Posted By Graham Bullough In the early 1980's a company called Country Crafts, based in Dorset, made a reasonably priced patented kit by which two 45 gallon oil drums could be converted (with suitable precautions for cutting the drums) into a cheap, simple and effective heater. One drum, laid on its side, was fitted with legs and a door to become a combustion chamber. The other drum, connected to and mounted above the combustion drum, was fitted with a long flue and served as a heat exchanger. Fuelled by wood, sawdust or any other dried bio-mass, such heaters provided a very useful way of consuming waste material to provide warmth for workers especially in traditionally unheated or poorly heated places like rural sawmills and joineries. Purchasers of kits included the Balmoral Castle estate and also the MoD who wanted to heat barracks in the Falklands using peat as fuel. However, the last known telephone number and address I have for the company or its successor (under the name of Drumheat Ltd at Newport in South Wales) are obsolete and I can't find it on the internet. Does anyone know if the company still exists or if the kits are now made and supplied by another company? As over 40,000 kits were sold by late 1983 some of the heaters probably remain in use. Therefore, has anyone encountered "Drumheat" heaters in recent years? If so, did you become aware of any perceived/known snags or think they were generally good and worthy of being promoted or resurrected.

Posted By Graham Bullough Peter - Thanks for your response. I've looked at the article on the website address you gave. Unfortunately it is a technical/scientific paper concerning large volumes of biomass and its use in large automated industrial combustion plants, and does not answer my queries about "Drumheat" which is/was a very simple manually-fed heater. After encountering it through work with joineries and sawmills in Eastern Scotland in the 1980's I tended to recommend it to other similar premises. Some owners and managers initially said that their insurers were bound to reject it because it could "pose a fire risk". However, they soon changed their tune when I asked whether their insurers were concerned about them and their employees smoking in areas with accumulations of readily combustible waste. As well as improving general housekeeping the system probably helped to reduce the overall fire risk by consuming combustible waste in a controlled beneficial manner. Judging from the low response to this thread it seems that IOSH Forum readers generally have not encountered the "Drumheat" system, so I intend to ask elsewhere, probably in a suitable woodworking/sawmilling trade journal when I identify one.