Prime time?

I get a lot of personal email from the corn burning site. At least two or three a day. More during a coldsnap. :-) Somebody wrote to me the other day and he surmised from reading all my posts that corn burners are not ready for prime time. I don't know. I'm not sure what I answered back, I am not even sure I even did answer. It's a tough question. Can I see grandmother in Topeka using a corn burner? No. I guess I can't. Can I see some investment banker in the suburbs burning corn? No. I have trouble with that one too, unless it's just the right banker.

I am not sure how I feel about that either. I am happy to be saving the money I am saving. I am happy to provide this site to those who want to learn about corn burning. But thinking about the logistics of having the ten other houses on my block also burning corn is rather a mind boggling thought. Everyone getting corn deliveries, feeding the burner in the morning, cleaning the burn pot, dumping their ashes, dealing with the quirks of their stove. I guess I just can't picture that either. So, where does that leave the corn burning industry?

The masses flooding to buy stoves could give the industry a real shot in the arm. Vast improvments could happen with these stoves over the next couple years. Better burn control would be one really great thing. A better monitoring system that would exactly dish out the corn dependent on burn temperature and air flow. We could eek much closer to the high efficency burn rates the natural gas folks have now. We could burn cleaner, and have less klinker and ash.

Or, what could happen, is the industry could profit-take. We could be dealing with the problems of klinker build-up and fussy stoves ten years from now. That would totally suck.

I think everything is really going to depend on the next few years. What is going to happen to energy prices? What is going to happen in this country if we have to pay ten dollars for a gallon of diesel? No, I can't see my neighbor cleaning up his corn burner, feeding it, dumping the ash, and then putting on his suit & tie to heading off to his investment banking job every morning, now. Today. With today's energy prices, even as shocked as we all are with them. If they got worse though, my neighbor is going to want to choose life over freezing to death.

--ja

continued information.

OK, that last post did look kind of rough. Poor spelling and puctuation optional. Sorry about that. I was just afraid if I didn't get it posted, pretty soon a week would have gone by.

So, the Icynene insulation salesman came for a visit. I want to get a bid on insulating our attic which currently has no insulation. What we settled on was, I am going to shim the sidewalls out to six inches. They will fill the sidewalls with an average of six inches of foam. Because my house is old, it is built using what is called balloon construction. Since the sidewalls are filled with wood chips I am going to use my shopvac to reach down and suck out as many of the wood chips as possible. They will spray foam down the side walls, I am hoping I can get down two or three feet. On the ceiling of the attic I am going to put in a secondary rafter so I can raise the ceiling of the room by a foot. Then they will spray five inches of foam under the roof deck. This should get me R-18 on this third floor where I previously had R-Nothing.

All for the cost of $7356.00

Not a cheap project. And in a way, being a corn burner, a little hard to justify. I am planning on burning about $1100 worth of corn this season. If I insulate the third floor, I am thinking best case, I will still burn $700 of corn. Sure a savings of $400/yr, so it will take me how many years to pay this off? But, we can't expect to be buying $1.40 corn every year either. If corn goes up to $6 some fall, I would be counting every little kernel and thinking about them going through our uninsulated roof if I don't do it now.

...Plus of course we get some more living space. Me personally, I would like to build a bedroom suite up there. Hot tub, little kitchenet, maybe an entertainment center. Hell, me and the wife would just move up there and leave the bottom two floors to the kids! :-)

Right now, surprisingly, the house does stay warm enough. As I type it is zero degrees out. It got down to -19 last night. We have the thermostats set at 70 degrees (which, thanks to corn, I am betting makes ours the highest set thermostat on our block) and the house stays pretty darned close to that mark. To do so though the Traeger TPB-150 corn burner I am running is operating flat out. It has been on full burn, feeding corn for the past 24 hours. Basically it is running at 100% duty cycle, which no household appliance is really supposed to do. I think it is hard on it, hard on the burn pots, hard to get the clinker out of the pots. I bet we are using more electricty than normal because the water pumps to the zones are running continously as well. I think that though the boiler can seem to keep up, it will be a lot happier once we get the third floor insulated.

Back online!

