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