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.