Corn Furnaces make national news

How dry is that ton of corn? Water costs, twice, you pay for of on delivery and you pay for it in the lowered process efficiency, right?

There's lots of woodchips around but they're wet, too. I assume pellets are a byproduct of some manufacturering process that has already dried the wood.

It's *real* hard to compare processes accurately. That's important at a policy level but if you live in a woodlot or have access to corn, national energy policy takes a back seat.

Hi, Steve. I see you have one of the old fire pots in your Quadra Fire. I had to replace the fire pot in ours a couple of years ago. A hole finally burned through the side after about 10 years. We are the second owner of the place, so the time frame is approximate.

We burn up to 4 ton of wood pellets here in Central Oregon. The cost per ton is up to $170, now. We just started on the second ton this week. We love the pellet stove fire. With socks on, I can put my feet on the side panel and thaw my toes!

Last nite sometime, the oil furnace died. The pump won't turn and the thermostat hs no control of the fan. It runs continually. Had to turn off the CB to stop the cold draft. So the pellet stove or the fireplace is the only heat we have till the oil furnace gets repaired. No, it's not out of oil. Been there and done that! Sure hope the electricity doesn't go out. It's 16 degrees here in Redmond, now.

Three years ago the local farm store and Quadra Fire dealer had a BIG tent sale. The tent and all were from Quadra Fire. When I looked in, there were no Quadra Fire stoves. The store's answere was the factory was completely out of stoves and had a big back log. They were all going to the mid-west to be used with corn. Guess they finally got cought up.

Paul

It's supposed to be below 15%. If not, the corn will start to mold, and it won't burn well.

When the wood arives at the pelletizing plant, they grind it into sawdust, then dry it. Then make pellets.

Sorry to hear they are charging you so much more for pellets. I have been getting mine from the local TrueValue hardware store for the last 3 winters. The price for "Clean Burn" pellets have ranged from 124/ton to the present

139/ton.

I have shopped around at HomeDepot and other outlets and couldn't match the local TrueValue price. (maybe it is because he sells a few stoves, on the side. The Much Higher prices has been from the Stove and Fireplace store and they often claim they don't sell by the ton or they charge more because they deliver (and if they deliver, they want to service your stove while they are there).

I live at near sea level and the local temp. are seldom below 25-30 degrees, even on the coldest winter days. I also turn the stove off or down very low at night or if I'm the only one in the house. (sweaters are cheaper than pellets.)

I had to replace the igniter the other day and the store ask if I had a ceramic or steal fire pot. When I told them that I still had the original ceramic pot, they were surprised. The claimed most all the original Quadra Fire stoves had been upgraded because of breakage or burn through of the ceramic. My stove is one of the originals since it doesn't have the pellet flow "gate" that was introduced later. I have added this and it helps get the fire to run at a lower flame (too much heat and it ends up going up the flue).

I also have a heat pump but only run the fan to help circulate the warm air from the living room, where the stove is at.

Go to hear that someone else enjoys their Quadri Fire as much as I do.

Steve

Wood pellets, if stored properly, will be around 5% moisture. They must be stored in a dry location even though they are in a plastic bag. These bag have small holes for some reason. "Moisture Is Your " and can lay waste to a ton over night in the back of your pickup.

I was just re-reading the bag of some Clean Burn pellets. The ash content is

1/2% from this vendor. The BTU is 8200/LB. For my house, I use about one 40# bag for 24hrs. (40#/24=1.67LB/hr or 8200X1.67=13667BTU/hr ), FWIW.

Steve

Generally I like those in concept. Chip type anyway - corn is fine also.

I'd have an inverter on a battery on a charger - or a UPS large enough to last blackouts...

Hard to turn the screw to crank fiber to the fire. Wish there were thermo couples on the stack to generate the power to turn the screw! That might be an idea. Then a small startup battery would do it in a blackout.

Martin Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder

Steve wrote:

I got a friend that grinds up old pallets. He sells the wood chips to the co gen plant. Im not sure what he gets a ton but i know its not too much. In the warmer months he dyes them and sells them for mulch.

John

I can't offer any specific cites because as far as I know the Department of Energy doesn't test wood & corn stoves for efficiency like oil & gas furnaces/boilers. There are only manufacturer's claims of efficiency, but no objective standard that I know of. For oil & gas there is the DOE AFUE test standards.

I would imagine a wood/corn furnace would have issues with contolling excess air (reduces efficiency), off cycle losses, and actually cycling the unit on & off to maintain a steady temperature. These factors are easily controlled with oil/gas, not so with solid fuels. Can't imagine operating a solid fuel boiler in the house unless your going to have a full time engineer adjusting the fire, and extra relief valves! Oil/gas are easily cycled on/off to meet the load.

A friend of mine had a wood pellet stove in his hunting lodge and I certainly was impressed, it looked like a little blast furnace. But when I hear claims about how much money is being saved I get skeptical, because you need compare apples to apples. Keep in mind oil/gas furnaced/boilers have had much more research & development towards improving efficiency.

