Mid November

Just a few details on what is going on here.

First off, I am sorry about keeping the "Fresh" graphic on the blog tab of the forum. In my mind, there was a fresh entry. My body had just simply not gotten around to typing it out.

I now have about a month of burn time on the new style bottom feed burn pot on the Traeger. Alls in all, I would have to say this burn pot runs exactly like the old style Traeger pot. It seems that clinker formation is not all about where the corn comes into the pot. At the corn symposium up in Rice Lake last month, it was proposed that lighter metals, such as stainless steel in the case of Traeger, conduct too much heat. This heat conduction allows the heat to pass right through, cooling the surface of the stainless. The cooled surface is what creates the clinker. Under this theory, burn pots made of stainless will always have clinker problems. Burn pots that are heavier metals and hold the heat, such as cast iron, won't have the clinker issue. ....humm. Opinions, anyone?

Open house at Energy King
Our local corn burning manufacturer Energy King, had an open house the other night. It was during the time I was sick with my two week long cold. So I had to pop a couple of Advil to break the fever and hop in the truck. Energy King furnaces continue to impress me. It seems like they are very well made. Just guessing, I am thinking I saw about a hundred furnaces sitting on their assembly line floor.

They had one unit in operation, heating a section of the shop, and it seemed to be pumping out the BTUs quite nicely. It seemed to be running real good. The burn pot seemed quite clean and free of clinker. The unit itself is quite function. It won't win any style awards for its feed auger and draft fan designs, because they hook right at the front of the unit instead of many other manufacturers that tuck their unsightly appendages off the back of their burners. But, having the parts out front could be real handy when something goes wrong. As we know from Cosmo Castorini, "And something always goes wrong." He was right. Something always goes wrong. Having the working parts right up front when you are having troubles far outweighs any aesthetic difference. ...And, as people would point out to me, this is a forced air furnace. You don't put it in your living room!

The Energy King controls are quite complex. They are two duel timer dials, so you can precisely set the auger run/wait for a high burn and a low burn (as I remember it... I wasn't a hundred percent that night) I think this complexity gets you a very high level of control about how the furnace is running. Initially it would take some work to get fined tuned I bet. Still, I think it would be worth it. Every setup is different and to tune your boiler to your exact setup, would be great!

The unit they have built is a forced air furnace. They are talking about building a boiler as well. Being a hot water heat guy, I would love to see it!

It was a brief visit there. I would have loved to hang around and meet some of the dozen or so dealers and other interested parties who were hanging around. I didn't figure I needed to infect that many people though, so I called it an early night.

In other news, I got word of yet another new corn burning manufacturer who is currently going through UL testing for its new line of corn furnaces. I have had an early peak at their designs and they look real nice. Look for more news here in a couple of months or so, after UL certification.

My house project.
Hey can anyone spot where in the attic I installed that first roll of insulation? I call this picture "Postage Stamp" for obvious reasons. I am looking forward to some improved heating efficiency once I am done with this project. Unfortunately, that might not be until next year. I worked on the project today again and got through all the insulation I have purchased so far. Seven rolls/batts. Still though, a long way to go. I figure another 22 rolls of R-29 and maybe ten more bags of R-15 batts. It is a big insulation project! When done it will take my house from having attic insulation of R-0, because I currently have no attic insulation up to R-29! For an old house, this is quite a bit of attic insulation. I have got to think I am going to be burning less corn next year. I still have old windows. I still have woodchips as my sidewall insulation. But up top, where most of the heat enters the atmosphere, I am going to be looking pretty good!

Thursday of this week.

Thinking maybe you are making your plans for the coming week, I am going to be speaking to a group of like minded folk, corn burners all. I will be in Rice Lake Wisconsin on October 26th, speaking for the Northwest Wisconsin Corn and Wood pellet Forum will be held at the WITC conference center, 1900 College Drive, in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. Barron and Polk County UW-Extension are organizing the 6-9 p.m. event,

I am going to be there and also Herb Schweitzer from Burns Best in Spooner, WI. There will also be some information sent from a professor in Milwakee on switchgrass pellets.

It should be an interesting time. Here is a link to additional info: http://www.iburncorn.com/artwork/Oct_26_Corn_and_Wood_Pellet_Forum.pdf

I also said I would post a blog entry about the new style Traeger corn burning pot. I have been putting it off because I would still say that I have not given it a good test. It did run a number of days without overflowing, and with minimal care. Still though, I did get clinker buildup eventually and had to pull the pot out because the airflow was blocked. Here is another downside, it seems the oyster shell we are used to feeding these units to keep the soft, no longer works with this bottom feeding design. When I pulled the burn pot yesterday morning, it was filled with a lay about 2/3s of the way up with very hard clinker. Clinker I have not been able to remove yet.

But, and here is where the stickler is, I am not even starting on the burning season yet. Is the burn pot going to work better once it is into a more steady burn? It sure could. Maybe the clinker buildup in this pot only occured because the temperature was swinging 40 degrees over a few days. So don't hold me to this yet.

Quick News

The pre-2006 heating season stuff.
Well, the corn has been ordered. It is coming from River County Co-op here in Chippewa Falls. I just bought today (Friday), as the price continues to climb. I feel like it will drop down at some point but right now I am predicting the corn prices to continue to rise. I think that the rise in price is somewhat due to speculation on buying corn for ethanol production and also I have heard due to poor world wheat harvest. I am leaning toward thinking the former. It is also an election year.

The price was around $2.90-$3.00 a bushel. I seem to have misplaced the reciept at the moment. I will get it posted later.

Burning Corn 2006, Day Five

Today is day five of burning corn in the new style Traeger burn pot. I would have to say I am cautiously optimistic. It has really been going quite well. Five days and I have been running the same burn pot. I have not poked or prodded at the fire and clinker, hoping to just see how it goes un-attended.

I can't give it an unequivocal thumbs up though because we have been having some warm days and because I am buying bagged corn and ran out on Sunday when the Co-op was closed. So, the fire has not been burning hard or continuously. So it is really hard to say for sure. Still though, five days of burning in a Trager pot without having to dig out clinker or swap out the pot for cleaning, seems really hopeful.

First Burn Night

So here I sit. Down in the basement again. Laptop balanced on top of a Traeger burn pot. Opening the boiler door once in a while to check on the fire. It seems like deja-vu. It seems like it, because it is. Two winters ago, I was a new corn burner. Still... um... yeah, I have to say it, wet behind the ears (heh heh) and I was lighting my corn burner up for the first time. Looking at the owner's manual, looking at the burner, saying “I don’t know” each time the wife would ask, “is it supposed to be doing that?”

Today is the first day of the 2006/2007 burning season. We had been putting it off, the house hadn’t really been *that* cold. We had been baking a lot. Living in the kitchen and office areas. Running the gas fireplaces a little bit each morning to take the chill off and keep those spaces livable. Tonight though it is predicted to drop to 17 degrees. That’s just a touch too cold to wake up to in the morning. That’s getting to be frozen pipes temperature. So, it begins. The heating season.

This time I am down here because I am trying something new. I have the new style bottom feed Traeger burn pot in place. I need to keep an eye on it for a couple of reasons. First off, it is something new. Using corn for heat is not an exact science and so any time you make a major change to your setup, it pays to keep a close eye on it. Here, I have a new burn pot. I don't know how the corn will burn in it. Will I need to change the draft fan adjustment to allow more or less air in? I don't know.

