Pellet mill.....anyone here have experience with them?

My ship has come in! Or so the shipping website says, it is in the river between New York and New Jersey. No one has called me to tell me that my Pellet Mill is here but I am sure that I have the most important package on that whole ship. I have hired a company to get it through customs and to my transporter. This should be done by tonight or in a month or two. I will let you know. In the mean time I have been working on a storage power cooler that will hold between 5 and 6 tons of pellets and I will be able to cool pellets and dry them with forced air. I bought a 3' x 12' piece of metal roofing and cut slits across the width to allow air to be pushed up through the metal. I supported the underside with scrap strips of lumber so it will hold the weight and allow the air to go the full 12'. I will connect an old hot air furnace fan to the one end that could give me 4 speeds of air movement. I will probably start with just 2 speeds to start with. This will allow me to blow room air up through newly made pellets in my long term storage bin. I think that this will give me 12 weeks of pellets to get through in very cold weather. I will still have an extra ton in my daily hopper so make that 14+ weeks. I will take some picture's in the near future.

I received the Pellet Mill yesterday, just a little over a month after I ordered it. The packaging was 1/2 fiberboard and the bottom was in bad shape as well as one of the sides. The mill has 3" C shaped steel as a base and showed no damage. The light metal that covers the gears had a small hole in it but that is only cosmetic. The mill is built like a tank, mosely 1/2" or better steel and it showed no damage to the main parts. It cost me an additional $475.50 to get the unit through the ship yard and customs. This included a $343.50 charge for Terminal Handling and Storage. This in part is my fault as I did not know that I needed to get several original papers from the company that I purchased it from and it took days after the Pellet Mill arrived in New Jersey. Live and learn or pay the man.

A while ago I said that I would post photo's of the storage bin cooling floor that i was working on. I have the 12' X 3' sheet of roofing that I cut slits into and the bottom showing support of strips of wood. I ended up with all 4 speeds of the furnace fan operational, each controled by a switch. The fan discharges under the sheet metal roofing and then blows up through the slots in the roofing. My intent is to be able to put warm pellets into the storage bin and then provide additional cooling and drying for them. I am going to see what I will need to do as far as how to handle the pellets that have just come out of the pellet mill. I have a horizional cooling tower that will hold about 500# of pellets but my concern is that this will not be enough as the pellet mill would cool down while I move them. I may need to adjust that volume so that I can continue to make pellets for a longer period time between sending them for storage.

Cool, keep up the posts, very interesting!

B-Mod asked a while ago for photo's of the tractor powering the mill. Notice in photo #1 the 3' yard stick om the rear wheel. In photo 2 notice the yard stick on the front wheel. The hood is over 6' tall and the back wheels are close to that while being 18" wide.

Awesome vintage Case you have there! Not much in the way of snow to push this year though. I have a 3pt rear snowblower on my tractor, and I only used it once so far this whole season. We have about an inch on the ground right now, and highs forcasted in the mid to upper 30's all week. Looks like it will be the winter that never came, lol.

Spartan said:

Hello everybody. First post so go easy on the new guy!

I have a decent supply of sawdust that I am now paying to haul away. Better still, I have two customers/friends who generate several 40 yard containers a week and THEY are paying to haul them away. Yes, I know that some farmer will kill for it but we are in the city (Toronto) and it cost to truck it ($350 to the nearest farm).

I want to start converting my own sawdust into pellets and burning them in a boiler at home and work. Step one is to see if I can make pellets. I'm having a hard time finding someone who sells pellet mills in Ontario. If I can't, at the very least, I like to find someone who has a pellet mill in Ontario and will let me test my sawdust. If not, then at least find someone in northern New York (near Buffalo?) and if need be, go further.

It's a shame that I have to pay to haul the sawdust away and pay for heat.

Second part of the question for those who have their own pellet mills, how well do they work? How much do you get out? I see crazy production numbers but they seem to vary wildly. If I do go ahead, it's no use for me to sit there and feed a handful of sawdust to make pellets.

I would appreciate any and all help.

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There's a news-print magazine called "Farm Show". A recent edition had an article about a pelletizing business that offers assistance to start-up pelletizers. As I recall, they have some experience with cheap chinese-made pelletizers and developed their own design based on superior materials. They will do testing on any product you want to pelletize to determine if it's doable and develop the formulation for you, sell you the equipment and assist you with setup of your pelletizing system. It sounds like you have access to far more material than you could use yourself, so you'd just as well look into a for-profit system.

Search on www.farmshow.com. The article is in 2011 - Volume #35, Issue #6, Page #17. The company name & contact info is:

Company: Lawson Mills Biomass Solutions Ltd.
67 Watts Ave.
City: Charlottetown
Zip: C1E2B7
Country: Canada
Website: www.makepellets.ca
Phone: 888 313 9424

That information is great. How does your unit work? Do you get the pellets you want? How much did you pay? Is this a complete system or piece by piece? How many # of pellets do you get made per hour? What is your cost per Ton? What is your source of raw material? How is the raw materials collected? How do you transport the raw materials? How do you transport the pellets? Where do you store the pellets? What is the distance from the raw material to the pellet mill to the storage? What type of system do you have? Please send photo's of your system. I would think that this kind of unit and help must be in the 10of thousand of $ and above the budget of a single home owner so you must be very happy with what you bought.

I did some work on the horizon cooling tower today. I needed to add additional hinges to make the doors stronger. I had said that I would send some photo's of it. One of the photos shows the 6" fan mounted to the top end that will blow outside air into the bottom of the cooling unit when I am making pellets to allow them to cool. The second photo is of the distribution housing going into the inside of the unit. The third photo us the raised floor so that air can blow the full length of the unit and go through the screen up through the pellets.

did you start working on the mill yet? Like reaming and polishing the holes? Did you buy any binder yet?

No I haven't done anything with the mill as I need to convert the one end of the PTO from Chinese 8 spline to American 6 spline. When I get ready to try making the pellets I will use a mixture of 50% sandblast media, 25% straw and 25% soybeans, corn, canola or other oil based products. While the mill is running I will need to run this through the mill about 10 times or 10 minutes. This should smooth the edges, shine the surface, ream the holes, and remove any metal from the milling of the rollers and die. This is information came from Buskirk Engineering. They make an American pellet mill but for me the cost is like two to three times what I have invested. I haven't looked into a binder yet as I am not sure that I will need one. If my plan works I will have the heat I need to make a good pellet without a binder. Most of the video on the inter-net are using little pellet mills under 15 HP or the size for manufacturing. I haven't seen ones like I have with almost a 12 inch die and 52 horsepower to drive it. Only time will answer that question. I did find an SKJ280 pellet mill in action. This is like the one I bought but mine is a SKJ300 and is driven by my tractor not the electric motor shown here.. The 280 is a 10"die while the 300 is a 12" die.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=5lipTsh8lDA