Revenue from sawdust?

[Pierre]

What does everyone do with their sawdust? I would like to make briquettes with ours but the machinery is mega bucks. Any homemade briquette presses out there?

[Alycidon]

You would need a fair old bit of sawdust to be worthwhile, when I looked at pelleting sawdust was compressed by a factor of 8, so a heap of sawdust will make a heap of brickets etc only 1/8th of the sawdust heap by volume, not actually done it myself so that might be wrong, it was what I read. I would think that Renewabal John would be best able to advise.

 

A

[County4x4]

Never seen anything home made that's up to the job of briquetting. Some small operators are using second hand machinery picked up fairly cheaply from other industries - like swarf presses and shredded paper compactors - but they generally produce pretty soft briquettes that don't last five minutes in comparison to decent ones. Customers that buy their briquettes tend to end up being one time purchasers.

 

There's also the issue of getting moisture levels right - too wet or too dry and you won't get briquettes at all. Might be a better bet getting in touch with an outfit like Durham Heat Logs to see if they fancy buying the sawdust off you?

 

Cheers,

 

Andy

[renewablejohn]

Depends on what sort of sawdust you have. To briquette the moisture content needs to be less than 15%. For hardwood you will need about 70 bar pressure to produce a solid briquette and 100 bar for softwood. At these pressures I would not recommend a DIY press. You obviously need 10kg of sawdust at less than 15% MC to produce 10kg of briquettes so you can weigh your sawdust to appreciate the volume bearing in mind you will be lucky to achieve £5 for a 10kg bag. Easiest method is to sell to a local briquette manufacturer although dont expect to get rich I only pay £1 per m3 but that is better than paying for skips which the joiners use to pay £200 per week to get rid of there waste.

[posch jon]

put it in big bags and and sell it to farmers and horse owners, people always want it!