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.