But, second, it wasn’t a real smooth start. Traeger’s, at least of my era, have trouble with a small $4 part that senses the smoke box temperature. I don’t know if current production units use the same part or not. I expect they might. This part, checks to see if the smokebox is hot. If it is, it allows the corn feed auger to come on. If it is cold, as in, the fire went out, it keeps the feed auger turned off.




Well, this part fails, or it sticks. I am not really sure which. I replaced two of them last season before I figured out they seem to work but just need a lot more temperature than what they are rated the first time they turn on. If your furnace has been off for a while no amount of initial wood pellets will generate enough heat to kick the feed auger on. The solution is to pull off the cover to the four dollar part and jumper the two wires. Then, the feed auger is in perminant feed mode, as long as the switch is in the feed position.

No problem as long as the fire keeps burning. Here I sit, with a new burn pot, not sure how the draft fan will need to be configured for this pot, and the feed auger jumpered into continuous feed mode. Not the best start. Don't try this at home folks...

Oh yeah. One other detail.

I have the jumper wire in place. (This is pre-ductape from what is shown above) And I am jiggling the wires around because I just realized the jumper wire insulation is laying in direct contact with the hot smoke box. I touched the bare ends of the jumper against the boiler. Well, better the boiler than my finger I say, but I did blow the fuse on the Traeger control board.

So, now I have the feed auger jumpered, and the fuse wrapped in aluminum foil, and I am off and running on my corn burning adventure.

I will shut off the power to the boiler before I go to bed.
And I will buy fuses tomorrow.

All this aside, the burn pot seems to be working quite nicely. The temperature on the boiler is coming up as I sit here. The temperature is still, only 70 degrees, but higher than the rock bottom it was when I flipped open my laptop. I really hope this burn pot works out. All in all, I have been fairly happy with my Traeger but it has been much more work that what I hear other brands are. Changing burn pots every four days during the coldest part of the winter is not a fun job. This could change all of that, and I really hope it does.

I see from the Pinnacle Sales web site, the new Traeger boilers look a little different than the model I have. The smoke box seems larger somehow, and, there is an upper blower fan on the chimney pipe. I am going to drop them an email asking for some info on the new design features.

One final thing. Clean those chimneys! I like to help out when ever and wherever I can. Many times, some of my best help is by being a bad example. Thus, encouraging others to better themselves. This time I might have taken it a little too far. Spring of 2005 I pulled my chimney pipe off to run the shop-vac into the cleanout. There really wasn’t much there. 2005 was a short season for us, we only really heated the last two weeks of February, March, April. No surprise the chimney was pretty clean. The 2005/2006 heating season though was a full season. I cleaned the boiler flues out three times during the season, but I didn’t clean the chimney at all. Why do it? There was hardly anything in there the year before!



Imagine my surprise tonight when I pulled the pipe apart to give it a quick clean before lighting up. There was a small hole, about the size of a silver dollar. Other than that, the chimney pipe was full of fly ash! This was an excellent kick in the pants for me. (which I seem to need on a regular basis) But, folks, this is how people die of carbon monoxide poisoning! Buy a couple of CO detectors for your home. Use them, but also remember to check that chimney pipe once in a while! I am thinking a mid January cleanout would be a good thing, putting it mid season, since a whole season seems to plug the pipe. If you are a new corn burner, I suggest you check it a couple of times this year just to get a feel for how fast the ash builds up.

Burn pot has been running about three hours at this point. Seems to be working really well.

Good night all.

Solar Fourm Coming Up

For those of you who are interested in solar, as well as biomass, there is a forum coming up you might be interested. It is put on by Andrew Dane and UW Extension - Focus on Energy. The program Northwest Wisconsin Solar Energy Forum Andrew is the same guy who put on the wind forum several months back. Hope to see you all there.

An interesting day today

I had an interesting day today. I took an hour off my day job and drove over to a local company that has just gotten into the corn furnace business. The company name is Energy King (http://www.energyking.com/)and I had a chance to talk, and get a tour from, John Anderson who is the national sales manager for the company. I have to say, I left their plant pretty impressed.

Though Energy King is new to the corn, or more accurately biomass, furnace business, they have been in the solid fuel furnace business for thirty years. They have a line of wood and anthracite coal burning furnaces and boilers, and large scale wood burning fireplace inserts.
The "Bio-King" is their corn and pellet burning forced air furnace. (The company has plans to build a boiler later in the year) The Bio-King had several features I really liked. First off, the furnace circuitry is build from off the shelf parts. No proprietary circuit boards and black boxes. What I relate this to, as a computer guy, is open source software. If something is wrong with the unit, there is the theoretical capability for me to go in and figure out what is wrong, and fix it myself. Or, even if I feel I can't diagnose the problem myself, if I can find someone who can diagnose it, the part is going to be available within a few miles of my house. A much better situation than furnaces with dedicated circuit boards, where if something goes wrong, you are pretty much going to be sitting in the cold until Fed-Ex arrives.

The burn pot on the BioKing is of the cast iron bottom feed variety. It is similar to the LDJ style caste iron burn pot, but seemed a little different at the bottom. The feed auger is very heavy duty and can easily be removed for cleaning. The feed auger is powered by a very high horsepower motor. Basically the thought is; cob, stalk, fines, who cares! Grind right though it. Push it in and burn it up!

What I was the most impressed with though is the layout and style of the heat exchanger tubes. They are horizontal, similar to the H.S. Tarm rather than vertical as in most of the corn burners I have looked at. It seems a better design to me (though I am no furnace designer) to capture that heat for a longer period of time with the horizontal tubes.

Then, the piece d'resistance, as far as I am concerned. You clean the heat exchanger tubes via a push pull rod that runs a scraper over the outside of the tubes. It was a slick design and I hope it works out well. It sure would be easier than what I have to go through each time I have to clean my boiler. I feel like the key will be how well the heat exchanger tubes will be able to handle the extreme heat of being inside the corn burning fire chamber. There is a heavy steel deflector plate that hangs below the exchanger tubes but still it is going to be very hot in that spot. Any warp-age of the exchanger tubes and suddenly the tube cleaning method isn't going to work very well.

The suggesting list price on the BioKing is $4250, it weighs in at 575lbs and is adjustable from 70,000-140,000 BTUs. The hopper capacity is 17 bushels. It is rated for corn and pellets and is being tested with switchgrass.

I really look forward to someone buying one of these units and putting it into their house. I feel like most of the corn burners we are all running are first generation units. They are built by companies that have good ideas, but after time and experience even good ideas can be improved. I think the Energy King has improved on some existing ideas and the Bio King deserves a good look.

A cool night!

Tonight is the first night where there is just that little bite in the air. It is sixty degrees out right now and it feels it. A corn burner's heart starts to look toward the winter. Thinking about those first fires of the season. Checking the gas meter after a warm cozy day and seeing in the exact same spot it was yesterday. Yeah, that get's a corn burner's heart beating faster....

It should be an interesting heating season. We have a war on, our Alaska oil fields just went dark. I wouldn't want to be owning a fuel oil burning furnace right now. No matter how many times the experts will tell you this is only 8% of our total production, it will effect prices. ....And here's a news flash, they ain't gonna go down.

Traeger Bottom Feeding Burn Pot

So here it is. The Traeger bottom feeding burn pot. I am really excited to try this baby out. If it would have shown up a week earlier, we had a spell of fifty degree weather, it would have had a fire in it. As it was, it was mid eighties and I just didn't feel like starting a fire.

