Awesome things I found for moving pellets around!

[canmic]

I found this: http://www.pellvac.com/e/system1-e.php but I couldn't find anyone in the US or Canada that has these products, I emailed the company in sweden and they said no one distributes/sells their stuff in north america . I did find this video:

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But when I contacted both companies mentioned in the video, neither one seemed to know anything about it

Does anyone know anything about sourcing this stuff in North America? I am thinking about going DIY on this one, I found a high power "explosion safe" central vac power unit and I can source the pre-seperator which is basically just a whirlwind ash cyclone (ash vacuum) without the hoses and with a plastic instead of metal bucket. Several dealers in the US carry the whirlwind. The rest is pretty easy to make myself.

I also saw this video and I am absolutely going to do this!

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I am thinking of making a rather big hopper out of wood, instead of using a bucket, something that can hold about 8 or 10 bags of pellets, then I will mount the whole thing on a chassis with wheels on the bottom. My pallets of bags of pellets are in a big shed about 100 feet from the house with a concrete pathway between the two. We don't really get much snow in the winter just rain and cold. I figure I can load up the little cart in the shed by dumping bags into it and then wheel it down the pathway to the house an connect it up to a filler pipe that goes into my big storage bin (1.5 ton). No bulk delivery here yet... This would be MUCH easier than carrying bags 2 at a time and much easier on my back. Also all the dust and mess would be in the shed not the house and I wouldn't have to go in and out of the house many times, so no tracking in dirt or water.

 

[AndrewChurchill]

Here's the two systems I designed and used.

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[canmic]

Here's the two systems I designed and used.

The first one is basically what I'm going to make, but I'm going to put wheels on it.

 

[AndrewChurchill]

I put it in the back of my trailer and move it with my garden tractor. I'm assuming you're going to use a vehicle of some sort to move the unit.

 

[velvetfoot]

I take it there's no access to the basement other than a little window or the inside stairs? I have 6.5 tons in the basement, but it's not that bad getting them down there since I have a walkout basement and only have to carry them over the door threshold, stack them on a pallet, and then use a pallet jack to put them into position. While I guess it is double handling, the loading to the basement is done in nice weather and once. They do take up a lot of room in the basement though.

I built a square box from three sheets of 3/4" plywood, some metal angle bracing and hinges. It holds a little more than a ton but has .75 ton usable without raking since it is a flat bottom. The pellet boiler has automatic vacuum transfer built in. It's not that bad dumping the bags over the side of the 4' high walls of the box.

At one time I had been thinking of bulk delivery, but never could figure out the logistics of getting the fill and vent pipes though the house envelope into the basement. You may still want to lay things out to accommodate bulk delivery in the future. What's your bin like? Would you be wedded to filling up your bin by blowing in pellets, or is there an alternative?

Since my bin is fairly rigid, I was thinking, 'what if I made it into a big utility vac?' Maybe cut a round hole near the top and hook up the suction of a real utility vac and cut a hole on the opposite side for incoming pellets. While the box is fairly air tight, I'd have to close off the hoses to the boiler. It'd might have some advantages, but I don't know how well it would work.

Here are a couple of pictures, maybe for your planning purposes.

 

[canmic]

I put it in the back of my trailer and move it with my garden tractor. I'm assuming you're going to use a vehicle of some sort to move the unit.

No, just a good set of wheels. That's why I am going to limit it to about 400 lbs of pellets per trip. It's going to be rolling along a nice perfectly level and smooth concrete pathway.

 

[canmic]

I take it there's no access to the basement other than a little window or the inside stairs? I have 6.5 tons in the basement, but it's not that bad getting them down there since I have a walkout basement and only have to carry them over the door threshold, stack them on a pallet, and then use a pallet jack to put them into position. While I guess it is double handling, the loading to the basement is done in nice weather and once. They do take up a lot of room in the basement though.

I built a square box from three sheets of 3/4" plywood, some metal angle bracing and hinges. It holds a little more than a ton but has .75 ton usable without raking since it is a flat bottom. The pellet boiler has automatic vacuum transfer built in. It's not that bad dumping the bags over the side of the 4' high walls of the box.

At one time I had been thinking of bulk delivery, but never could figure out the logistics of getting the fill and vent pipes though the house envelope into the basement. You may still want to lay things out to accommodate bulk delivery in the future. What's your bin like? Would you be wedded to filling up your bin by blowing in pellets, or is there an alternative?

Since my bin is fairly rigid, I was thinking, 'what if I made it into a big utility vac?' Maybe cut a round hole near the top and hook up the suction of a real utility vac and cut a hole on the opposite side for incoming pellets. While the box is fairly air tight, I'd have to close off the hoses to the boiler. It'd might have some advantages, but I don't know how well it would work.

