An update

Hello everyone! It has been a long month, and it is what, the 9th? Oh dear.

Already this month we have had some low points. I took a call I had not been looking forward to receiving. My wife's step dad passed away from cancer last week. It was a very rough week on her. She went to her mom's house for the week. She delt with a whole bunch of family issues, as happens at times of death. It was a very rough week for her. I stayed home with the kids and though there were still three of them left after the week was over, I sure didn't get much work done on the corn burning web site.

This week though has been much better. I was able to get the web server reformatted with a new version of the OS and got the forum software up and running on it. Just today I got my new IP number from my ISP and I hope to put the server in the mail to them on Thursday. I would like to think that the forum will be live by early next week.

Everything always takes longer than I expect it to. Even when I inflate my expectations by 2x

On a corn related note, my neighbor got his corn burning stove in tonight. He bought an LDJ boiler. I have already been down to his house to take some pictures of the room before the burner. If I can talk him into waiting until Thursday (I am busy tomorrow) to bring it home I can also get some pictures of it coming in and being moved down into the basement.

It should be interesting to have a second case study on the web site.

--ja

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

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.