This is sort of rough. I haven't even spell checked it. Tomorrow will be my first day back to work after being off for a week. I don't want to leave it unposted. I will follow up later in the week. So, here it is, my post for Dec 18th:

I have been out sick for the past week. Ugh! It was a nasty chest cold that really got me down. So, not much has happened on the blog or the web site this past week. Today is the first day I have totally human again.

I had a couple of events this past week. The first, happily was the day before I got sick, rather than the day after. I went down to check on the furnace and discovered the fire seemed to be weak. It was not burning strong like normal and the furnace should have been at full burn. The draft fan was blowing but I felt like it wasn't really putting out that much air. I did a little more checking and felt like the draft fan was not putting out anywhere near the normal amount of air. This is the second time I have had trouble with a draft fan. This time though the warrenty on the boiler had expired.

Rather than contact Traeger and deal with them shipping me one out of Canada and the delay involved there I went downtown to a place that had a "motor repair" sign out front. I figured they could either repair it or maybe they would have a line on a new one. As it turns out, the motor repair place was pretty nice. They took one look at my blower fan and said "You a corn burner or pellet?" Wow, I guess they know their motors! I confessed to corn. They said "You been oiling this motor?" Ummmm. Oil? Uhhhh, no, I didn't know I was supposed to oil it.

So, I walked out of the place with a brand new blower fan and motor assembly, just exactly like the one I brought in. ...It seems I am not the only idiot who doesn't know to oil the draft fan so the place keeps a good stock onhand for people like me. In fact, I was told that I was the second person that day to have exactly the same problem. The owner said that the dust from the corn settles into the bearings. No big problem, just oil the fan twice a season and everything is fine. Don't oil them, however, and the bushings overheat really fast and the motor is ruined. You can see here in this picture that I have pointed out the oil weep holes. If you zoom in on the picture, you can see the holes packed with dust. This fan does not run right, it can be used as a spare for a few days. Even though I have now oiled it, it still doesn't run at the speed it should. Still, if I needed to get by for a couple of days, it could be pressed into service.

The oiling process is quite easy. The oil bottle the motor place sold me had an extendible tube that came out of the bottle about eight inches. It was simply a matter of putting the tube into the weep hole and filling it up with oil. The motor place suggested a very heavy oiling considering the environment the motor runs in. Any excess oil will simply drip out. I would say I put about 1/8th oz. of oil into this motor before it began to drip out. Really not much dripped out either so it must have been quite hungry.

So, quite an adventure. I really hate running into stuff where I don't know to do something. I didn't see anywhere in the Traeger manual where it says to oil the draft fan motor twice a season. Now I know though.
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The second thing that happened this week is I had scheduled up a meeting with the Icynene Insulation Sales Person. A few of you have written to me asking about what kind of house we are trying to heat with corn. I can give you a very vivid discription. It is 3500 square feet of living space, just shy of one hundred years old. It has seventy five windows, 50 of which are the age of the house. There is an 1,100 sq foot third floor/attic space that has zero insulation. The side walls are insulated with (mouse friendly) wood chips. I have seen barns that would be easier to heat, it is pretty much a miracle we can heat the place at all!

I have done some checking around and find that Icynene is some of the best foam insulation out there. There are a couple of reasons why I want to go foam. First off, with no real bearing on the quality, I have done too much insulation without a mask in my past. So putting in the pink fiberglass myself, unless I am wearing a resperator, is totally out of the question. But yet, I have done so much of it in the past that I can't quite bring myself to spend the money to have it done. So, that is weighing in my mind. The main thing though, I think the foam insulation is much better than fiberglass. What I am thinking about here is redoing the entire third floor. With foam insulation it can be sprayed right against the roof. I don't need any air space. That will allow me to finish the very top of the house, a smaller fourth floor space into storage.

The other thing that is very nice is foam insulation is a vapor and air infiltration barrier. So, no need for visqueen inside. No more bats in the attic any more.

Corn stoves for homes are hot item

Corn stoves for homes are hot item

An article in the Star Tribune attests to the popularity of corn burning stoves. We are defined as a "Consumer Craze" rather than a good idea who's time has come. Still, it is good to see this. The more people interested, the more companies are going to be interested in the corn stove building business and I have to think that is good for all of us.

