Could brash be compacted and baled ?

[openspaceman]

Re: fans for firewood burning, the reason I looked into logettes is so I didn't have to have a fan assisted burn because I'd be living off grid

 

Yes natural draught for when there is no electricity is what we need to talk about for the 2 billion people that still cook with wood or agricultural wastes. When we have a grid connection and a low marginal cost for electricity it is a no brainer.

 

Several firms have made stoves with thermo electric piles for fans, there was even one pellet heater.

 

A british firm has developed a small generator that works with a falling weight to power a stove fan, you only need a fraction of a Watt to run a 5kW(t) stove, which is why they named it deciwatt.

[Dean Lofthouse]

Any idea of the draw current for the little blowers on the assisted boilers ?

 

Don't get me wrong, modern off grid power generation is very efficient now and can cope with modern residual current draw, ie power needs that you must have 24/7 such as alarm, alarm clock, heating circulation pump and clocks

[skyhuck]

Can some of the heat generated by the boiler not simply be used the dry the chip as it sits in the bin or in the delivery tube?

 

Also many boilers will burn chip up 40% moisture.

 

The many advantages of chip, such as ready availability and ability to automate the fuelling , makes me think finding solutions to the moisture problem is better than bailing brash.

[Dean Lofthouse]

It's the expense of the delivery system Mate, it can cost a fortune without a drying part as well. Good idea though.

 

The reason the brash logging is a good idea is you can bag them on site and each bag will be worth £3 ish, so you can count them onto the back of your truck in proper Yorkshireman style £3, 6, 9, 12 ........,,, money in the bank mate. Better than tipping chip for free at the golf course

[penfold]

A heavy duty conventional round baler was used used in trials in about 2000 but it formed "baskets" rather than round bales. The interest in baling was because of the ability to stack the bales outside at ARBRE power station prior to chipping and burning.

 

The anderson biobaler, now in production and used all over the world mainly for RoW under powerlines. They do a stationary model which is fed by an auger but produced the same size bales. Did my FDSc study on this and self propelled coppice harvesters.

[gensetsteve]

I am not so much thinking bits of conny but alot of jobs on sight I see 8" chippers and people trying to get whole trees through them. Alot of brash contains 3" stuff upwards alot of heat trapped in this stuff. I have paid £40 a tonne for cord in the past and 1/4 the lorry was 3" sticks:001_rolleyes:

[openspaceman]

Any idea of the draw current for the little blowers on the assisted boilers ?

 

I cannot check much from home but my 10kW pellet stove id fan is rated at .55A 220V, I'm sure it draws less but my clamp meter will not resolve below 2A.

 

The 150kW woodchip burner has a 160W primary air fan and a 1kW id fan but these are both frequency modulated by the burner controls and will work nowhere near rated output.

 

In my small stove experiments and for my fast water boiler I use a centrifugal fan from a computer (NMB panaflow but I loaned my last two to a offgrid project and now cannot find a supplier) This was rated at .38A and I ran it with a small pulse width modulated controller so it never drew that. I estimated the power output was about 5kW(t).

 

So you see the power draw is quite low for the extra turbulence it added to the fire. It is also well within the capabilities of a thermo electric generator to produce and even though these are not high converters of heat flux to electricity (less than 1% for metal-metal and a couple of % for semiconductor ones) as the cold side is in the airflow no heat is actually lost from the combustion.

[Breezeblock]

this is catching my interest after cutting down 10 silver birches today and seeing how much waste was made

[broonie]

was thinking something like , have the brush fed into an auger system to break it down a bit then, compressing it an oversized briquette machine then fed into a net similar to a sausage machine

[csservices]

Its something I've been pondering over for a long time, as when hedgelaying alot of brash is produced which is usually burnt on site, whereas if there was a way of processing it into a usable product it would add value to the job and be more enviromentally friendly.