Chopping fire wood for boiler.

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fuelfarmer

Burning Hunk
Oct 18, 2010
112
VA
Here are a few photos of how I like to get firewood for our wood chip boiler. The wood is waste wood from a pallet recycling operation. I was hoping to see pallets and other scrap running through the grinder. But they had already ground a pile of scrap and the wood was being reground which makes it a better fuel to run in the boiler.



 
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ewdudley said:
Have you looked into a walking bed trailer to feed the boiler hopper?
Click to expand...

That could happen at some point, but for now I use a skid loader to feed the boiler fuel bin. We are also experimenting with a poultry litter burner and that is where I would like to use a walking floor to feed a fuel hopper. The way the hopper set up it could be modified to use a walking floor.
 
fuelfarmer said:
That could happen at some point, but for now I use a skid loader to feed the boiler fuel bin. We are also experimenting with a poultry litter burner and that is where I would like to use a walking floor to feed a fuel hopper. The way the hopper set up it could be modified to use a walking floor.
Click to expand...


Poultry litter = very acidic fuel. Not known to be "good" for the boiler it's being burned in.
 
heaterman said:
Poultry litter = very acidic fuel. Not known to be "good" for the boiler it's being burned in.
Click to expand...

Are you sure? Then why does it smell like ammonia which is basic?
 
Poultry litter is not the best fuel. But if you have a lot of it that needs to be removed from the farm, and the heat value can be extracted, and the condensed ash can have a high value. Transporting the ash to farms where they need the nutrients is a lot easier than moving the litter.

The burner on our farm is a hot air unit so the exchanger could be replaced at a lower cost compared to a boiler.
 
Aha!
Fred61 said:
Are you sure? Then why does it smell like ammonia which is basic?
Click to expand...


Just repeating information that I have read from companies that make bio-mass equipment. And, also remembering how everything in a commercial egg operation I worked in as a young pup used to rust the dickens out of anything and everything.
I'm no chemist but you are correct in that is smells like ammonia. Oooo how I remember that smell. I also know that the stuff contains copious amounts of nitrogen. Years and years after the chicken farm closed up, the dairy guy that bought the property told me the ground they used to spread the chicken manure on was still to "hot" to apply any normal amount of fertilizer for raising corn. After they started planting it, the corn had an almost blue color to the leaves and stalks but my word!. did it ever grow corn.

I would guess drying the litter/manure as much as possible before burning would help.
 
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