On an unrelated note, it sure is cold our there today. It is sitting at seven degrees right now, I don't think we have been out of the single digits (unless you are talking the minus ones) for the past 24 hours. The house has stayed warm today but we have burned a lot of corn. I am getting a burn pot ready to change over maybe later tonight. It seems like when it is really cold like this and the boiler is burning hard, it pays to swap the pots out often. The only real trouble is I am getting low on wood pellets to start fires with so I am either going to have to find some or find some way to light fires within the next couple of weeks if it stays cold like this. I think I have about half a bag of pellets left.

Heat for our office

Fireplace Stoves, Gas Stoves, Pellet Stoves, Fireplaces, Fireplace Inserts by QUADRA-FIRE: Products - Pellet Inserts

I think some of our problem when it gets to these really cold days is that our Traeger TPB-150 Corn burning boiler can keep up with the demand of the house, but *just barely*. Part of this is an attic insulation issue (we don't have any), but I think part of it also is just the size of this house and number of windows. We have 75 windows in this place! Great view of the river valley, but expensive to heat. We have been running our gas fireplace insert way more than we want to this year and so we are thinking some of putting in a corn burning insert instead. This would take some load off the main boiler and I think make the whole place easier to heat. We are hoping to add attic insulation right after the first of the year when the tax credits kick in.

So shopping around, this is the best looking fireplace insert on the market and other Quadrafire products are highly rated, so I am hoping this is just as good. I get some time to do some additional research. I guess they are running about nine months backorder right now!

I am using a new tool to make this entry. Our tie-wearing friend from down the street, Andrew, suggested I look into the Blog This tool for the Firefox browser. To make this page, I went to the Quadrafire page I wanted to comment on and did a right click with the mouse to choose "blog this" . It worked pretty slick! Thanks Andrew!

Busy weeks!

Wow, what a couple of busy weeks! Thanksgiving was good here. The day leading up to the day of was warmer, then it dropped into the teens on the day itself. You can be a lot more comfortable in a warm house on a cold day without that ku-ching of the gas meter to think about hour after hour. Everything has been running pretty good but I had a slight overflow of corn from the burn pot on Thanksgiving morning. I let the fire burn out and cleaned up a couple cups of spilled corn.

Then this morning!

Some trouble with the burner this morning. It has gotten to the point where I can get a pretty good idea of the condition of the fire in the pot, by taking the first couple of steps down the basement steps. This morning, it seemed just a *touch* too cool on those first steps. I knew the fire must be weak or out. I arrived downstairs to find the fire choked out. When I first opened the boiler door, the hunk on the left, outside the firepot, was still burning. In the time it took me to curse and fetch the camera it had gone out. Still though, it was sort of a smelly, smoldery mess. I reached in, carefully, because I was bare handed, and took out about a five gallon bucket of clean dry corn that I returned to the supply bin. I took the ash pan out to the back hillside and dumped it over. ...waited around a few minutes to confirm the hillside did not start of fire. And, got the fire restarted in the firepot.

Not a real good beginning to a day. The other thing, it being Wednesday, it was my day to be in the office. Sitting in a cubical, in a sea of other cubicals. With all the messing around with the fire, and having to drive my truck in -- because the radiator is out in my car, my usual disheveled appearance was also accompanied by my tardiness.

What I am guessing is going on with my burner is right now is; I am in a section of my corn that is coming from exactly underneeth the fill hole in the center of the corn room, in the middle of my front porch. I think that is the spot where a lot of fines collected. Around the edges the corn is much cleaner, but right now, I am getting a lot of "fines" or broken particals of corn. They vary in size from about a third or maybe a quarter of a kernel is size on down to small little fragments. Here is a shot of how the corn looks. It is tough to see. The camera doesn't really focus on it right. It is better if you click on the picture. Then you get in a zoomed in view. What I think happens is these fines don't burn the same as the kernels. They don't have as much air space between the kernel peices as the regular kernels do and I think they smother out the big flame in the fire pot.

So, this weekend is going to be a project weekend. I am going to try to follow Ford's and other plans and build a corn screener. I will try to video tape it so people can see how it is put together. With a screener, you put the corn in on the top and it flows over a screen to seperate out the fine particles. The fines go into one bucket, the clean corn into another.

