Can you burn sleepers

How bigs your woodburner? Seriously smash em up and throw em in,burn luvverly and ive never known any ill effects from the gunk they are coated in. You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

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It will also chuck out loads of smoke and tar up the flue. How do I know this? Post by greentwinsmummy » Tue Mar 10, pm sounds rather like the voice of experiance there John.

I must be a mermaid,I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. Post by County4x4 » Wed Mar 11, am The sleepers I've seen with a bitumen treatment have been pretty well covered in the stuff - looks like thick tar.

Should be fairly obvious if they've been creosote treated - they'll be dark brown most of the way through and you'll smell it easily. We did a bank stabilisation job years back and ripped a load of sleepers down the middle with a chainsaw - awful job due to buried nails and stones, and everything reeked of creosote for days afterwards - including us!

There are quite a few threads on here about whether we should burn painted and treated wood or stuff like chipboard etc. My opinion is that you can burn whatever you want IF you don't give a toss about what goes up your chimney for the rest of us to breathe in later on.

I don't know just how hot a domestic woodstove gets - but in industry, many materials like this have to be incinerated at very high temperatures to break down any toxins, and the exhaust stacks are often scrubbed as well. It often strikes me as a bit odd that many people on what is supposedly a "green" forum are more concerned about damage to their appliance or flue liner than what is actually going up it and into the atmosphere.

Just my two penneth Andy. Post by Hairyloon » Wed Mar 11, pm Bitumen is what they use to glue roads together, it is not on the whole used as a wood preservative. Creosote is made by distillation of wood or coal, so if you are worried about burning it, best stick to gas. Blessed is he who expecteth nowt, for he won't be disappointed. Post by County4x4 » Wed Mar 11, pm Hairyloon wrote: Bitumen is what they use to glue roads together, it is not on the whole used as a wood preservative.

Post by jimll » Wed Mar 11, pm As I volunteer at preserved railways I know about some of the stuff that gets dropped on sleepers. You'll probably end with a mix of creosote, bitumen dip, lub oil, point and fishplate grease, coal dust, human effluent, motak, diesel fuel, minerals, and general dirt and grime.

Used railway sleepers may contain asbestos. Fibres from the asbestos brake linings can become trapped in cracks in the sleepers. As long as they are not disturbed they are safe, but they will be released when the sleepers are burnt. The fibres collect and concentrate in the ash in the bottom of a fireplace or heater, and they can be deadly. If anyone has burnt old sleepers in their fireplace or heater they should use and wear protective equipment when cleaning out the ash from the heater to avoid the chance of inhaling these deadly fibres.

Of course not all sleepers will contain fibres, only those in sections of railway track where the trains were using their brakes.