Liberty Brick Information from Manufacturer

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Fuelmaker

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We have noticed this forum coming up when we google “Liberty Bricks”. I founded the company two years ago with the goal of producing pellets. When the credit tightened up and sawdust started getting scarce, we decided to scale back and work on collection and then discovered the brick product. We use the same machines that produce the Bio-bricks, Eco-bricks, US wood fuel brick and Envi-blocks. We learned a lot in the first full year of production and would like to explain the changes we made and get some feedback on what would provide the best value for our customers.

The biggest challenge in the business is to get enough raw material, because it is so bulky and messy. I identified a door factory as a great source of raw material a couple years before we started. They sand the doors down and have a relatively dense, free flowing dust that makes dense uniform bricks that are 10% heavier than bricks made from other dust. We even took a few hundred pounds of dust and made bricks before we bought our first machine. The dust is very fine and has to be handled very carefully. It is too fine to be used very much in wood pellets. The strange odor that some of the burning bricks have is from that dust and we could never identify exactly what caused it. It did not leave any unusual ash and did not seem to be from the scrap primer coated door skins that they chipped up, because we burned some bricks made with dust when the chipper was broken and got the same smell. As soon as we discovered the problem, we reluctantly stopped using that dust and it is going to landfill now.

We did check material safety data before we started and did not see anything unusual in the materials they used in the doors. There was some ordinary resin in particle board pieces, but most of those were inside the doors and did not constitute very much of the dust. It could have been something weird in the abrasives or in the glue that holds the abrasives on the sanding belts.

The only inventory left that includes the source that caused the strange odor is with PelletSales. Our biggest distributor, BT, sold out of those bricks in March.

With regard to packaging, we started with a polyolefin film that was recommended by our shrink wrap machine supplier. It is a very strong film and very clear so it is used for packaging all sorts of consumer products, including food. It is also very expensive. When oil prices spiked just as we were getting started, the packaging film alone cost over $10/pallet. We discovered that with chips and splinters in the bricks, just a little puncture would cause the wrap to tear. We switched to polyethylene film at the beginning of the year and solved the tearing problem completely, because polyethylene does not tear, it stretches. It is a little less strong though, so we more than doubled the thickness to 2.25 mils (thousandths of an inch). Fortunately it is so much cheaper per pound that we saved a little bit on a per package basis.

Of course the heavier packaging results in more used packaging. We have been asked if the packaging is recyclable. It is very pure polyethylene, so it could be recycled, but very few people collect it. We have large volumes of trimmings and no one around here will take it, so it goes to landfill. If you just stuff it in a recycling box and your collector doesn’t use it, you will not be forcing them to recycle it, you will be forcing them to sort through it and it will still go to landfill or will contaminate some other recyclables.
The same polyethylene film is actually used as bags to collect dust for incineration. It burns as cleanly as paraffin wax, which is what polyethylene is, a very high melting point synthetic wax. It has no ash forming additives and creates no smoke or chemical odor. If you notice any smell from the white smoke before it catches fire, the smoke smells like paraffin wax. Nonetheless, no stove manufacturer would ever recommend burning polyethylene in their stove and it is far too expensive to burn as a fuel anyway. However, if you start your stove with the waxy firestarter sticks, you are burning a small amount of refined petroleum that is chemically identical to polyethylene.

This leads to the issue of whether burning our bricks will void the stove warranty. Overfiring will ruin any stove and bricks are dry and can burn more quickly than cordwood. Once the fire is started, you must control the burn rate with air dampers just like you would if you were burning kiln-dried scrap wood. This is why some people avoid pine. You can easily overfire a stove if you stuff it with less dense wood that burns faster. Our bricks are dense and usually don’t need to be arranged any differently than dry seasoned cordwood. But because the bricks are smaller than most cordwood, you can overheat the stove if you overfill the stove and leave space for air to engulf a big pile of bricks. For the same reason, if you throw a whole bunch of wadded up polyethylene plastic into the stove all at once, you might damage the stove once the plastic melts and becomes a raging boiling liquid fire.

Some of our customers with large enough stoves feed an entire 10 brick bundle with the wrap still on. This keeps dust from shedding off the bricks and slows down the burn because there is no air between the bricks so it has to burn through 5 times the distance. The wrap just melts into the bricks and does not noticeably affect the burn because there is so little compared to the bricks. There is about 4 pounds of wrap on a 2000 pound pallet.