Here are a few more images of it:

You can see here the air hole configuration. They no longer have air holes around the bottom of the burn pot and where the corn comes in you can see is obviously no longer in the middle of the burn pot. The other thing that is important to note, the seam for the inner chamber is no longer directly across from where the corn comes in. I think that will be an important detail when it comes to the life span of these pots. Directly across from the corn inlet, on the old pots anyway, is an area of very intense heat. I always thought having the inner welded seam in that spot seemed like a bad idea. That was always the first spots in the old pots that the welds seemed to crack and let go.

Also, one other thing that seems to be a little different from the old pots is that the stainless seems to be scored or something. You can actually see it in this picture. See the vertical lines down next to the corn entry hole. The old pots didn't have those, they were perfectly smooth inside. Now, I don't know if this is just because it is an early production unit, close to a prototype. Maybe once this goes into production it will be built differently, or maybe there is some advantage to building them this way and it is the wave of the future.

Here you can really see where the corn is coming in. It is way down at the bottom compared to the old pots. From the outside, it is almost like they took the old design and turned it upside down.

Also you can see now that the went to a different structure on the holder for the bottom slide door. My old burn pot had a stainless channel that formed right in with the burn pot above. Now, it is more like a hunk of angle iron that was welded on the side. Again, I don't know if this is because it is an early production unit.

I have had this pot sitting here for a couple of months and I am just now getting around to writting. Life is just so busy sometimes. I did one day get a fire in this burn pot. ...and it went poorly. Not because of any fault of Traeger's though. It was really pretty funny, in hindsight, that is, and, I shot video of it. If I get some time I will go ahead and post it just so you can get to see me being a dumb ass. Basically what happened was the boiler really needed cleaning. I mean, it REALLY needed cleaning. But what was happening was the outside temps were hovering in the low sixties during the days, and drop into the 40s at night. But, clear and sunny almost every day. I hadn't given the boiler it's spring cleaning. It was still dirty from the winters burning where I had run alot of corn through it since the last time I cleaned up the flues. They needed to be cleaned. ...but, every few days we would get a cloudy day, and I would have to run it. So, I didn't want to do all the work of the spring cleaning, then two weeks later when it did finally turn warm, have to clean it again. So, I put it off and put it off. Then, this pot shows up and I just had to run it. ....but, because it was a warmer day, with less draft because of the heat, and being nearly plugged with fly ash, the draft was almost totally gone. The results were pretty smokey. I got the fire out after a few minutes of me saying on video, ....jeeze sure is a lot of smoke commin' outta there...."

So I am sorry to my Traeger readers. I don't really have a report for you. You will have to wait for the first cool day this fall, when I can light a proper fire. I do offer this as a beacon of hope. I live in Wisconsin. The first cool day of the fall could be next Tuesday.

--ja

A report from N 47.00.011 W 94.50.719

I am sitting in a coffeeshop in Walker Minnesota, pondering the future of corn burning and the future in general. Northern Minnesota is a great place to sit and ponder. I came to this coffeeshop hoping to get wireless internet access but I was out of luck. The guy behind the counter told me that though the shop had did not have wireless service, one of the businesses close by had it and he said I might be able to connect. As it turned out, the signal was too weak for me. Apple laptops, for as great as they are, have internal wireless antennas that truly suck. So, here I am at the Walker Bay Coffee Company, with it’s sticky door (sign says “pull hard, we are open”) and its remote charm (no wireless) and I write here. I think here. I will post from somewhere else.

Vacations are wonderful things. We have been doing little to nothing. Relaxing in the lake canoeing to a couple of the islands. All this time though I think about the future. We have lived through some great times but do you see such great times coming in the future? I have lost touch this week and tried to forget about the troubled times in the middle east. On this powder keg rests the United States security and economy. It is a powder keg sitting in the back yard of a nations that hate us – and hate us for good reason.

It is easy for us corn burners to appear smug, to say we don’t care. I am even thinking of getting some t-shirts printed up that say “Screw OPEC, I burn corn” because that is exactly the sentiment we all share. These shirts would sell! I like to conserve, to save, and to use alternative forms of energy, but is it really true? No, it isn’t. We as corn burners are just as tied to that mideast oil as the next guy. We all drink from the same tap, it’s just that right now, in this economy, with the government protecting the corn farmers with a sustenance living, we corn burners are able to save money. Take away that fossil fuel infrastructure though and our house of cards will collapse too.

I am reading a really great book, which I think every corn burner should read. The title of the book is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It has less to do with corn for fuel, and more to do with corn as food. I am only about a third of the way in though, and so it might get to the fuel aspect of corn yet. The book breaks down all the uses for corn and how it shows up in our diet. It is really amazing the uses for corn in processed food and it contends that 45% of an American’s diet is either directly or indirectly corn based.

The free market doesn’t work in agriculture and it never will. If a factory gets caught in an over supply of product, if the widgets it produces drop too low in price, factories can be idled, workers laid off, and demand can catch up with supply. It is impossible to idle land however. If a farmer goes out of business, someone else will step up to the plate and plant corn on the ground. The over supply problem will not go away, it will just shift to a different farmer.

Corn costs about $2.50 a bushel to produce, how can the price of corn hover at $1.45? Even now, with the US drought covering more than half the country http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html the price is still below $2.00/bu.

So, to change the subject. :-)

A little conversation about burn pots. I am a Traeger owner and for the most part a satisfied customer. My major point of contention however is the burn pot design. The Traeger than I own and have run for the past two heating seasons is a top feed burn pot design.

The corn feeds in from the top of the burn pot and dumps down into the bottom of the pot where the fire is burning. The fire is quite strong because there are combustion air holes all around the inner cylinder and so after the first few minutes of building a new fire, the burn pot looks like the biggest blow torch you have ever seen.


Here is the trouble. The corn feeds in from the top and everything is just rosey for the first day of burning. Corn klinker is building up in the bottom of the pot and begins to cover over some of the air holes that blow into the fire. The instruction manual on the Traeger says to remove the klinker daily. ….Yeah, right.

The manual doesn’t really tell you how to go about removing it but there are two ways to remove the klinker. Either, shut the feed off, let the fire die down. Let the boiler cool down some, dig all the klinker out, and rebuild the fire. Lots of work, but it is the best way to remove the klinker. The second way, and the way I usually use, is to shut off the draft fan and dig right into the burn pot with a short crow bar. By running the 12” crowbar along side the interior burn pot walls you should be able to – without damaging the burn pot, knock the klinker loose. You can’t really use much force, but if your fire has just been running the klinker should be in sort of a plasma phase. Sort of like very, very hot putty. So, it really shouldn’t take much force to get the crowbar along the pot wall. Then, without dislodging too much of the actively burning corn, flip the masses of klinker up and over the edge of the burn pot. It is tricky. If you chuck over too much of the burning corn, your fire goes out. If you don’t get out enough of the klinker, the corn doesn’t burn efficiently and you don’t get as much heat out of the boiler as you should.

So I had mentioned this several times on the blog and on the forum and had talked about what I consider to be a better design on the LDJ boiler, using a bottom feed. Instead of the corn dropping into the burn pot, it is pushed in from the bottom. You don’t get the klinker buildup in the bottom of the pot. In late May Traeger contacted me and said they had a burn pot design they would like me to try. It is a bottom feeder of this design.

