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.

Prime time?

I get a lot of personal email from the corn burning site. At least two or three a day. More during a coldsnap. :-) Somebody wrote to me the other day and he surmised from reading all my posts that corn burners are not ready for prime time. I don't know. I'm not sure what I answered back, I am not even sure I even did answer. It's a tough question. Can I see grandmother in Topeka using a corn burner? No. I guess I can't. Can I see some investment banker in the suburbs burning corn? No. I have trouble with that one too, unless it's just the right banker.

I am not sure how I feel about that either. I am happy to be saving the money I am saving. I am happy to provide this site to those who want to learn about corn burning. But thinking about the logistics of having the ten other houses on my block also burning corn is rather a mind boggling thought. Everyone getting corn deliveries, feeding the burner in the morning, cleaning the burn pot, dumping their ashes, dealing with the quirks of their stove. I guess I just can't picture that either. So, where does that leave the corn burning industry?

The masses flooding to buy stoves could give the industry a real shot in the arm. Vast improvments could happen with these stoves over the next couple years. Better burn control would be one really great thing. A better monitoring system that would exactly dish out the corn dependent on burn temperature and air flow. We could eek much closer to the high efficency burn rates the natural gas folks have now. We could burn cleaner, and have less klinker and ash.

Or, what could happen, is the industry could profit-take. We could be dealing with the problems of klinker build-up and fussy stoves ten years from now. That would totally suck.

I think everything is really going to depend on the next few years. What is going to happen to energy prices? What is going to happen in this country if we have to pay ten dollars for a gallon of diesel? No, I can't see my neighbor cleaning up his corn burner, feeding it, dumping the ash, and then putting on his suit & tie to heading off to his investment banking job every morning, now. Today. With today's energy prices, even as shocked as we all are with them. If they got worse though, my neighbor is going to want to choose life over freezing to death.

--ja

continued information.

OK, that last post did look kind of rough. Poor spelling and puctuation optional. Sorry about that. I was just afraid if I didn't get it posted, pretty soon a week would have gone by.

So, the Icynene insulation salesman came for a visit. I want to get a bid on insulating our attic which currently has no insulation. What we settled on was, I am going to shim the sidewalls out to six inches. They will fill the sidewalls with an average of six inches of foam. Because my house is old, it is built using what is called balloon construction. Since the sidewalls are filled with wood chips I am going to use my shopvac to reach down and suck out as many of the wood chips as possible. They will spray foam down the side walls, I am hoping I can get down two or three feet. On the ceiling of the attic I am going to put in a secondary rafter so I can raise the ceiling of the room by a foot. Then they will spray five inches of foam under the roof deck. This should get me R-18 on this third floor where I previously had R-Nothing.

All for the cost of $7356.00

Not a cheap project. And in a way, being a corn burner, a little hard to justify. I am planning on burning about $1100 worth of corn this season. If I insulate the third floor, I am thinking best case, I will still burn $700 of corn. Sure a savings of $400/yr, so it will take me how many years to pay this off? But, we can't expect to be buying $1.40 corn every year either. If corn goes up to $6 some fall, I would be counting every little kernel and thinking about them going through our uninsulated roof if I don't do it now.

...Plus of course we get some more living space. Me personally, I would like to build a bedroom suite up there. Hot tub, little kitchenet, maybe an entertainment center. Hell, me and the wife would just move up there and leave the bottom two floors to the kids! :-)

Right now, surprisingly, the house does stay warm enough. As I type it is zero degrees out. It got down to -19 last night. We have the thermostats set at 70 degrees (which, thanks to corn, I am betting makes ours the highest set thermostat on our block) and the house stays pretty darned close to that mark. To do so though the Traeger TPB-150 corn burner I am running is operating flat out. It has been on full burn, feeding corn for the past 24 hours. Basically it is running at 100% duty cycle, which no household appliance is really supposed to do. I think it is hard on it, hard on the burn pots, hard to get the clinker out of the pots. I bet we are using more electricty than normal because the water pumps to the zones are running continously as well. I think that though the boiler can seem to keep up, it will be a lot happier once we get the third floor insulated.

Back online!

This is sort of rough. I haven't even spell checked it. Tomorrow will be my first day back to work after being off for a week. I don't want to leave it unposted. I will follow up later in the week. So, here it is, my post for Dec 18th:

I have been out sick for the past week. Ugh! It was a nasty chest cold that really got me down. So, not much has happened on the blog or the web site this past week. Today is the first day I have totally human again.

I had a couple of events this past week. The first, happily was the day before I got sick, rather than the day after. I went down to check on the furnace and discovered the fire seemed to be weak. It was not burning strong like normal and the furnace should have been at full burn. The draft fan was blowing but I felt like it wasn't really putting out that much air. I did a little more checking and felt like the draft fan was not putting out anywhere near the normal amount of air. This is the second time I have had trouble with a draft fan. This time though the warrenty on the boiler had expired.

