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