In design, the new Traeger burn pot is similar to the LDJ pictured here. However this LDJ burn pot is a heavy weight cast iron pot. It would be hard to imagine this burn pot warping the way the Traeger top feed stainless steel pots I currently own have warped. The LDJ has two rows of air holes, spaced around the inside. They are much smaller holes than the Traeger uses, but much closer spacing. The corn auger you can see just at the bottom of the burn pot is a solid fin style, whereas the Trager uses the hollow core, spring style auger.


And, this is pretty much where I was planning on sticking the pictures of the new style Traeger burn pot. I burned them onto a CD and stuck it somewhere in our stuff that got packed for the lake. Do you think I can find them now that I want them? NO...... Rats. I will post them when I get home.

Until then, goodbye from Spider Lake.

--ja

Forum

Hello everyone. I have been on vacation for the past week so naturally the day after I left town the forum died. Sorry about that. I am back and will be looking into the forum tonight and tomorrow.

I also have a blog posting that I have written up at the lake. Going to try to get that posted tomorrow as well.

Forum open to the public

The Corn Burner's Forum is now open to the public. The address is http://forum.iburncorn.com the testing is over. It still has one feature that doesn't work, the spell checker, but I am working on that and hope to have it fully working soon.

The forum is online!

Still hidden though. I gave out the address to about a dozen people who are in there posting a few messages in it and testing. It seems like it is going to work. If you want to get in on the testing, drop me a mail and I will send you the address.

Server is on the way!

The new web server, setup to be the new Corn Burner's Forum, has been shipped to the ISP. Here is a photo of it all boxed up, the wife is just ready to go out the door and take it to the post office with a bunch of her EBay sales. I am hoping it shows up at my ISP on Thursday. So, don't dispair folks! The forum is about to be back online!

I had really hoped that I would be able to migrate over the old usernames and passwords from the old forum, over to the new one. I was able to get the migration to work on my laptop, but then when I tried to get it to work on the production server it failed everytime. I don't know quite why. I decided not to take the time to figure it out.

I will send out email to a few of the heavy posters (ahem, Tallcorn) and let them get in a day or two in advance to secure their old usernames back again. With all the work that they had put into all the posts they did, I would hate to see them loose the name to someone else.

In other news, I am pretty sure I am going to be going to the Wind Energy Forum that I mentioned in my last post. It is about an hour's drive from Chippewa Falls but I think a couple of my neighbors are going to go up there with me. It sure sounds like it is going to be an interesting forum. Make sure you send your registration forms in. There are going to be FREE SNACKS PROVIDED, :-) and they want to get a good count on the attendees so they are sure to have enough.

And one final note. A rather interesting box showed up in the mail a couple of days ago. It is a new burn pot design from Traeger. A bottom feeding burn pot, similar in style to the LDJ, that will push the corn up from the bottom. I don't think this burn pot is on the market yet. It sounds also like the weather might just be cold enough tomorrow to try it out. I will do some burning and let you all know how it goes. If this works, it could be the solution to many of the complaints everyone has about their Traeger boilers and could be a great thing for the company! I will post some pictures of the new burn pot in the next couple of days so you can all see it.

Another Day, another crisis

I don't know about you, but I am burning corn again. As a matter of fact, I think you are doing the same thing. You want to know how I can tell the outdoor temperature? I look at the hits on my website. The hits go up, people start emailing me asking when the heck the forum is going to come online again. That pretty much tells me that it is cold outside. Today, you are sure right. It's 40 degrees outside right now! Heading toward the lower thirties tonight! Snow in the forecast! What month is it???

I tell you folks, I like Wisconsin and all, but, sometimes I get listening to that Jimmy Buffet music and get thinking about those little latitudes. My friend Dave Jones says he wants to live a life where his biggest decisions of the day involves what color of umbrella to put in his drink. That seems to me like a really warm weather thought, doesn't it? Yeah Dave, you got the right idea.

Yesterday was another interesting day. I was driving in to St. Paul for my weekly penance of sitting in an office cubicle. Driving down I-94, the far side of Menomonie, just (luckily) a mile past the single lane road construction area my old dependable Saab coughed. Then shortly later it coughed again. Then it choked, sputtered, spat, gagged and, finally, coasted. Damn. That's how I got to meet Tim, the tow truck guy. Heck of a great guy. I even say that now, after he lightened my load by $200. I hit him up with what I consider my universal conversation starter.... "So, how do you heat your house?" Ummmm Propane huh? We had a good chat about global economics, peak oil production and how are children's live are going to be different than ours. He was much more of an optimist than I am. I suggested some depressing reading material, _The Long Emergency_. Depressing, but one of the best books I have ever read. We'll see if he is still an optimist the next time I run into him.

One thing Tim was real interested in was wind energy so it was quite a coincidence that when I got home and was telling my friend Andrew Dane about the whole experience he hit me with a brochure for a Wind Energy Forum he organized. It really sounds like a great forum and I plan on attending. It looks to be a real overview of where wind energy is at and might offer some information on local wind generating systems. Hope to see you there.

A corn burners forum update. What with car trouble and now the wife is gone again for a couple of days I didn't get the new server packed up to ship down to the ISP. I still have hopes for tomorrow. I would like to get the forum online early next week.

--ja

An update

Hello everyone! It has been a long month, and it is what, the 9th? Oh dear.

Already this month we have had some low points. I took a call I had not been looking forward to receiving. My wife's step dad passed away from cancer last week. It was a very rough week on her. She went to her mom's house for the week. She delt with a whole bunch of family issues, as happens at times of death. It was a very rough week for her. I stayed home with the kids and though there were still three of them left after the week was over, I sure didn't get much work done on the corn burning web site.

This week though has been much better. I was able to get the web server reformatted with a new version of the OS and got the forum software up and running on it. Just today I got my new IP number from my ISP and I hope to put the server in the mail to them on Thursday. I would like to think that the forum will be live by early next week.

Everything always takes longer than I expect it to. Even when I inflate my expectations by 2x

On a corn related note, my neighbor got his corn burning stove in tonight. He bought an LDJ boiler. I have already been down to his house to take some pictures of the room before the burner. If I can talk him into waiting until Thursday (I am busy tomorrow) to bring it home I can also get some pictures of it coming in and being moved down into the basement.

It should be interesting to have a second case study on the web site.

--ja

Ah, the Irony

Saturday night we had tickets to see one of my favorite bands at the Target Center in Minneapolis. The band name, and here's the irony, is Korn. The wife spent enough on the required "new outfit" to make the tickets look cheap. We went with my nephew who got us some really great seats. Visually, I would have to say it was a great show. The sound was really not so good though. It was like we were sitting in a sound hole. We left at the end of the concert, my ears didn't even have that "great rock show" ringing sound. While there, I went over a couple of isles and down a few rows and the sound was great there. I almost wonder if one bunch of the speaker stacks weren't working or something.

Well the corn burner shutdown is over. We are in that springtime period where the temperature bounces up and down a lot. We had the fire out for about 24 hours while the temperature went up to about 60 and held. Less than twenty four hours later it started cooling down though, and with the prospect of three days of rain in the forecast, we lit it back up. It sounds like this week is going to be warmer and sunnier again. It was snowing when I left Chippewa Falls this morning. That was sort of harsh reality after loosing a hour of sleep over the weekend with daylight savings time change.

A big night tonight...

Only time for a short note. Just wanted to write, that tonight we have the corn fire off. We are hoping to pick up enough solar tomorrow to keep the house warm during the day. Spring time has come, even though I know that winter is still lurking around the corner, and is sure to make at least one more unwelcome appearence. For tonight though, and tomorrow, we thinking spring thoughts.