Please post back here with any further comments and concerns and I will respond as soon as possible.
 
The last big topic is the size of the chips we use to make bricks. The supply of dry dust is very limited so to keep the machines running, we blended chip that comes from pallet recycling. These chips are pretty large. After we stopped using the dust from the door factory, there wasn’t enough dust to fill up the spaces between the chips so the bricks were rougher and did not hold together as well, especially when they started burning. Since then, we installed another grinder to reduce the size of the chips and now our product is much more consistent and pretty close to the smoothness and hardness of the Bio-Brick. The Envi-blocks are made from the fine sawdust that can’t be used to make pellets, so they will always be the hardest and finest grain bricks.

If you are just making a decorative fire in the fireplace and you want the bricks to burn a long time without shedding any chips, the Envi-blocks would work best. Liberty bricks produce the same BTU’s per pound as any of the other bricks. Actually, a little roughness makes the bricks easier to get started. I get a stack of bricks started with a few wads of newspaper but need more when I have very hard smooth bricks with no chips in them. As discussed before, the rate you burn the bricks needs to be limited by the air to prevent overfiring, not by the bricks. If the bricks are burning “too fast” you need to damp your fire and not depend on the brick being slow burning with wide open air.

We still have some inventory of bricks made with the larger chips. Those are the bricks we call “chippy” bricks. Most of them are being sold from our factory at a discount to local customers via Craigslist. There are a couple distributors in CT that also have some of that product to offer at a discount to their most value conscious customers.

We do not expect to make that product again because we don’t want to confuse our customers with different products. However, you will notice variations in the bricks caused by variations in the sources of raw material.
 
I assume this is from Anders. What kind of feedback are you looking for? I am only 90 miles from you and haven't been able to find any of the product to try. Without driving 35 miles the other way. To a stove shop I wouldn't be dragged into with a winch.
 
No, this is Peter posting. We have a couple guys that will deliver to NoVA now. Stove stores are the only distributors we have up there now and it will probably stay that way until the product is well known enough for the feed stores like Southern States and rural hardware stores to carry them. Pellets aren't even selling anywhere else yet. I would be happy to get more bulk oriented distribution up there through firewood dealers, but haven't convinced anyone to try it yet. If you could recommend a reputable firewood dealer, like the ones that bundle firewood for grocery stores, I would be happy to set them up as distributors.
 
Send free samples! We'll get you some reviews....
 
I'd like to hear your comment on the topic of the cost on these. It seems to me that the value proposition of burning bricks is that they are a premium fuel as (at least around my area) the cost/ton tends to be higher than the cost for a cord of wood (considerably higher in many cases).

Who do you consider to be the primary market for your product?
 
The cost is all about logistics of getting the raw materials in and distributing the finished product. We can't compete with firewood in most places where the wood is free for the taking or even a byproduct of landscaping, tree removal or land clearing. We sell the uglier "chippy" bricks for $135/ton which is a great value compared to random raw (usually "seasoned" for a only a month at the end of the season) cordwood dumped in your driveway. We charge $50 to deliver locally so if you get 2 pallets neatly stacked in your garage for $320 it keeps a lot of people using their woodstove with $10/MMBTU fuel that is safe, stable and pretty compact. This is a pretty good alternative to putting 233 gallons of fuel oil at twice the price per BTU ($2.78/gallon). We cannot literally process firewood into bricks because we have no way of drying it consistently. As the market develops for bricks, we expect to expand production into new areas with available scrap wood. There are very few places with enough "free" dry sawdust to support brick production, so we have to install collection systems to keep the sawdust dry and grind scrap wood to supplement the available sawdust. Where wood is in short supply, like New England, people pay as much as $100/ton for shavings and sawdust to be used as bedding for horses, dogs, and other animals.

On the West Coast where there is lots of salvage timber available to make pellets, the price of pellets at the mills is cheap enough to ship the pellets all the way to New England. One of the best ideas for raw materials to make bricks is to use the fine dust byproduct from pellet production. That is what Envi-blocks are made from. Most pellet mills burn their fines to dry the green dust that is their primary raw material, but Barefoot pellet gets dry dust from a flooring factory and doesn't need to dry dust.
 
