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.