Last week we went up to the woods on a beautiful sunny day for dinner. The oaks are all out in leaf now and it looks fantastic!
In between them there's patches of sunlight reaching the ground, and I used one of them to test out running our woodgas stove directly from a solar panel, with no batteries involved:
The setup used a 10Wp solar panel:
A very basic charge controller (shunt mode rather than PWM, for those who are technical). This is normally used with a battery, but I left that out in this case:
A voltage regulator to give 3V for the stove:
And then the woodgas stove, which ran nicely:
Of course, all the trees in our wood are solar powered too ;-) We went for a walk to look at them, and found that the ride sides we coppiced 18 months ago are springing to life even more:
There's even grass starting to grow in the rides, now that there's some more light there:
Deeper into the wood there are still bluebells around, as they made such a late start this year. Here's a few photos of them...
It's a similar story back near our camp, though this has the benefit of being the third summer after coppicing, and oak thinning too in this case. The ground is positively green now, with new plants and more bluebells that last year:
Nice to see the Blue Bugle arriving, probably having travelled in from the wayleave:
Of course, the fruit trees needed tending to, though they're awkward to get at because of the fences we made to keep the deer off them while they're young:
I needed to get in there to remove blossoms, so the tree can focus on twigs and leaves instead of fruit this year...
There's more photos to come from the bank holiday weekend in a day or two...
Mike
Sunday, 30 May 2010
The solar-powered woodland
Sunday, 26 April 2009
Friday in the woods
Friday was the last day my family were visiting, so we had dinner up in the woods in the evening. The wayleave is now dense with leaves:
and there's all kinds of flowers out on the ground, such as Violet:
and Blue Bugle:
Also, our mystery tree has now flowered, thus confirming its identity as Crab Apple. I'll be interested to see if there are any fruit, as I've never noticed them before...
As we were cooking for six adults and my nephew Joshua:
we needed several fires going. There was the one we were sat round, which my brother Andy had started in the afternoon before we got there, and hot coals from that were used to light the kelly kettle to make drinks. I was also trying out my new pot stand attachment for it:
With so many of us we couldn't fit dinner in one saucepan, so we had the big one on our normal cooking stove:
and a smaller pan on my shiny new woodgas stove:
You'll notice it has a tiny battery pack - this supplies a controlled amount of air to gasify wood at the bottom of the stove, and more air at the top of the stove to burn the gas produced , just under the pan:
I'll do a post just on this stove soon, including how to use it.
After dinner our neighbour Andrew called in to collect some wood for a caravan trip he's going on, so he can have a few camp fires on the way. He had a quick go with the air rifle while he was there:
but seemed surprised he hit the tin can first time:
Anyway, he got into splitting logs after that:
and we loaded up his truck.
My nephew had to go home to sleep, as he's only little, but my parents stayed up with us until dusk, sat round the fire.
and we left with the sound of the Tawny Owl echoing through the woods.
Mike
