this is a fantastic use for it. We should begin to stock them in the next couple of months hopefully, more info to follow on the Product pages.
These blocks and the other compressed earth blocks we sell form the heat store in our ETH system (see Applications pages) and are to be used primarily for new build applications. We’ve also found a new supplier for our cob blocks. The rather dreary dark grey blocks will be replaced with ones that are a pleasant browny orange colour.
The weather has been superb recently, it makes working in our yard so much more enjoyable, no permanent muddy slurry, hooray! Hope you’re all enjoying it too, long may it last after the awful winter we’ve just had!!
We have almost finished our new yard area now. Hopefully we should soon have enough storage for up to 150 tonnes of lime mortar at any one time. We also have covered storage for 100 pallets so should be able to fit our artic load of quicklime in!!
We’ve also bought a telehandler for moving everything about. All we have to do now is sell more lime mortar to. Any takers??
We also need some more rainwater storage tanks as we shall be using fairly large quantites of water now, can anyone help?? We almost need to fill up a small reservoir.
The government is setting new targets for emissions again, 60% reduction over 1990 levels by 2050.
That’s great but they don’t say how we are realisticly going to acheive it. Removing the standby button from electrical goods isn’t going to be enough and nor is building everything from Hemcrete (though it would help a lot).
Maybe they should be addressing lifestyle changes a little more and reduce our excessive energy consumption.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6444145.stm
We do our usual bit by turning off the TV/DVD at night and have the house full of energy saving bulbs. we recycle and compost our waste, but I can’t help feeling we need to do more. Any Ideas????
I also read today that for each kWh of electricity we consume in the UK 0.55kg of CO2 is produced. We used around 8000 kWh last year in the home and the office, which is 4.4 tonnes of CO2. That’s awful. I need to sell a lot of hemcrete!!!