Our primary market is suburban areas where there is not enough firewood available nearby and no good place to let it season and store. Liberty Bricks allow people to keep using their stoves when firewood is just too expensive and bothersome. Secondary market would be as a supplementary fuel for serious wood burners that like to be able to start their stoves more easily, keep them burning overnight more easily, and get full capacity out of their stove when their seasoned wood runs out or it just gets too damn cold. For those types they might take a ton or two to supplement the 4 or 5 other cords of wood they get themselves.

Our ultimate market may well be as a replacement for bundled firewood and ambiance logs, which are a real pain for grocery stores to handle. Our local natural foods market sells our 20 pound bundle for $3.99, which is probably the cheapest thing they sell per pound. It works very well for them versus bundled firewood because it stacks neatly and is so much cleaner than bundled firewood. I don't think they even carried firewood in the past. It will take a few years of word of mouth until most people realize how much easier it is to build a campfire or fireplace fire with Liberty Bricks than with bundled firewood. Once the word is out, we will probably replace a lot of the ambiance logs, which use very expensive wax. The market that carries our bricks sold a 5 lb Java Log (made from coffee grounds and wax) for $6 last year. So instead of paying $6 for one fire with a Java log, you can make two fires with $4 worth of Liberty Bricks and yesterdays newspaper, a very inexpensive luxury.
 
Wow, you folks are ON IT. I assume you all might have picked up on my mention of Liberty bricks under somebody else's thread about other bricks, posted in the last couple days. https://www.hearth.com/econtent/index.php/forums/viewthread/23130/P18/
The price on Craigslist for the seconds is, I assume, the factory or distributor price, but it was agreed it's apparently a really good price for this kind of product, if they burn well. I would consider it as an amendment kind of thing since we don't have as much seasoned wood as I figure we ought to.

I'm all for recycling so I think if these don't hurt the stoves they are a good plan. I kinda thought they might be a byproduct of the paper mills, but I guess they arent. THanks for the info. If I can get by your place for some samples I'll pick them up and see if I need a ton. :)
 
We give away samples to anyone who comes by. Craigslist posts have the phone number to arrange pick up. Our website lists several local outlets where you can buy individual bundles.

Paper mills don't have any byproducts we can use. They compete for some of the dry chips we use, but are notorious for paying barely enough to cover the transport cost to them. The result is that they pay less for supplies from their neighbors because they can. Sawmills have lots of usable material from their planing operations, but this is very valuable for horse bedding. People who built processing operations assuming they could just buy up large volumes of fiber away from the existing buyers have usually failed. Success in this business requires developing a lot of new sources of fiber, operation and maintenance of a lot of specialized machinery and rolling stock, and efficient logistics. Oh, yeah, then you have to guess how much people will buy in the next season and store it until they want it yesterday.
 
Fuelmaker I started using Liberty Bricks apparently when you first started your buisness and had a couple little issues but they have definetly been corrected. I get them from BT and love them !
 
I will make one comment on the idea of using bricks for "ambiance fires" - I do work on the side for a wood guy that mostly sells to the "ambiance burners" - and the impression I've gotten from him and his customers is that part of the thing with an ambiance fire is the "look" of real wood... Many build fire piles w/o lighting them to avoid having an "empty hole in the wall", and will want something that looks like "real wood" not a pile of blocks...

Even when burning, I suspect the fire from cordwood will look a lot different from what you would get with bricks, and the ambiance burners are all about "the look". If you aren't toasting hot dogs, a stack of briquettes isn't as "sexy" as a fire w/ a bunch of logs... The wax logs and some of the other products of that sort at least LOOK like "real wood" at first glance, both sitting in the fireplace unlit, and while burning.

I suspect that the ambiance burners are not going to be real anxious to switch to a block looking product. Don't know if your equipment would allow it, but I would think the ambiance burner might be more attracted to a product that looks like a log instead of a brick...

Gooserider
 
Still too early to tell whether bricks will catch on in a big way for ambiance fires. Flame is fascinating in all its forms. A pellet stove flame is nothing like a burning log, but it is still very attractive and just about every pellet stove has a glass door. Brick fires are obviously different but no less attractive. But it will take time for people to try it. There are a lot of people who just aren't skilled enough to build a fire with bundled firewood and buy the wax logs or put in gas firelogs. When I went to the hearth show last year I saw all sorts of strange ambiance products, flames shooting out of broken colored glass was especially popular.
 
