No more wood pallets, the future is now.

[Highbeam]

I keep a two years supply of wood on hand which is 10-12 cords. This means that my scrounged wood pallets are on the ground for at least two years and after that amount of time, they suck. They are rotten, often broken, and have nails sticking out. They work fine but I don't like stepping through the gaps and I hate dealing with the dead ones and finding 20 new pallets every year.

So I know a guy that runs a factory that has access to these EPS foam pallets. They use them for 2000# material bags and seem to love them. I have not heard of anyone else using these so I thought I would give them a try. The only drawback I've discovered is that I like to hold down my visqueen top cover with mason string stapled to the pallets. That won't work anymore so I'll have to staple to the splits. The foam manufacturer says that water will not be absorbed into the foam and that the UV or water won't weaken them over time. We use EPS for lightweight fill under roadways so it is fine in the dirt. I also have a crapton of this EPS foam under my shop slab in a 2" thick layer.

I have several cords of red alder to stack in the next couple of weeks so we'll see how it goes.

 

[JoeyD]

I started using plastic pallets a little over 3 years ago and started reusing them this past spring. I'm never going back to wood and having to clean that mess up every spring.

As for covering, I use 16-20' tarps and loop rope through the eyelets on the ends and just feed rope through the bottom of the pallets every 4 or 5 feet and tie it down. That also worked for me with the wooden pallets.

 

[Auzzie Gumtree]

Looking good - did you have to buy the pallets or were they free? I bet they are a lot easier to move around as well being so much lighter than the wooden pallets. I haven't seen these over here but i will keep my eyes open.

 

[Highbeam]

I did not have to buy them, this factory takes in raw materials on the pallets and then ships out finished product on stickers so the pallets accumulate and become a problem. He was happy to give them to me.

When I loaded them into the pickup I could hold three pallets in one hand pizza box style. Only limited by the bulk and not the weight. That is one reason that the shipping companies like them, they are paying less to ship the weight of wooden pallets.

I use 6 mil plastic to top cover and roll it up as I consume the row. I'm sure I can figure out a way to hold it down.

 

[Hickorynut]

Highbeam, I just staple with a bostich hammer stapler into the sides of the wood stack. About 1.5 ft. down on one side, up and over and down about 1.5 ft. the other side. That's about 5ft. on a 10ft. wide roll. So on a 100ft. roll you got 200ft of plastic to use. This is using the 6mil black plastic. I use the 4in.. solid concrete blocks and landscaping timbers as a base. Good luck with the plastic pallets

 

[maple1]

I think I have given up on trying to fasten or staple a top cover in place - although I haven't actually done much with top cover. From now on I will be laying it on top of a not-quite-high enough stack, then just putting another layer of wood on top of it.

 

[Dix]

I'm going to keep an eye out for those. I'm tired of going through pallets every season, sorting, cutting, trashing.

When I first started with the wood heat thing, I had A LOT of 8' x 12' cement bricks and the 3 holes popular cement blocks that I used to stack stacked on. Going into year 6, and still have 90% of the cement, and have replenished my pallets twice over that time, with the exception of the pressure treated ones, they are still fine.

I've noticed that wood pallets stacked with firewood on them last longer than uncovered ones.

I really like thought of the lightness of them. That would make moving pallets so much easier !

 

[Highbeam]

As a follow up, the foam pallets worked great for stacking. No cracks, breaks, compression, etc. The smaller 39x39 dimension means less wasted space with my 16" splits. We had a strong rain and no water was pooling on the pallets. I was stacking a full cord on four pallets.

Problem is I need more wood. What you see here is less than 8 cords and I consume over 5 per year. I sold my woodlot so I suppose I need to buy a log load.

 

[n3pro]

Never seen foam before. Thanks for sharing, learned something new. Should be interesting to see how long they last with all that weight. Great find.

 

[Soundchasm]

Do you think they'd take paint? Might be fun to customize them.

 

[Highbeam]

Do you think they'd take paint? Might be fun to customize them.

The foam factory actually applies line-X to this type of EPS foam when they make docks to keep the ducks from biting the foam. So it can take heat and some chemicals. As any kid worth his salt will tell you, when you put gasoline on foam it melts into a sticky gooey mess.

So I don't know. I suspect some paints are fine but others will completely destroy the foam. You'd have to test it. This is regular expanded poly styrene foam. It is made in different densities for different applications but the base stock is the same.

 

[Soundchasm]

The foam factory actually applies line-X to this type of EPS foam when they make docks to keep the ducks from biting the foam. So it can take heat and some chemicals. As any kid worth his salt will tell you, when you put gasoline on foam it melts into a sticky gooey mess.

So I don't know. I suspect some paints are fine but others will completely destroy the foam. You'd have to test it. This is regular expanded poly styrene foam. It is made in different densities for different applications but the base stock is the same.

Ha, I'm not quite sure if my folks thought I was worth the smelling salts I made them require regularly. It was gasoline and styrofoam cups we were trying to blend. Maybe the EPS stuff would take some spraypaint or perhaps a latex base.