I want to thank you all for coming to my web site this heating season. I will continue to update it as often as I can, but I know you all have busy lives to live this summer. You won't be stopping off at my house as much for a while. I look forward to hearing from you all again in the fall.

--ja

What a great day!

I don't know for sure what the temperature got up to. But it sure was a great day here in Wisconsin. It was nice enough for me to declare it to be the first official day of yard work. I am planning on building a retaining wall behind my firepit in the backyard this year. So I carried a bunch of the stones I picked up while on the family farm a couple of weeks ago, back to the area I am planning on building the wall. It was quite a workout. I am sure I will be stiff tomorrow.

Other than that, pretty much a lost weekend. The youngest daughter has had the flu all weekend. I am bogged down in work stuff so I tried to do a couple hours on Saturday. Couldn't really get my head into it though. Tonight she had a temperature of almost 105. Scary.

On the corn burning front, we are not burning much right now. Yesterday the burn pot got plugged up and it spilled a bunch of corn over the edge of the pot, down into the ash pan. I cleaned some of it up but let the rest go. Since we have only been burning lightly the last couple of days, it hasn't been enough to incinerate the spilled corn. Instead, it is sitting down there smoldering and smelling. I will be glad when spring arrives in full.

...Except for the fact that shortly after spring comes "Are you going to get back to painting the house?" THAT season, I am not looking forward to.

--ja

Away from home...

I am reading my email in the basement of a hotel tonight. Wishing I could be home sitting on a corn fired radiator drinking a beer. It never really strikes you how good that beer tastes until you are sitting somewhere you can't get one. :-) I am pretty much a one beer a night kinda guy. Actually my average is a little lower than that. Some nights I forget to have one. Other nights, I open one up and then a few minutes later, can't find the damned thing. It is particularly tough right now though because last weekend, my nephew, saint's praise his name, brought me a case of Grain Belt Premiums. It's almost impossible to find that beer in Wisconsin. I think it's a border thing. But now, here I sit, a whole case of Preme's sitting in my fridge in Chippewa Falls where I can't get to them!

I got some mail that I thought I would post here because either it or my responses have some good information.

Ted writes:

When did you purchase thiscorn boiler? Are you happy with it? How much corn do you burn per month, anddo you feel you are saving? And is it alot of work to clean and how often doyou clean this? We live in Cheyenne, Wy. very interested, we found Traeger 150before we read your information. Please tell us more. We had called theAction Fire Place, but they have not called us back yet. Thanks!

One page you should check into is:
My Burn Rate Page
(Normally this page has some graphs on it, tonight for some reason, the graphs
are not showing up -- so never mind about those big blank areas.)

This page lets you know how much I am burning. On average, as of the data I have in there right now, 167lbs a day. I should say though that we live in a big old house with no attic insulation, 75 single pane windows, and limestone foundation with plenty of drafts. Your milage may vary.

The boiler was purchased in January of 2005.

By my estimations, as of February 25th I had saved $1160 this year. I need to get the March data put into the computer and then you should have a better idea of a season's savings.

I have a video on the site showing me doing a cleaning. I don't think it is a huge amount of work. I think I will have cleaned it four times by the end of the season, so at least it doesn't have to be done real often.

There is work to be done daily. The hopper has to be loaded. The burn pot must be cleaned of klinker almost daily, and changed out weekly. That is a bit of a pain but we feel, worth it, for the savings.

Am I happy with it? Hummm. Here is what I think. The best corn burner on the market is an H.S. Tarm. It is $10,000. Since I have trouble coming up with coffee money each morning, this was not an option. A lot of people really like the LDJ. If I was starting over, I might go that route instead. However, I think the Traeger is a very solid, well built unit. I think it has some design issues surrounding it's burn pot. I will also admit that I might be trying to ask a little too much from the Traeger. It could be that my BTU demand is actually higher than what it can supply and so therefore I am having the troubles with it that I am.

So, this summer I am going to insulate my attic (right now we have zero). This should help the BTU load. I think Traeger continues to work on it's designs. With the influx of money the company has now that corn burning is so popular, I hope they are fixing the problems they have. Maybe between these two things next season will be better.
----------------------------

I also forwarded onto my neighbor some comments off my blog from a guy who really likes Traegers and thinks they have the best burn pot design (being top feeding). My neighbor and I are working ...well, the fact is, he is doing most of the work, but you get the idea... :-) on some new burn pots for my Traeger boiler. One of the thoughts we had was to try to build a bottom feeding pot. My neighbor reponds to the mail:

This guy seems to have a hard desire for Traeger from the sounds of it. The problem with all corn systems is the clinker. Bottom feed pots I like the better because they remove their clinker instead of leave it in the pot and piling new corn on top of it. If the feed rate is set right I don't think any corn should ever hit the ash pan. As for having to go in and break some of the clinker up I am not completely in agreement with him but it seems the same thing is required of the Traeger from time to time anyway. The Traeger is a good unit but I think the burn pot is a major disappointment with it. Your pots should have never failed that soon. I am pretty confident our design will be better. I am going to see if I can get a hold of some material soon for some experiments. I will keep you posted.

I give the guy credit for replying and defending himself. I would like more info on his stove. I am curious to see how it works. I understand his interest in top burning systems better now but I still think the bottom feeding ones are better. The LDJ has been made for 20 years (was made in Illinois before LDJ bought them). I would have to think that they have it pretty together.

The Tarm that I looked at had a simiar issue. It always burned the corn however the ash covered the air vents for the combustion air and when I moved ash off the holes the flame grew significantly. Even the top of the line have their issues.

I am confident we will have a full very detailed report on your site as I get everything installed and setup.

And that is true. I will put together every detail, thought and plan on this web site as I go along. But for tonight, I am going to call it a night!

Happy corn burning!

--ja

Burn pot cement and corn level

Last night I put up the pictures of what a cracked burn pot looks like. This morning, the pot has cooled down enough so that I can clean it up and put some boiler cement on it. The cement really looks a lot like concrete but it drys with more of a glassy surface.

Here it is as I am spreading it. I just dip in with my finger and squeeze it into the crack. It doesn't really take much. Like I mentioned, it might be a good idea to sort of mix in a little wad of pink fiberglass insulation. I haven't tried it yet but might the next time I have to patch this burn pot. Doing so might provide some gap filler and make the cementing job last a little longer. As it is, two burning is the best you can hope for from a cemented pot. What I do, after I get the cement spread out over the crack is to throw the burn pot up on top of the smoke box on the burner. This keeps the burn pot nice and warm and helps the cement cure. The instructions on the container say to keep the heat low the first few fires. Since that isn't really an option on a burn pot, I am hoping this warming over a few days will do the same thing.


The Current Corn Status

The question now is, "Are we going to make it or not?" I would say we have about one pickup load of corn still in the corn room. It is tough to get an idea of scale from this photo. I should have stuck the dog in the picture. I took some measurements though and have inch markings on the wall in the back. So, the pile is 33 inches high. It comes out from the wall 76 inches. It is 92 inches wide. 33x76=2508 divide by two gives us 1254 square inches in this triange. Then, times 92 gives me 115,368 cubic inches. Divide this by 1728 to give me 66.76 cubic feet. Then, using the information on my corn storage page I divide this by 1.25 to tell me that I currently have 53.41 bushels of corn left. This is 2,884 lbs (assuming I have less than perfect 54 lb/bu corn) or, enough for 17 average winter days.