Rather than contact Traeger and deal with them shipping me one out of Canada and the delay involved there I went downtown to a place that had a "motor repair" sign out front. I figured they could either repair it or maybe they would have a line on a new one. As it turns out, the motor repair place was pretty nice. They took one look at my blower fan and said "You a corn burner or pellet?" Wow, I guess they know their motors! I confessed to corn. They said "You been oiling this motor?" Ummmm. Oil? Uhhhh, no, I didn't know I was supposed to oil it.

So, I walked out of the place with a brand new blower fan and motor assembly, just exactly like the one I brought in. ...It seems I am not the only idiot who doesn't know to oil the draft fan so the place keeps a good stock onhand for people like me. In fact, I was told that I was the second person that day to have exactly the same problem. The owner said that the dust from the corn settles into the bearings. No big problem, just oil the fan twice a season and everything is fine. Don't oil them, however, and the bushings overheat really fast and the motor is ruined. You can see here in this picture that I have pointed out the oil weep holes. If you zoom in on the picture, you can see the holes packed with dust. This fan does not run right, it can be used as a spare for a few days. Even though I have now oiled it, it still doesn't run at the speed it should. Still, if I needed to get by for a couple of days, it could be pressed into service.

The oiling process is quite easy. The oil bottle the motor place sold me had an extendible tube that came out of the bottle about eight inches. It was simply a matter of putting the tube into the weep hole and filling it up with oil. The motor place suggested a very heavy oiling considering the environment the motor runs in. Any excess oil will simply drip out. I would say I put about 1/8th oz. of oil into this motor before it began to drip out. Really not much dripped out either so it must have been quite hungry.

So, quite an adventure. I really hate running into stuff where I don't know to do something. I didn't see anywhere in the Traeger manual where it says to oil the draft fan motor twice a season. Now I know though.
.

The second thing that happened this week is I had scheduled up a meeting with the Icynene Insulation Sales Person. A few of you have written to me asking about what kind of house we are trying to heat with corn. I can give you a very vivid discription. It is 3500 square feet of living space, just shy of one hundred years old. It has seventy five windows, 50 of which are the age of the house. There is an 1,100 sq foot third floor/attic space that has zero insulation. The side walls are insulated with (mouse friendly) wood chips. I have seen barns that would be easier to heat, it is pretty much a miracle we can heat the place at all!

I have done some checking around and find that Icynene is some of the best foam insulation out there. There are a couple of reasons why I want to go foam. First off, with no real bearing on the quality, I have done too much insulation without a mask in my past. So putting in the pink fiberglass myself, unless I am wearing a resperator, is totally out of the question. But yet, I have done so much of it in the past that I can't quite bring myself to spend the money to have it done. So, that is weighing in my mind. The main thing though, I think the foam insulation is much better than fiberglass. What I am thinking about here is redoing the entire third floor. With foam insulation it can be sprayed right against the roof. I don't need any air space. That will allow me to finish the very top of the house, a smaller fourth floor space into storage.

The other thing that is very nice is foam insulation is a vapor and air infiltration barrier. So, no need for visqueen inside. No more bats in the attic any more.

Corn stoves for homes are hot item

Corn stoves for homes are hot item

An article in the Star Tribune attests to the popularity of corn burning stoves. We are defined as a "Consumer Craze" rather than a good idea who's time has come. Still, it is good to see this. The more people interested, the more companies are going to be interested in the corn stove building business and I have to think that is good for all of us.

On an unrelated note, it sure is cold our there today. It is sitting at seven degrees right now, I don't think we have been out of the single digits (unless you are talking the minus ones) for the past 24 hours. The house has stayed warm today but we have burned a lot of corn. I am getting a burn pot ready to change over maybe later tonight. It seems like when it is really cold like this and the boiler is burning hard, it pays to swap the pots out often. The only real trouble is I am getting low on wood pellets to start fires with so I am either going to have to find some or find some way to light fires within the next couple of weeks if it stays cold like this. I think I have about half a bag of pellets left.

Heat for our office

Fireplace Stoves, Gas Stoves, Pellet Stoves, Fireplaces, Fireplace Inserts by QUADRA-FIRE: Products - Pellet Inserts

I think some of our problem when it gets to these really cold days is that our Traeger TPB-150 Corn burning boiler can keep up with the demand of the house, but *just barely*. Part of this is an attic insulation issue (we don't have any), but I think part of it also is just the size of this house and number of windows. We have 75 windows in this place! Great view of the river valley, but expensive to heat. We have been running our gas fireplace insert way more than we want to this year and so we are thinking some of putting in a corn burning insert instead. This would take some load off the main boiler and I think make the whole place easier to heat. We are hoping to add attic insulation right after the first of the year when the tax credits kick in.

So shopping around, this is the best looking fireplace insert on the market and other Quadrafire products are highly rated, so I am hoping this is just as good. I get some time to do some additional research. I guess they are running about nine months backorder right now!

I am using a new tool to make this entry. Our tie-wearing friend from down the street, Andrew, suggested I look into the Blog This tool for the Firefox browser. To make this page, I went to the Quadrafire page I wanted to comment on and did a right click with the mouse to choose "blog this" . It worked pretty slick! Thanks Andrew!