Making wood pellets from wood chips. Anyone?

[candoarms]

Hello folks.

I'm wondering if any of you are currently in the business of making wood pellets for use in pellet stoves, either for your own use, or as a commercial venture.

I have an endless supply of wood chips less than 100 yards from me. The electrical utility company is piling their wood chips and burning them. It's a massive fire and they burn about twice per month. I almost cry when I see all of that potential heat go up in smoke.

The chips they produce come from trees that are interfering with the overhead power lines. The utility workers go out in bucket trucks and clear branches from the power lines continuously. As the branches fall, a ground worker feeds them into a chipper, which then shoots the chips into a dump truck. The chips are then dumped and piled about 100 yards west of my house. The chips are free for the taking. People from all over town come out to get wood chips for their landscaping projects, or for weed control in their gardens, but they don't even put a dent in the wood chip pile. When the pile gets BIG, the utility company sends a man out to the pile to set the entire thing ablaze. The pile often burns for more than a week.

I'd like to explore the possibility of using those wood chips as an alternative home heating source, such as these folks are doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIchXiVE7TM

If anyone here is currently involved with the pellet making process, I'd really like to hear from you.

Thanks in advance.

Joel

 

[Magnus]

If you have a furnest you can burn it as it is.

http://www.stahlsplat.se/Dubbla_100Kw_pellets.JPG

Pellet is made out of saw dust, much smaller fraction than chippers make.

 

[Thor's Hammer]

Making wood pellets from chips involves a huge amount of investment. You need to dry down to about 9%, hammermill them to dust, and run them through a pellet mill. Then you need a cooling line.

Alternatively, you can buy some very neat little pellet mills from China, along with matching tiny hammer mills. Its still the drying process that costs a lot of money though. I guess you could make a small operation with about $20k investment. Google small pellet mills. Plenty of information out there.

You might want to think about a briquette extruder instead, as they make a great product for stoves and suchlike.

Or think about a furnace / boiler that burns woodchips. Google Chiechwitz or Moderator Poland. Some great woodchip burners on a budget.

 

[Porkbrick]

or just do this and pipe it through radiators.
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ruF0ZqXPuaw?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[candoarms]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I already own a large hammer mill. I use it to grind feed for my chickens. With some minor modifications it would easily handle these larger wood chips. Drying down the wood chips would be a much bigger challenge. I'm not quite sure how I'd tackle that one. Something to think about.

Joel

 

[MasterBlaster]

That compost pile is amazing. I wonder how long it lasts?

 

[Porkbrick]

at that size it makes heat for 12 months supposedly.

 

[bonner1040]

How much is something like this?

http://moderator-sp.polandtrade.us/automatic-feeders-for-biomass-burning

 

[MasterBlaster]

I'm checking out the website...

 

[Thor's Hammer]

How much is something like this?

http://moderator-sp.polandtrade.us/automatic-feeders-for-biomass-burning

Roughly $6 -7000

 

[bonner1040]

That seems like a bargain! If someone I knew had one they could get free heat indefinitely since I have an unlimited supply of woodchips (like most treeguys!). I supply one friends firewood, but the logs require processing and splitting etc, dumping chips is easy and loading that thing looks like a piece of cake.

I wonder, roughly how many cubic yards (cubic meters) of chips it would go through in a given week or day per 500sq feet heated (46 square meters)?

 

[Magnus]

Burning wood chip in furness does not require it to be very dry in comparison to firewood.

 

[Thor's Hammer]

1 m3 of chips is approx 250 kgs at 30%mc. 1000 kgs of chips at 30% has about 2900 kwh of energy. So 1 m3 is 2900 X 0.2 tonnes = 580 kwh x boiler efficiency (typically 80 -85%) = 493 kwh. Divide by boiler output at full bore (lets say 25kw) = 19 hours running. Figure on a nice big hopper, say 10 m3, with a spring stirrer auger (pictured below), and you have 190 hours of full output running.