Winter can turn into spring litereally overnight here. No mind that we have gotten a foot of snow in the last seven days, two weeks from now I could be mowing the grass. ...of course, the reverse is true as well, winter can sometimes drag on. We could still be needing heat on the 15th of May. We will just have to see how it goes.

Saturday Night.

Well, I am rested up after a good night's sleep.

Check out my new corn burning equipment. This old bit of hardware came from my father's farm, by way of my brother in law's chicken shed for the past twenty years. It is a fanning mill, and is used to clean grain.

I am guessing the machine must be about 80 years old. It was pretty much ancient, back when I was a kid, helping my dad clean seed oats. The last twenty years in the chicken coop didn't help it much but at least it was mostly dry in there. There was a layer of chicken dung on it when we first brought it out of the shed but sitting in the back of the truck for the the two hundred mile trip home in the rain the other night pretty well cured that problem. It still has a rather disticnt odor, but it is visually fairly clean. The hopper is pretty much rotted out, but it shouldn't be too hard to rebuild. The fan seems in pretty good condition, though it does have one spot where it rubs against the housing. I will have to re-form that a little bit. I am also going to have to put my hands on one belt leather. Not sure how tough that is going to be. I will also try to build some sort of vacume attachment to the top where the fan blows out. I will be using this inside my basement so I am going to try to make it as dust free as possible.

Here is a shot looking down from above. You can see the bottom of the two screens. The top screen seems to be missing entirely. The bottom screen is rotted out and hanging off at an angle. No mind. These are the oat screens. The screens we used in the mill to clean oats for planting in the field. I need to put in the corser screens to clean corn. The way this mill works is the first screen takes out the big stuff. The corn falls through it. The stalks, cobs and such ride on the top of the screen and fall in the chute. The second screen takes out the fines. The corn rides on the top of the second screen and the fines fall through. The the corn passes and drops in front of the fan which takes out the chaff and bee's wings. I think I will need to buy a new top screen and build a frame for it. I think the corn bottom screen I have.

You can see in this, a shot of the hopper I am going to have to build. Should be a pretty easy project. Not sure if I will build it out of pine, I have some pretty nice looking maple down in the shop. That would make a sturdy little hopper. With the price of clear pine these days, maple isn't very much more expensive. You can also see in this shot, the spare screens down in the bottom. I think there are six spares, mostly really fine ones. I think back at the time my Dad said they were for cleaning alphalfa seed. I am looking forward to getting this machine into production by next season.


Traeger burn pots. The weakest link in the chain.

Here is my season and a half burn pot. I have already had this pot welded twice. I has cracked again. The stainless steel on the top part of the pot is getting very thin. The air holes you can see on this pot are actually getting quite sharp on the edges.

Check out the comments on this post of my blog
March 15th. The comments by teajohn are quite interesting. Now I don't know if this guy's real last name is Traeger, or just what. He sure thinks Traeger is on the right track. It sure seems like I hear the bottom-feed-burn-pot folks complaining less than what I complain.



I don't have time to weld this burn pot right now. Not even sure if my neighbor the welder is in town. I need a short term fix. Enter boiler cement. With boiler cement, you can patch a burn pot hole. It doesn't last long, maybe two burn pot changes, so eight to ten days of burn time. I have thought some of wadding in some pink fiberglass insultation with the boiler cement to get to have a little more body, and bridge gaps a little better. I haven't done this yet though. I will give a report if I try it.

This boiler cement I bought at the local True Value Hardware store. I think it was about four bucks for this container. It goes a very long ways. I have patched burn pot holes three times this season and it doesn't even have a quarter of an inch taken out of the container.

The usual title

I went to type in what I was going to have as the title to this post. "Busy Weeks" I got as far as B,u,s and the computer popped up and suggested the rest. I guess have I have typed that phrase too many times lately.

Winter has returned to Wisconsin. We got about a foot of snow on Sunday night. Eight inches predicted for tonight. I guess we are getting our winter late. The snow is a pain but I do like it better than cold.

Work has been very busy the last four weeks. I have four more weeks of this schedule to go and then life should either return, or shortly return, to the usual pace.

I have been getting spammed from some aweful company, Silver Fox Plumbing, who has found my blog where I have the post about doing some plumbing work, hooking up my water heater. They have been mailing me three times a day with posts to this blog (which I just delete) trying to advertise their plumbing business. So, let it be said here first: "Don't buy anything from Silver Fox Plumbing" They are "total crooks" YOUR PIPES WILL LEAK. If I am not mistaken, I believe their dog has fleas too.

One cool thing; my work sent me home with the Art Departments brand new, super high speed, dual processor, Mac G5 computer and 23" flat panel monitor. I get to format it all up for them, and do some software burn in for two weeks. Whoo hoo. This baby looks real cool siting beside my desk. If I had the money, I would own one just like it. It is a really great computer and the OS X operating system is fast, well designed and secure enough to trust. Apple now makes the ultimate computer hacker machine. I sure love my 17" powerbook. ....and I am a total wienie computer hacker.

Corn burning has been going good here, though I have only made occasional trips to the basement. The wife has been totally in charge of the corn boiler and she has been doing a great job. Only thing is, it is a Traeger and so it needs regular burn pot changes. She can't lift the burn pots when they are in the stove. So, I have to change the burn pot every night I am home.

Hey, and while we are talking about burn pots. I talked to my neighbor the other night. He was down to help me unload my prize (a ~80 year old fanning mill that used to be my fathers -- I will post pictures later) from the pickup. He also brought a pad and paper to take some measurements of my burn pot. He is thinking about working up a couple of burn pot designs. Maybe one that is close to factory spec, and maybe another one that attempts to be a bottom feeder. It should be interesting. Anyone have any Traeger burn pot suggestions?

Can't think of anything else. Hope you all are having a good winter.

Forum is up

I hate to say the forum is up, only to have it crash again, but.... the forum is up. I might have found the problem, it was with one record in the database.

--ja

More work on the forum

I have contacted an ISP about hosting the forum, even set it up and ran it for a while tonight. It seems like there is something wrong with it though. I will do some more checking into it in the morning. It ran for about half an hour and then suddenly the ISP's server went away.

I am now looking into the possibility that maybe one of the posts has some bad data in it.

--ja

One last thought

I should give some credit where credit is due. I want to announce that the wife ran the corn burner for three days while I was gone. She had a few little problems. She worked through them.

I would also confess that I came home, took a look at the fire. Thought it looked a little too fed and so shutoff the feed on the stove.

...of course, fully intending to turn it back on in 15 or 20 minutes. I forgot. The fire is out. I have to get a fire built in there again before I can go to bed. Then hope for the wife to not read my blog...

Good night.

A Technical update for those computer people who might care

Homecoming tonight. I am back in Chippewa Falls. I got a little time to look at the new server tonight. I had been looking at some software called Blue Dragon. It is free software that runs on a computer and can send out dynamic web pages, like the forum is. I had looked at it some before I left. I had downloaded the newest version and tried to install it on the new server. It would not install though. As soon as I typed in my password it would crash. I downloaded an older version of the same program tonight and it installed right away.

Ummmm, it doesn't run yet. That is sort of a down side and the way this stuff works. I will have some time to diddle with it some tomorrow night. In the meantime, I have someone to call tommorrow and see if I can use some space on one of his servers. If so, I should be able to move the forum over his server and bring it back up tomorrow night!

I am sorry to you all for all this down time. I do know how you all enjoy it. I enjoy it too.

--ja

Where did you go on your winter vacation?

