wood pellets

[boxelder barron]

can someone tell me how they make wood pellets-is there a way i could make my own

 

[Patrick62]

I would say.... I doubt it.

I just did a quick google on wood pellet manufacture. If you had enough equipment to manufacture pellets... you would be in business doing just that!

They are make like OSB plywood. Compress the stuff enough that the resins glue it into a chunk. I don't know what pressure this takes...

The couple of tons of saw dust can't be too hard to get. You have to dry it to less than 10% moisture. Then the larger stuff has to be hammer milled into smaller pieces. Then squeezed really hard.

The serious folks up here buy it by the pallet. :blob6:

-Pat

 

[Bowtie]

Friend of mine just bought a pallet of 40 pound bags at 3$ per bag, 50 bags to the pallet=150$ per pallet. He says his stove on a cold day will burn a full bag if ran at maximum all day.

 

[lxt]

can someone tell me how they make wood pellets-is there a way i could make my own

yes you can make your own pellets!! I did, but it will take some experimenting, the machine I put together consists of some off the wall stuff.

first a industrial garbage disposal retrofitted to a hopper with a funnel type design(to grind my chips down) may need to repeat process a couple times!!

second an old feed mill(table top) used to make cattle food, dog food etc... the one I found is very old but worked for the process, it is of the stamp style which means its basically a press, but this one is a matrix stamp!! or roller press.

you will need a hydrometer for water content, I used a rack style dehydrator with hydrometer to get to the right level, a cooling tower made of old duct work( these are easy to make) to more or less solidify the pellet.

I recycled my old store bought pellet bags and currently have 1 1/2 tons bagged & ready for the stove. It was chilly the other night out my way so I decided to see how the homemade pellets worked, JUST FINE & FREE!!!

It took me along time to get the recipe for the pellets down, grind them ,press them, they fall apart start again!! the key is in the pressure applied to the press however this will change depending on the specie of wood being compressed & the make up of your operation!! I have saved the press pressure readings for the following; oak, ash, maple & cherry.

once you get it down its not hard ( for god sake Im a tree trimmer) & I did it.

LXT.............

 

[habanero]

I once had a research project with the goal of making pellets out of ground up pecan and peanut shells. We were trying to make activated carbon pellets out of them. We actually had some success in making the pellets (and making activated carbon-but not making act. carbon out of the pellets) with various binders. One of the best binders I found was molasses. I'd heat it up like I was making candy to just past the hard ball stage (I don't remember the temp-I think I have it in an old lab notebook somewhere) then mix it in with the ground material and press it in a die at a couple thousand pounds of pressure. After cooling, you could take it out of the die and have a nice solid pellet. We were making quite large pellets one at a time, but you could do the same thing with a die with multiple, smaller cavities.

We worked with molasses because we were looking at using sugar refining by-products and molasses is a reasonable approximation. It would be quite expensive to buy commercial molasses for this purpose, probably. I had some luck with using vegetable oil that I heated to just at the polymerization stage, then mixed into the material, but I don't recommend doing that outside of a lab. It is like playing chicken and can get pretty nasty in a hurry if you aren't careful. Also, the resulting pellets are sticky and smell terrible.

 

[lxt]

nice thing about wood is that it has its own binding agent no need to add anything!!

LXT...........

 

[timhar]

There is a site that sells pellet machines in the $2-3K range called PelletPro.com