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
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2 comments:
I don't know why anybody would think that corn burners aren't ready for prime time. They are ignorant of how people have keep warm for thousands of years. Women and grandmothers have keep the home fires burning. They used the wood burning cook stoves and room heaters and lit and stoked the coal furnaces. Most people as little as 60 or fewer years ago.
Remember the Christmas story and Scrooge. All the workers brought their own coal to work.
I've read some history of some ancestors in early Kentucky that kept warm with a fire in a pit dug in the center of their drafty cabin. At night the fire was removed from the pit and they made their bed in the warm pit to keep warm.
I agree. More technology needs to be incorperated with the corn burners to make them more pratical to use. Of course, if evey other house on the block burn Corn. What will that do to Corn and food prices?
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