I bet it was more fun than where I am. I am sitting in a hotel, so that part might be the same. The difference is I am working nine hours a day. Then sitting in a hotel, where I have very limited net access (a fact that I never realized would drive me so crazy!). What's worse, the area the hotel is located in is dry, SO I CAN'T EVEN HAVE A BEER! Aaaaaagh.

On top of all this, my web server started having some problems on Sunday night. Basically what it amounts to is the hits on the forum are pretty high. The month of february is looking like it will have the highest number of hits on my web site that I have ever had. I know you all need your fix from my forum, ( not as bad as I need a beer right now) but I will try to get things working again when I get home on Wednesday night.

Just to let you know what is going on, I bought a new computer to run the databases on. I got it about 90% of the way setup. Then I had an inspiration of what might be causing some problems on the old server and fixed those problems. That gave me some breathing room. Unfortunatly, that was the last thing I needed. I waited a couple of weeks to see how the fixes took, and in the meantime, got a super rush of work that takes me away from home three days a week.

So here I sit. I can't really make the fixes. I hate television. My fingers are already sore from playing guitar and I have really sucky net access....

Oh yeah, and did I mention, NO BEER!

Back to winter

Well, I was sitting outside a few days back, another typical January day in Wisconsin. I was sittin' there in the sun, wearing a t-shirt, drinkin' a beer. I was saying, you know, this winter stuff, it ain't so bad....

Ahh, but I have lived in the north for too long. I just feel like there is going to be hell to pay for all this nice weather. The last couple of nights we have been getting a little bit of that hell. It has cooled down quite a lot. Still though, corn burning wise, it has been a really great winter. The Traeger gets a little behind when we have those really cold days. I can keep it running but it needs more work. I have to keep an eye on it, it runs 100%, it overflows more often, and needs more burn pot changes.

I talked a little bit to one of the folks at Traeger about some changes they made to the TPB-150. I will try to get a few more details and summarize them here. Maybe they will be things I will try to incorporate to my setup.

A word to the techies out there

I apologize in advance to all the computer illiterate corn burners out there. Suffer through, I need to talk technical for a bit. I will try to get to some actual corn burning talk before the post is over. I have seen some of the posts on the forum and heard from a few of you so I know there are some geeks burning corn too. I will let you know something I discovered today.

Today was sort of a wasted eight hours at my day job. I have been working on a technical issue with some ESRI mapping software being incompatible with our hardware and operating systems. I am reminded of why I will do almost anything to put off calling in tech support from a major software company. Well, I had put it off. My boss had asked me how it was coming too many times. I had no solutions myself, so, today was the day. I emailed ESRI tech support. I spent most of the day gathering information and emailing back and forth to a tech support drone. We have now successfully tried all the stuff I had already tried before. Sigh....

However, that being said, in between all that searching, documenting, and emailing, I had some free time. During that free time, I did some work on the database structure of the corn burning web site. Those changes really seemed to speed up how the site works. Much more so than what I expected them to.

Let me give you some back ground. The forum software the www.iburncorn.com site runs is called CF-forum. It is written in a computer language called Cold Fusion. Originally, my wife, who has a computer consulting business bought the CF Forum software for a client of hers. It was written to run on Microsoft Windows and use the Microsoft Access database. She rewrote the code and got it to run on the Linux operating system and talk to the open source, MySQL database. After a couple of years, her client moved on, but the software stayed with our server. Even at it's peak I think that forum only had about fifty users. Nothing like the iburncorn forum has. So, her programming and database changes were never really pressure tested.

Time passes, a couple of years go by. I bought the corn boiler on blind faith because there is no real resource out there on the web. I decided to setup my corn burning site and then setup the forum. The software suddenly has 10x the number of users it had before and more like 100x the number of messages. Things began to drag and I started getting complaints about how the software was running. I will be the first to admit, it was running S L O W.

Today in my spare minutes I had the freetime to take a look at why it was running slow from the data end. MySQL is a very powerful database engine and I assumed it should be able to handle the load just fine. Really, the computer the web site was running on should be able to handle the load as well. So, what was happening? The database tables were not very complex for the cfforum software, just 14 tables. Not even very many fields in those tables. So why did it run so slow? The tables had no indices.

Fourteen very simple tables. Each web page would fire off several queries to the database. Each query would have two or three joins to other tables based on primary keys within the database. The biggest table had less than 6000 records in it. I figured, no worries! MySQL should be able to crunch through that and do the joins, no problem. Wrong!

It made a huge difference in how the forum ran with just adding one index in each of the three largest tables. Suddenly page build time was cut by 1/4th! The index ties together the userID, messageID and topicID into one index. Wow. Amazing!

A second change, not quite so dramatic, but still made some difference. I turned on query caching in MySQL. Actually, more technically correct, I allocated RAM to the query cache. Every since MySQL V.4 query caching has been turned on in the default but since no memory is devoted to it, it does not cache. This was a very simple change, just add the line:
query-cache-size = 20M
in the /etc/my.cnf file. I would say that made some difference in how the site runs. Not as big as the indices, but noticeable.

So, some good came of the day. Now, if I could only get those stupid maps working! :-)

I never did get to any corn talk. My fingers are tired and I need to get to bed because tomorrow is my day to be in the office. I do have a new site feature in testing right now. Mostly for the pellet burners. It will allow people who are burning corn in their pellet stoves to enter some details. It will build up a database for others to see which pellet stoves can burn ratios of corn without troubles. I hope to have the feature online by tomorrow.

Have a good night!
--ja

web site

Sorry folks, the server is crashed out again. I think this will be coming to and end. I have the new machine all setup. Now I just need to do some testing on it and then I will ship it out to my ISP.

--ja

One of the really great things about running this web site is some of the great email I get. On any given day I get somewhere between five and ten emails from corn burners, or wanna-be corn burners. I get a lot of questions, I get a few suggestions, and I get alot of good general information. Here is one of the good information ones.

Don writes:

In October of '05 I decided enough was enough. Natural gas prices were expected
to skyrocket and I decided to "fight back" I ordered an Amaizablaze 7100 with all the trimmings in mid October '05. finally, on Dec 17, after a 2 month wait, I was on my way to pick it up. I had to drive all the way across the state of IA to get it, but it was worth the
savings in shipping, plus I got to meet the Gentlman I had been calling on a
regular basis to get answers to all the questions I had. One of the nicest guys
you will ever meet, Jerry Jackson. On the evening of Dec 19, A local dealer
arrived and installed the outside vent system, and by 8:30pm, it was ready to
fire. I was at this point still wondering if this stove was really going to heat
my house. All 2400 sq ft of it with only 6" of insulation in the attic and none
in the walls.
I couldn't sleep that night. I was afraid that it wasn't going to work and I was
going to have to turn my furnace back up.

Well it is now Jan '06 and all my worries are gone! This is the best thing since
sliced bread!!! The first night it run, it was 8 degrees outside and the stove
kept my house at a comfortable 72 degrees all night. Amazing!!!
The only real problem I had was relighting the stove after the first cleaning. I
got it started and thought that I needed to add a little more corn to get it
going untill the auger kicked in. Well, I snuffed the fire out. Just chalk it up
to the learning curve of owning one of these amazing stoves.
I pop the clinker out and fill the 115lb corn bin twice a day. The stove burns
about 2bu a day, which costs me about $4. I shut the stove down and clean out
the ash and heat exchanger tubes about once every 2 weeks. I have learned a real
good formula to restarting the stove. I would like to share it with you and all
the other people of the corn burning community.

