PART 1 23/10/10

During 2009 within JF Joinery and jfjflooring we decided that we wanted to form a policy of NO waste from our workshops. In other words every peace of hardwood timber would have to be used for a useful purpose.

It seemed sensible to tern all our sawdust and shaving that are all hardwood into a heating fuel.

We had already seen and heard about briquettes,heat logs,eco logs for wood burning fires and wood burning stoves. Most of these are either imported from abroad or are very poor quality and dusty and in many cases have thousands of road miles on them before they arrived with the end user.

We wanted to produce a heat log, hardwood briquette or eco log of better quality and from purely a waste product. It also had to be classed as Carbon Neutral.

Over the next couple of weeks I intend to tell the story and the pitfalls that we fell into. I also will be giving away some of the secrets on how our briquettes have now gained a name of simply the best you can purchase today. For the time being here is the link to www.devonbriquettes.co.uk for more information

Part 2

To produce the best burning briquettes that are slow burning yet give out the best heat,a hardwood waste has to be used. The eco log or briquette needs to be a highly compressed material made up from sawdust and planner chips from our joinery waste. No additives such as glue etc have been added as we wanted to be able to sell our heat logs as an eco friendly product. A natural reaction with the hardwood when it is highly compressed holds the fibres of the wood together.

We have been through a long process with purchases of three different makes of machines in order to manufacture a briquette or heat log to meet this standard. There are several machines on the market that just do not produce a constant quality briquettes and certainly are far from trouble free. We certainly have learnt this from past experience the hard way.

Being a small family joinery company employing four or five joiners we soon found out that we had to purchase a machine that was of top quality if we were going to sell quality briquettes. With this type of investment we then realised that the only way this machine would pay its own way would be to bring in further sawdust from other joinery companies within our local area to keep this machine running greater hours of the day.We can now produce about forty to fifty bags a day and each bag weighs about fifteen to seventeen kilos / bag although we do not sell our briquettes on weight but just per bag.