Here are a couple of pictures, maybe for your planning purposes.

Access to the basement is the inside stairs, outside stairs are on the other side of the house from where the pellets are and there's some stairs between.. The part of the basement with the bulk pellet storage isn't easily accessed from outside but it wouldn't be too difficult to run some short pellet transfer pipes like they do for bulk delivery.

I am going to use identical fittings to bulk delivery and follow the standards and specs for bulk delivery so if it becomes available, that could be done using the same fill ports.

You should look at the transfer system that I found here: http://www.pellvac.com/e/system1-e.php There's unfortunately nowhere to source the stuff in the US or Canada but it uses a big central vac or big utility vac. It looks like it would be pretty easy to build. You don't want to use your pellet bin in your vacuum circuit for lots of reasons, you want a small container that starts empty and then dumps when full and then the cycle starts over again. much more efficient and much easier to seal up tight and much less stressful on your suction power unit.

My big bulk storage in the basement is going to be a frame and bag style, about 5 tons. It isn't that close to where the pellet boiler will be, and I will use a small 0.5-1 ton storage bin next to the boiler to feed it. I have already worked out the transport system between the bulk bin and the working hopper, basically it's a pair of augers and a drop pipe controlled by a sensor on the working hopper and a timer as a safety feature (timer will only allow it to transfer about 150-200 lbs per day, so if the sensor goes wonky it won't cause a big mess)

 

[canmic]

At one time I had been thinking of bulk delivery, but never could figure out the logistics of getting the fill and vent pipes though the house envelope into the basement. You may still want to lay things out to accommodate bulk delivery in the future. What's your bin like? Would you be wedded to filling up your bin by blowing in pellets, or is there an alternative?

The reason I am going with blown in is because that is how bulk delivery works and I want to lay things out to be able to use bulk delivery. The big cloth bags are best filled by blowing in, because of how they fill and they have soft sides and they contain the dust well. I am going to put a pellet inlet and an exhaust port and hook up a filter bag to the exhaust port to catch the dust. I can always put some minor suction on the exhaust if needed to get more of the dust but I don't think I'll need it.

As far as the "house envelope" works, I have an unheated crawlspace that I will be passing through then from there into the basement, it's a 100+ year old house so it isn't so much an "envelope" as a cheesecloth bag when it comes to being airtight! For water tight, I'm going to follow the bulk delivery port specs for the inlet and exhaust vent ports so I should be good there.

 

[velvetfoot]

Yeah, I should've just said 'walls'. My problem was that I couldn't go parallel to the floor joists from the outside because of a poured concrete porch and I thought if I went perpendicular to the floor joists there'd be too much 'hole space'. It's good, I feel, if you do it with bulk delivery in mind, but you have to have this apparatus built then to fill it with bags.

The truck driver can put another hose on the exhaust coupling and blow it out farther from the house so there won't be the back pressure from a sock on the exhaust coupling.

If you have one of those fabric bags hanging from a frame, I think they don't need an exhaust hose because they use the bag fabric as a filter.

I'm going to stick with what I've got only because I have a walkout basement.

 

[canmic]

Yeah, I should've just said 'walls'. My problem was that I couldn't go parallel to the floor joists from the outside because of a poured concrete porch and I thought if I went perpendicular to the floor joists there'd be too much 'hole space'. It's good, I feel, if you do it with bulk delivery in mind, but you have to have this apparatus built then to fill it with bags.

The truck driver can put another hose on the exhaust coupling and blow it out farther from the house so there won't be the back pressure from a sock on the exhaust coupling.

If you have one of those fabric bags hanging from a frame, I think they don't need an exhaust hose because they use the bag fabric as a filter.

I'm going to stick with what I've got only because I have a walkout basement.

Ya I'm lucky in that the floor joists run parallel to the way I need to run the pipe so I can just tuck it between them. They are 2x12's (full dimension roughcut lumber) so there's lots of room. I wouldn't cut holes if they were the other direction, I'd just hang the pipe underneath them since it's in a crawlspace anyway, a couple of 22 degree long bends and it would work that way.

For actual bulk delivery, I doubt the exhaust port would even make much difference but code says it's gotta be there and connected to some sort of filter, and the driver would probably have to follow code, so... Using a leaf blower, it would likely be much more important because I wouldn't have anywhere near the same CFM or pressure that the big blower on the delivery truck would have and from what I've seen, they also tip the tank of pellets on the truck up like a dumptruck so that's a LOT of weight pushing those pellets into that port!

By code, for my size bulk storage, I also need 2 different inlets, one at each end, not sure it makes much difference with the fabric bags but... code is code..