This requires a glass pyrex cup, a microwave, a bottle of 91% alcohol, which you
can purchase at any drug store, wood pellets, and some plastic containers.

pour some wood pellets in a plastic container, and add some alcohol. make sure
you put in enough so that the pellets soak it up, and make sure to keep a lid on
it.take about 1/2 to 1 cup of corn (depending on the size of your burn pot) and
microwave it on high for about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes. This dries the corn out
further. Dump the hot corn in your burn pot. Fill it about1/3 full. Then, take
some of your alcohol soaked wood pellets and shake in a light layer on top of
the corn, just enough to lightly cover the top of the corn in the burn pot.
Throw in a match and it will instantly ignite. Close the burn chamber door and
thats it. The pellets will burn and ignite the corn in the burn pot. It should
be enought of a burn to kick on the auger. I learned this from the local dealer.
To date I am 110% satisfied with my stove and the way it performs. I would
encourage anyone to try this form of heating. It is the way to go!!!

He has not been burning for very long but it seems like he is happy to be here.

I have not tried his method of stove lighting. I have been real happy using the charcoal lighter fluid. Just a little sprayed over a chili can of wood pellets sitting in the burn pot. Put fire to them and it seem like it starts great every time. Much cheaper and better than gelled alcohol. The only trouble is (and I really can't believe I am making a product endorsement :-) I had been using Kingsford charcoal lighter fluid in the metal can. I switched to some off brand lighter fluid that I picked up at Menards. It was half the price of the Kingsford. It is in a plastic squeeze bottle. For one thing the bottle is very thin walled, so it is hard to not squeeze out a lot. Second, the nozzle holes are very large so that contributes to putting on a lot. It also seems like it is a touch more evaporant than Kingsford. I have only used it twice and both times I have gotten a POOF! when I put fire to the wood pellets. Not good. Damn shame I bought two bottles of the stuff. I guess I can always save it for the grilling season....

So much for under the radar...

Ah well. I am being outted this morning. I was one of the topics in the company newsletter that came out on Friday. With the holiday Monday, it is hitting everyone's inbox Tuesday morning. Remember Walker, paybacks are hell.... :-)

Every time MPCA webmaster John Abbott opened his heating bills last winter, it was a painful hit to his pocket book. With a monthly natural gas bill approaching the four-figure mark, he began investigating alternative sources of energy for his 100-year-old, Craftsman-style home.

John started looking at corn as a fuel source after seeing a corn-burning stove at a relative's house. Locating companies that sold corn-burning furnaces was relatively easy, but he needed advice on more practical questions. How much corn will I need? How do I store it? Do I buy it in bags or in bulk, and from a co-op or directly from a farmer?

He quickly discovered that there wasn't much info available about this technology. To fill the void, John started up a Web site chronicling his experiences working through problems that have cropped up since installing his burner, and offering advice for others considering a switch to this renewable fuel source. Up and running since last August, his site presently draws about 800 unique visitors every day. Even if corn burner isn't for you, some of John's narrative makes good reading. Check it out at : www.iburncorn.com.

Other items of interest

A small project that I did is to wire in two lights into my zone pumps. I did that during the time we were running our boiler to do our domestic hot water 100%. Our electric hot water heater was shut off. Currently we are using the boiler as a pre heater to the electric hot water heater. More about that later.

My trouble was the pumps run so quiet, you really can't tell which one is running. Putting in the lights so they turn on when the pump is running lets me see which one is pumping water to what zone. So, for instance, if I want to take a bath, if I am using the corn boiler for 100% of my domestic hot water as well, I have to check the boiler temp before I can take a bath. For unlimited hot water the boiler must be 180-200 degrees. If the boiler temp is low, and the closest pump is running, that's the main part of the house. The boiler temp isn't going to be coming up any time real soon. You have to wait, and take your bath later, sometimes much later. But, on the other hand, if the farther pump is running, that is just the office. A smaller, better insulated space that warms up pretty quick. Stop back and check in half an hour and there might be hot water aplenty. ...Unless of course the close pump kicks in just at that time. Do I need to cover, going down and seeing both pumps running? You see why we have the electric hot water heater on during the holidays.

Another thing that just got wrapped up tonight. I talked to my neighbor down the street. He is the guy on the block who knows people with skills. I asked him if he knew anyone who welds stainless. He told me he did, and took my cracked burn pot away with him. He brought it back tonight, two nights later, with a really great weld. It looks so much stronger now than what it did before. I know this burn pot has a short life ahead because I feel like the sidewalls are getting warped and brittle. At some point in the not too distant future this pot will need to be replaced. I have just exactly one season on this pot now. I think doing this weld will get me through the rest of the season. So, that is something to consider as an expense on the corn burning project.


What I had been doing is using High Temperature Furnace Cement, or sometimes called Boiler Cement. I picked up a jug of it at my local True Value Hardware. It can fill a heck of a crack. You fill it in with a putty knife. It is black and very sticky. It sticks bad to your hands if you touch it. Put it on, throw this burn pot up on top of the smokebox on the Traeger, patch side up, for a few days. This will buy you two burning/cleaning cycles. The cement will be burned away and you have to do it again. I was able to do this three times with this pot. Then the hole got too big, it had to be welded or replaced.

January at last!

Christmas is over. The Rellies have all gone home. Life is coming back to normal. Gosh, what all has been happening on the corn burning front? Well, the Traeger pulled a little trick on me a couple of times. The way my corn burner works is to have two motors to move the corn. It has a cup motor on the top, which is a geared down motor that attaches to a shaft via a couple of allen-set screws. The cups rotate into the corn hopper, fills, and then dumps down into the feed auger which is driven by the second motor.

Well, a little Traeger trick, is for those allen-sets to loosen up. It did it to me once last year as well. So, it's not quite often enough to be the first thing you think of when you are problem solving. You go down into the basement and the fire is out. Huh? Check the hopper. Plenty of corn. Huh? Check the burn pot. No fresh corn waiting to feed into the pot. Huh? So the first thing you think of is that some stalk of corn has lodged in the feed system. (Well, OK, you guys burning clean corn don't think this first. I have to though!) So if the feed system is jammed up, the first thing you do is empty the hopper. A few buckets and some cursing and promising to build a corn screener later, the hopper is empty only to find the feed system is just fine, not stuffed up. Well, it fooled me twice. Last year and this. I never claimed to be a quick learner.

All it takes to fix it, is to run the feed motor and stop at a particular spot. The two couplings in the photo above have a shaft in the middle of them. The allen screw tightens down against this flat spot. The trick for you is to figure out where the flat spot is on the center shaft. The problem is with the allen-set on the black part of the shaft. It has come loose. The silver part of the shaft has two of these allen-sets. More than likely the flat spot on the shaft will be underneath one of these two allen-sets. If you look really close, with a bright light behind the shaft, on the front side of the Traeger, and you, on the back side, with the feed running, will be able to spot the flat spot by looking real close at the narrow gap between the silver and black part of the shaft. Once you have done it once, you will see it sounds tougher than it is. The tricky part, if you are working alone, is shutting the feed off at the right moment. If you miss it, just let it run around again.

So, what I did is tightened the allen-set, on the black block, when it was stopped, directly over the top of the flat part on the inner shaft.

What I plan to do is pickup another allen-set of exactly the same size. I will run that allen-set in behind the one that is in there. The outer one will then lock the inner one from turning itself out.