Plumbing project is complete

Well the plumbing project is done. As a little bit of background, we use a corn fed boiler to heat the old fashion cast iron radiators in our house. As part of the boiler it has built into it a "tankless coil" domestic hot water heater built into it. Last year was our first year of heating the house with corn. This year I decided to hook up the water heater part.

We are exclusively using our corn burning boiler for our domestic hot water. It will take a bit of getting used to but it has been working fairly well. The only real problem is the uncertainess of hot water. Normally, if you have a regular hot water heater, and you have power (gas/electricity), and nobody has taken a 40 minute shower recently, you have hot water. Not the case when your hot water supply is tied to your boiler. Tonight was a case in point. The wife wanted to take a bath. Half way through filling the tub, the pumps kicked in to push water out to the radiators in the house and suddenly our unlimited supply of hot water dropped to nothing. Boiler temperature was about 90 degrees, which ain't gonna warm up the domestic water going through the coil very well. Once the boiler temperature is down it takes a while to come back up.

A little plumbing project this weekend.

I have been working on a little plumbing project this weekend. A couple of weeks ago I got an email from someone off of the web site who was talking about how great the tankless hot water heater on the Traeger corn boiler was. I had not hooked mine up last year because I figured there was enough for me to figure out without the wild card of trying to use the furnace as our domestic hot water supply also. By this year, I figured I was ready for the advanced class!

I wanted to hook it up in such a way that it would run in series with my existing hot water heater. Then by switching a combination of valves, I could run either the Traeger exclusivly, or the hot water heater exclusivly, or run the Traeger as a pre-heater to the hot water heater. What I came up with is the drawing up at the top. I got everything test fit earlier in the week and so this weekend has just been a matter of fluxing the ends and sweating the joints. That and a break to run down and see the new Harry Potter movie.

Warmer weather

One of the reasons I wanted to get this blog going is to talk about some of the problems and the day to day actions of burning corn. I also want to talk about some of the problems I am having in the hope that as time goes on I will solve these problems and you won't have to live with the problem, only the solution.

The weather is not quite so cold today, currently 37 degrees and snow on tap for later today. The corn burner is keeping up just fine in this type of weather. It wasn't so rosy a few days ago. We are in that variable season, where it can be below zero one day and the next day it is t-shirt temperature.

Two nights ago the house was cold. It was zero outside and the corn burner had been burning hard all day. It seems like one of the problems we have is the burner gets behind. Once this happens, more and more corn piles into the burn pot and it starts to build up on the rim of the pot. If left running the corn will start to push over into the ash pan. Eventually the fire will smother out but not before a whole bunch of corn gets wasted and becomes a smelly mess down in the burn pot.

I have a few theories. I think either I need to open up the draft fan some. (I will put a picture of it's current position on later) Perhaps this corn is different and needs more air to burn correctly. I know I am going through a section of the corn that seems to have more fines in it.

Another theory is last year I burned a corn/wood-pellet blend. Maybe I need to pick up a few bags of pellets and see if this helps the burn some. Perhaps burning straight corn as I am now just won't work durning real hard burn times.

Or, the last theory, perhaps my boiler is just a little bit under powered. Maybe it doens't have quite enough BTUs to keep up with the heat loss of the house. It is rated at 150,000 BTUs, and my gas furnace was rated at 130,000 so I figured I had BTUs to spare, but sometimes manufacturers play a little fast and loose with the BTU numbers.

An important question to ask your dealer, when you are buying a corn stove, is if their BTU ratings are input or output BTUs. Lets look at an example; if your stove is rated at 100,000 input BTUs, that means if I put corn into the stove that should mathmatically compute to 100,000 BTUs and my stove has an efficiency rating of 80%, my output BTUs would be 80,000. But, how many BTUs does a bushel of corn have? I have read manufactuer's claims from 7,000 to 10,000. That could play a big difference in the end result, how warm you are sitting on your sofa.

--ja

Welcome

Here starts the event blog of a person who burns shelled corn to heat his family's home. What I hope to do is make it easy for myself to give people and insite into what it takes to heat with corn.

I am not currently planning to allow feedback on this blog. If you would like to give me feedback, please visit my web site at http://www.iburncorn.com and fill out a feedback comment, or better yet, click on the Forum link and join the forum.