Compressed sawdust Briquettes

[dwconservation]

I think that everyone is missing a point / trick. I sell around 150 x 10kg bags of compressed biquettes a season along with my logs and how I market them is as an alternative to kindling (which I also sell). They give the customer an easy way to light their wood burner and it gives them a hot base ideal for wood burners and open fires alike.

 

I never try to sell them as an alternative to logs as this would be just silly, logs are my main winter business and I would not detract from that.

[gensetsteve]

we have sold a briquette made just down the road from us for about 4 years. We always have a bucket next to the stove ideal for fast start ups and when the fire is almost out to get going again. We have some customers that love them but most are either resistant to using them or hate them. Everyone loves a log. The company that makes ours spent alot of money on their machine which gets serviced regularly and in the space of a month will fill twenty arctics for the power station alone.

They are slow sellers by a ratio of about 300 to one on logs. I sometimes throw some mad money at a crazy project that looks slim on profit. A briquette machine is something I will never buy.

[DCS6800i]

Iv plenty of sawdust about the logging site - and always wondered about compressing and burning it on the fire.

 

So how would i go about making a briquette?

[deejay]

Hi Guys,

Does any one know which air wash channel to have open when burning brickettes? I have a Morso 1412. I always thought of brickettes as solid fuel but a neighbor tells me to treat them like logs.

Thank you

[codlasher]

Some years ago my fathers partner acquired a briquette machine in a buy out along with a number of saw-milling machines. I was asked to help and dispatched to collect two 45 gallon drums of hydraulic fluid, from the local ag supplier, to fill up the reservoir.

As an experiment it was set up to produce briquettes with the available sawdust taken straight from the pile that the cyclone extractor produced. The end product was normally a 3" x 8" briquette.

The machine produced, what looked like a number of fine looking briquettes, but after every sixth or eighth stroke there was a rapid build up of heat in the form of steam which propelled the briquette being produced some 40' down the full length of the building and impacted on the sliding door at the end. The mouth of the machine being at roughly knee height! A bit like a small howitzer shell:001_rolleyes:

As I said earlier 'available sawdust'. Now this was the big drawback, shame really, but after many impacts on the bottom door the decision was made that this machine was really only meant to produce briquettes from DRY sawdust such as came from a joinery shop. A sawmill and the wet, diesel impregnated sawdust that was being produced from the timber milling was unsuitable. The machine was sold on.

As an end to this story, the briquettes were the type that suppliers dread As soon as they were put on a fire they expanded so much they almost put the fire out. As least the experimenting was done 'in house' so no upset customers.

I suppose the moral would be that the best briquette is produced from a dry base!

codlasher.

[niftysteve]

I am considering making my own briquettes from sawdust and wondered if anyone could advise me on a machine

 

theses are for personal use, I live in France, yes we have lots of wood but have a source of sawdust too, good idea to use it.

 

the machine is capable of producing briquettes at 50mm, but only at 140kg/hr, ok for me i think.

 

it uses a pressure of 15-20Mpa to screwpress the sawdust

 

will these briquettes be ok

 

ANY comments welcome

there is a local wood recycling business near me that is producing these brquettes heres a link to there website the owner will adivse on machine im sure

Cambridge Wood Works - Recycling and Reusing Waste Wood In Cambridge UK

[gensetsteve]

If someone else gets the wood and puts the labour in to making and bagging it for £3 a bag you then sell for £6 a bag. Unless you know you have a good proven market for it I would not spend 10k on equipment to try and squeeze another 50p out a bag.