Corn Boilers....Experiences?

Boilerpro_3

Any experiences for installs and brands/types would be useful. The folks here in Northern Illinois are now paying about the same as everyone else for natural gas now that the Illinois gas utilities were recently deregulated....prices for nat gas are at 400% of what they were about 5 years ago and people are looking at alternatives.

Boilerpro

Boilerpro_3

Getting Calls for these

Any experiences for installs and brands/types would be useful. The folks here in Northern Illinois are now paying about the same as everyone else for natural gas now that the Illinois gas utilities were recently deregulated....prices for nat gas are at 400% of what they were about 5 years ago and people are looking at alternatives.

Boilerpro

Bob W._3

Dave, can you even get them at this time? Corn stoves are back ordered many moons. Would think boilers would be the same. The technology is getting better but still not as good as wood pellets. Getting a good burn in the firepot is the key; corn has a lot of sugar and tends to produce a clinker which must be removed often. The better stoves (St. Croix) are getting a more complete burn. I plan on installing a stove (not a boiler) this next year when they again become available. Like your area, we have lots of corn.

Tom R.

Use corn

If below 15% moisture content, corn has less than 75% of the BTU value per pound than the average wood. It is generally used as an emergency fuel, hard to dry except in a kiln, and not easily suited to handling except in larger boilers. The energy consumed in drying can use as much as half the contained heat. However, with little or no modification, it can be burned in any stove or boiler that takes wood or coal, and doesn't produce much ash. Personally, I have always felt that corn was best used for creating sour mash whiskey.

hr

I think pellet

boilers make the most sense. Scrap wood products, and even paper are being pelletized. I suppose some pellet boilers could also handle corn.

I believe the Tarm folks already offer a nice pellet boiler. Solar Today had a nice write up about the Nichols team at Tarm.

Supposed to be some real nice pellet boilers arriving from Germany soon.

hot rod

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Mad Dog_2

I'm with you tom

Jim Beam, JD. Makers mark. Corn is for eatin'...and fine Bourbon. Mad Dog

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Bob W._3

Actually corn burns hotter than wood pellets. Folks that have been around both prefer the the heat from the corn stoves. Neither are going to give you the radiant heat of a cordwood stove. Here is a widely circulated article on using corn as a fuel:

http://burncorn.cas.psu.edu/

[Deleted User]

My Granpappy would have agreed with you...

He was a moonshiner back in Missouri in the 20's and 30's.

Hear tell, they had a special code they'd resort to if and when they saw the revenoors coming. They'd send one of the kids to a fellow bootlegging neighbors house and have the kid ask for a cup of sugar. That was the alert to head for the hills with what you had built, 'cause the 'noors would destroy your stills. They could be rebuilt, but to see a bunch of glass gallon jugs of shine being smashed to smithereens was more than most grown men could stand for...

So, it's a documented fact that my families hydronic experience goes back a LONG way, if you consider my grand pappy an expert at mash STEAM, and condensing equipment. ..

One time, a revenoor caught up with him, and caught him empty handed. He asked him if he'd ever suffered from an alcohol black out, to which he replied, "Well, not that I remember..."

We miss the ol' grouch :-)

Children, hug your parents.

ME

[Deleted User]

BioMass Crash...

http://www.summitdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051016/NEWS/110160022&template=printart

Interesting article. I don't think people realize how labor intensive these projects are. Even on a small residential scale, they're a PITB. haul the wood, haul AND dispose of ashes. Put up with the smell, look and feel of wood burning.

But on the plus side, they ARE using a lot of free standing beetle killed lodge pole pine, and THAT's a good thing. Funny what global warming does to a forest. And the environment surrounding it.

ME

Weezbo

*~/:) Known Hydronic Users *~/:)

Thats Great Mark

thats even bettern my fat reveniooer theory

Jimmy Gillies

Wheat & Barley Boilers.

We have just finished a boiler installation at my brothers house, he is a forestry contractor and has a load of free wood. We installed a Baxi Solo Innova (www.baxi.dk) burning logs.

The guy who supplied and commissioned the boiler, told me that they have a very high demand for their grain/corn range of boilers here in the UK. With wheat and barley at £60/ton, most people are finding that it's half the running cost of kero!

What a crazy, crazy world, food is cheaper than oil and we still have millions of people dying of starvation.

Thanks for reading.

Tom R.

Mark -

Sounds like the early days of burning garbage. Private companies do it very profitably now, disposing of waste, separating recyclables of value and selling excess electric power to local utilities. In addition to getting paid to dispose of refuse. Governments were not conceived to be profitable.

Lloyd Nichols

We have very happy corn boiler

customers in many parts of the US and Canada. Our automatic stoker boilers handle wood pellets and corn equally well. We have residential and commercial users...not a lot yet really but the interest is growing as more people find out about them. It is true that corn forms clinkers but it only takes a couple of minutes/day to deal with in our boilers...well worth it when corn is readily available, in many cases for well under $80/ton. Yeild in our corn boilers is conservatively approximately 6200 Btu/lb for corn at 14 percent moisture. In many parts of "corn country" yeilds of 5 to 7 tons/acre are common. I'm no corn expert but our customers tell me that often the corn is less than 14% moisture content when harvested, so little or no drying is needed. We have one customer burning 19 to 20% corn harvested recently. Frankly, although he says it is working very well with no problems, I wonder. We'll see. He is installing 2 to 3 more corn boilers in the next two weeks. I know some people are very skeptical about all of this but the number of successful users are starting to disprove the doubters. Have you ever seen a carwash heated with corn boilers, or an 8000 sq. ft. shop, or a greenhose, or a ...
This is exciting stuff to us. I've also burned grass pellets and peanut shell pellets. There are many other biomass fibers that will be pelletised in the future. The future is going to be very interesting I think. By the way, we do have these some of these boilers available now in our warehouse.
Sorry if I rambled on a bit but this is a subject that I am very passionate about because I believe it is one part of the solution to our energy problems. We grow a lot of biomass and the technology is in place to use it to provide economical heat in an earth friendly way.

Bob W._3

Lloyd, what company or brands do you represent?

Bob W._3

Lloyd, what company or brands do you represent?

Lloyd Nichols

Trying not to be

commercial in respect for the "rules" of The Wall. You can see the product at www.pelletboiler.com It is made by Baxi A/S in Denmark. We brand it here in North America with the HS-Tarm name to keep brand recognition in our marketplace. Please feel free to give me a call or send me an email. Phone is 1-800-782-9927. Thanks for your interest. I was just at an 8,000 sq. ft. municipal highway garage with 7 truck bays which is using two of our 150,000 Btu/hr stoker boilers with wood pellets. The comfort level in this garage is just fantastic.

Bob W._3

Given the difficulty of heating an entire home with a stove, I think a pellet/corn boiler would be the ticket. Interested to know what kind of stoker systems would work. My brother-in-law is building his own for a corn stove, consisting of a gravity wagon in an adjacent shed, overhead piping to a 55 gal. drum, and gravity to the stove. Probably won't look like much but its for his shop/garage. He is using a shop vac head on the 55 gal. drum to pull the corn out of the gravity wagon.

hr

I'm with you Jimmy

children starving to death in Africa as we speak and we are burning corn for crying out loud. What a crazy planet!

hot rod

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