Fuelmaker said:
Still too early to tell whether bricks will catch on in a big way for ambiance fires. Flame is fascinating in all its forms. A pellet stove flame is nothing like a burning log, but it is still very attractive and just about every pellet stove has a glass door. Brick fires are obviously different but no less attractive. But it will take time for people to try it. There are a lot of people who just aren't skilled enough to build a fire with bundled firewood and buy the wax logs or put in gas firelogs. When I went to the hearth show last year I saw all sorts of strange ambiance products, flames shooting out of broken colored glass was especially popular.

You might be right, have to admit I personally find watching a pellet stove fire to be about as exciting as watching the burners on the gas stove... The gas logs aren't a lot better, althogh the newer ones seem to do a better job of simulating a random flame effect. Still gets to be like those DVD's of a burning fire you can buy after a while.

OTOH, seems to me like the wax log people could make pretty much any shape they want, and they all seem to be going for the "looks like a log" appearance...

Gooserider
 
The bricks can be made larger and in a longer shape with a different model machine and can be made to look more like a square piece of split wood. I'd like to hear what people think of the larger Envi-Block which weighs about 6 pounds. Do they burn better overnight than the same weight of smaller bricks placed close together in a stove? I have burned the 3.3 pound Envi-blocks in a fireplace and found them to burn about the same as our smaller bricks. They were a little harder to start and you needed at least 3 bricks to make a fire, which would burn longer, but most people don't want a fire to last much more than an hour. Other machines use a different mold and can make a round or hexagonal product. Round logs are very dangerous because they will roll off the fire.
 
Going for that ambiance market, what about a wedge shape? If you could manage to somehow 'toast' the outer edge to make it darker and look somewhat like bark then perhaps that would help with adoption. Plus the pointed end would make lighting easier I would think. No rolling issues either.

As to the larger blocks - I burned Envi-Blocks (large version) and Bio-Bricks as well as some brand of round logs in my old stove last year. I liked the larger ones best when it came to burn time and the fact that it was easier to load - less having to push a pile of bricks close together to keep them from all burning at once. It seemed to me that in that stove the key to controlling the burn was minimizing air gaps between the bricks so fewer surfaces were exposed.

I have not burned any of these products in my new stove. I have an ample supply of well seasoned wood this year. I also have a good pile of leftover bricks under the stairs too though... not sure what I'll do with those. I may put them up on craig's list or keep them for some unknown emergency and/or the very rare camping trip.

The warnings from stove manufactures against burning "anything but natural cord wood" really has been resonating with me for some reason. I know you mentioned this in one of your first posts as primarily an issue with over fire potential, but I think that is something that your industry as a whole needs to take on with the stove manufacturers if possible. I suspect that if a simple paragraph stating that burning compressed wood products without binders is ok as long as care is taken to avoid over firing the stove were added to manuals it would remove a significant barrier to adoption of your products. I don't envy your situation with regard to this issue!
 
We are seriously considering offering Liberty Bricks in "beer trays" made of cardboard like Bear Bricks does. Although the trays are a little more costly than shrink wrap, they are less labor to pack, so we would offer them at the same price. We might pay a little extra to get a tray with tabs that does not have to be glued or stapled. This would make it better to either recycle or burn. Nearby customers could even return trays for a discount on another ton.

How many of you would like cardboard better than shrink wrap? Dust will probably be contained better in a tray than a bag. It will not protect the bricks from humidity, so they probably should not be stored as long outside, even under the pallet cover or a tarp or shed.

Should we print anything on the sides of the tray when we pack whole tons for sale?

Would you prefer 35 pound trays or 23 pound trays or a combination?
 
FM,

This forum is not really for commercial use - and while a question here and there is OK, we don't want it used in this fashion.....the problem is that if it is OK for you, it is also OK for dozens or hundreds of other companies and members....and then the forum loses it's usefulness.

thanks...
 
I am a supplier of a variety of compressed wood and found that the liberty bricks are not consistent on pack could love very smooth and the next pack rough. Was not pleased with the service either. I sell Envi blocks and they are a lot better and bigger brick.
just my observations and 2 cents worth.
 
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