Going to burn pallet wood through boiler. Any suggestions/concerns?

I burned about half scrap wood this year, mostly to get rid of it. I'm not sure if it was worth the effort or not. It is great when you have big chunks of too wet wood that you want to get rid of also, the small stuff burns hot and fast and the big chunks burn fine once they're started, and they keep the fire going after the pallets have burned out in ten minutes.

If I were cutting a lot of pallets, I'd use a circular saw with a good carbide blade (dialo from HD) and cut them on a table so you could slide them around, and throw the pieces in a wheelbarrow or garbage can. It's not too hard to avoid the nails, and there's no way I'd use a sawzall or any other kind of blade for that much cutting for so little wood. The only thing to watch out for is adding too much small dry wood at one time.

If you can't stand the thought of cutting pallets with a good blade you can sharpen a chipped/dull carbide blade on a bench grinder or angle grinder, just lightly touch the blade to the wheel and pull it back immediately so it doesn't overheat, repeat until satisfied, crude but effective.

compound mitre saw with a jig set to whatever length you want. if you have one, u can cut 3 or 4 planks at once. Or stack them on a homemade rack and use powersaw.

What kind of wood are pallets made of.

First off, I have just a plain old OWB not a gasifier. I picked up a truck load of old skids from where I work this fall and cut them up to burn in the fall. I used a sawzall with a blade that said it was for nail imbedded wood. It worked great and didn't take long to cut them up. Now about burning them. They burned alright but made the most nastyist thick grey smoke I ever seen come out of my boiler. When I went to auger the ash out after a couple weeks of burning them I noticed there was like chunks of rubber in my ashes. When these chunks cooled off they turned hard like plastic. This pallet wood must be treated with some sort of preservative. That is the only reason I can think of why they smoke so bad. I normally burn seasoned dry wood and don't get much smoke from my boiler, but these pallet were bad. I'm not going to burn them anymore.

Burns great. Been thru about 30-40 this year. I like to mix cutup pallet sections with my splits. Seasoned pallet wood burns hot and fast, so I mix it to get a nice coal bed. I throw down about 8 pallets or so on the ground then throw some more at various angles on those pallets. That helps keep what I'm cutting off the ground. Touch the dirt with the chain and it's typically toast. I use my chain saw with a 25" bar so I don't have to bend over so far. Be careful to avoid the nails. They will dull the chain almost instantly. Cut it all up into ~24" lengths and stack separate from your splits that way you can blend to your liking.

Forget the nails. Boiler doesn't care. Only difference for me is after I remove the ashes from the boiler I let them cool for a good while so I can eventually put the ashes in a heavy trash bag. Used to spread ashes on garden or wherever but not burning pallet wood. Gotta be careful to keep nails from Ranger, mowers, and dirt bikes, etc. You can burn exclusively pallet pieces, but it works well to mix. The only nuisance of the nails is to the chainsaw chain and ash disposal. Go for it. Probably ~20% of my energy this winter came from free pallets collected at the business over the year. Cheers

I've not burn't pallets, but have burnt some wood with nails. No harm done. I just run a magnit over the ashes when I done.
I burn't a little particle board one day and it really off gassed. It made the boiler huff. Probably could have adjusted the air to fix it
but I think i'll stay away from the particle board from now on. I'd suggest starting with a little and see how it goes. If
you can mix it with some other wood that would probably work best.

If you're using "fine" sized wood the trick is to stack it tightly so it presents less surface to the air flow/flame. See my post titled "A couple more Garns going in."

I burn pallets in my VIGAS 80 . Cut the pallet in 3rds. Then the 42" way fits right in. I mix in a few splits also. Before loading a new batch i use a strong magnet ( harbor frieght special) on rod and go over the ash and nozzle area in stove to collect nails, as it gets so hot in gasifying chamber the nails become a ball of junk steel down there. You also want to make sure nozzle is not covered with this junk material. Let magnet cool on floor till you load again and whip off nails in bucket. I filled three 5gal. buckets so far this winter, just sell it for scrap when you haul in the next junk car. If you are burning just slats i put in about 10 to 15 on each side of fire box and fill in the middle with splits. The stove does not like slats over the nozzle as it does not get the right air. Hope to have enough dry splits for next yr., but pallets are free.

vince, I doubt the palletts are treated, what you are seeing and smelling is the effect of too many combustibles for available combustion air. you need to either as heaterman says pack it very tightly or mix them in between cordwood pieces. I would experiment with smaller tighyly wrapped bundles if you want to try to use exclusively.

Look for stamps on the pallet. Any wood pallets that ship overseas must be treated, for pests, and stamped.

Treatment options are HT for heat treated

Or MB for Methyl Bromide.

I would not recommend burning pallets that have a MB stamp. Methyl Bromide, soon to be outlawed, is a nasty product and probably not wise to send up into the atmosphere, or inhale while re-loading.

hr

TCaldwell said:

vince, I doubt the palletts are treated, what you are seeing and smelling is the effect of too many combustibles for available combustion air. you need to either as heaterman says pack it very tightly or mix them in between cordwood pieces. I would experiment with smaller tighyly wrapped bundles if you want to try to use exclusively.

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I was wondering the same thing, or if the "tar balls" were the result of an unusually hot fire that melted the creosote off of the boiler walls?

As far as I know, methyl bromide is deadly stuff, but not in a way that would create tar/creosote or even smoke. The treatment is to kill the resident bugs in the wood, not to give it any long term protection.

We burned wood pallets almost exclusively for the first season we used our boiler. The dry wood ran out before the boiler was installed due to stupidity on our part. A full load does give you a lot of heat, but as we had the heat needs that year it wasn't a problem. I did notice that our nozzles seemed to wear more that year than they have since. As has been said before, packing tight is a good idea. My husband just sat them on an old trailer we have and cut them with a skill saw. As long as I cleaned the nails off the nozzles it worked fine.

I burned pallets in my old Energy Mate boiler for about 7 years almost exclusivly. I tried saws, pallet breakers, sawzall, you name it. What worked best for me was a 3' bar on my chainsaw & I didn't need to break my back leaning over. You can tear through a lot of pallets fast like this. I only used full chisel chains, Randy