Tony

Any furnace should get its air from an outside source. You already paid to heat the air inside the house at most a 95 percent efficency. The outside air is part of the flame so it could be considered to be 100 percent heat transfer. You can get kits for your oil burner to burn outside air. Also a guy I know put a kit on his burner and also a damper to stop the air flow when the furnace isnt running to keep the heat in the firebox and flue. He is working up data on the change of efficiency now. He has to run it a couple of months to get some good data.

John

you need to get a good hot fire going to burn up the cresote in the chimney before it gets a big accumulation. If you got an old chimney with cracks in it, the creosote will leak through and catch on fire on the outside and set the house on fire. A good chimney can stand a creosote chimney fire but I would not recommend it.

John

You should remember, you need to run a combustion blow as well and with a third hand (spouse) you crank the convection blower.

My stove has two combustion blowers, one blowing air through the fire pot and another to draw a vacuum on the whole combustion chamber and draft up the flue.

The reality is, for the automatic combustion pellet stove, it will take a good size battery to keep the controls and blowers going, not to mention the igniter.

Steve

Outside air avoids air infiltration, but burning with cold air reduces combustion efficiency. It's an old engineering problem from steam- and other subfields of combustion engineering. Preheated air makes for a more efficient system.

In a house, using already-heated ambient air, as you say, is bad economy. Also, burning inside air draws in air from outside -- infiltration, which knocks the hell out of your overall heating efficiency.

I thought it was worth pointing out that there is an engineering tradeoff, as there so often is, but that it works out in favor of burning outside air.

If you burn softwood, burning with cold air can really foul up your chimney because of incomplete combustion of tars, unless the system is designed for it.

-- Ed Huntress

Preface: If any of this sounds defensive, it's because I have just been down this road on another forum.

it took me a whopping 0.14 gallons of diesel per bushel. Add to that

0.04 gallons of LP. Hardly significant. That accounts for ~27000 BTUs of the potential ~392,000 in a bushel. Leaves 365000 BTU per bushel net. A gallon of fuel is only 140,000 BTU. That means we have around the equivalent of 2.5 gallons of diesel fuel left yet.

Anhydrous Ammonia is a direct product of natural gas. It is manufactured by injecting steam into natural gas and then refined from there. I finally took the time to look it up. This doesn't really account for very much. Using the average of 33.5M BTU natural gas to produce 1 ton of NH3, this is only another 14k BTU per bushel of corn. From my previous post, that still leaves 351k BTU net gain per bushel.

The only factor I can't prescribe a "energy cost" to is pesticides. FWIW, I apply 16oz to an acre so it can't be terribly significant.

As to how this compares to say rapeseed or other crops I don't know.

I don't want to get into the subsidies thing, but I will say this. The reports that corn is heavily subsidized are largely overblown. Unless someone can show me hard numbers (and where to collect my check) I stand by that.

Really?

Where?

I've always thought the numbers used to defeat corn as a fuel were bunk, but I haven't had the personal experience to prove it. Thanks for your post.

Many times when I see an article claiming a net energy loss, they are using figures required to make ethanol from corn. Those figures will include the fuel cost to transport the corn to the elevator, the cost to auger it to a train, dry the corn, then add water cause it's too dry, ship it off by train, heat it to produce ethanol, make tires for the trucks and tractors, asphalt for the roads, and let's not forget the petroleum based soap the farmer used last week to wash the corn dust from his face.

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 22:00:31 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, John quickly quoth:

Perhaps it's a requirement so the fuel doesn't consume itself too quickly. That would reduce its efficiency.

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:45:47 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "Tom Wait" quickly quoth:

One of my vendors has to import hemp fabric as all hemp is illegal to grow in the USA, even the non-lethargic stuff. It triples the price for him and he just loves that.

Exactly. But try to use the same argument for/against oil/wood/whatever. "Oh, well that isn't relevant/important". ????? Interesting double standard.

The reports for ethanol are generally based on old data and skew towards the bottom of the effeciency scales. There have been major advancements in the yields of ethanol per bushel. There has also been development in "producer" variants of field corn that are higher in starch so yield higher levels of fermentables and accordingly higher yields of ethanol.

This is an area I've got a significant interest in. I unfortunately don't have the time to do real research into the area, but alternative uses for field corn are something that the US needs to research. The US used to have over 80% of the world export market. That has shrunk to 61%, and will continue to shrink as South America continues to develop it's ag industry and China begins to develop it's. We need to either quit growing it or find another use for it. Those that say quit growing it have no idea the implications of doing so.

I won't say that corn is the BEST alternative fuel source, but it certainly has a lot of points in it's favor.

Of course I do have a bias on this topic and will openly admit it, but I think I have an opinion based in more fact than most "media educated".

JW

I can not comment on most of what has been said here. But I'll add something that I believe is true.

Last year the US has a bumper corn crop. When I visited a friend in Iowa last November (2004) I remember seeing piles of corn next to silos that were as big as the silos. My friend said they had run out of room to store it.

Corn for burning might be cost effective because of all of the corn "lost" (piled on the ground).

Vince (who wishes he had a fireplace or wood stove)