Farm built wood chip heating unit

 
Brendaren Farms - Tuesday, November 27, 2007- by: Edwin Wallace
As expected winter is with us and the prospect of same inspired us to do a little 'forward planning' in anticipation. We have a lot of good firewood in the trees around the place - three generations going on four - so we decided we would acquire a wood chipper for making mulch and yes, fuel.

Here are some pictures of the furnace we just completed for burning wood chips.
One electric motor drives the compressor (The forced air makes a fire hot enough to make a clinker out of the wood chips!) and the gear and sprocket reduction down to .17 RPM to drive the 8" auger.
The hopper is the hood off an open flame stove we built earlier - not everything we concoct is a resounding success!

There was a need to prevent bridging. This ugly (below) is rotated by the flighting.
 
The auger is from a combine problem we had. The bushing is from the grain elevator we repaired at the same time. The home made coupling - 1" to 1 1/4" - provides a little flex to the drive line.
We thought we should suck more heat out of the system so we constructed this manifold with a duct fan. It blows through pipes as seen below.
Son Darren starts it up with oil soaked chips.

 

 
 

 

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