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
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