Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote a journal entry. This summer was just a blur with all the work and truthfully this will be my first chance to catch up. I'm actually going to clean my house for a change!

 Business is good though. It's been an adventure getting the corn stoves to market,  building a routine for placing these outdoor furnaces in their new homes as they are delivered. We're getting better at this and next year things should really come together.

EZBurn is a good business for me. I have the websites to maintain, and the software for monitoring the stoves to remove the bugs from.

That software installs on our customer's computers. The stoves contain the monitors, which transmit serially to the computer in the house through the ground wires. This in turn sends the temperature monitoring data to our web site, where Dale can pull the reports to his cell phone. It's very cool.

Here's a video we took which shows one of the customized stoves EZBurn has installed. This one is filled from the top, more convenient for the dairy farmer who owns it.

Sometimes you have to get creative

EZBurn Outdoor Corn-Fired Boiler

 

Outdoor Corn-Fired Boiler
We use an outdoor corn-fired boiler to heat our home, our shed, our hot water, and our hot tub. 

Our outdoor corn stove is located in a shed that we built specifically to house the stove and the corn storage bin. (There's a picture of the corn stove shed top left of this screen) Inside the shed is a corn storage bin which holds 200 bushels. That's the top of the grain bin sticking out the roof, I painted the galvanized steel to blend it with the shed.

MDH fills the bin using an auger and gravity feed trailer that our corn provider loans us whenever we purchase the corn. We buy our corn from a farmer who lives about 10 miles away.

This text is a description of a unit MDH built which he will use to keep the corn stove full all the time. Before we had this device, MDH would fill the hopper of the corn stove using his electric auger. The auger extended from the bottom of the grain bin over the hopper of the corn stove. And periodically he would have to check to see if the hopper was getting low on corn and turn on his auger to fill the hopper. Making sure to stand by so that the corn didn't overflow.

Now, with this device, the hopper will have corn in it to a specific level as long as there is corn in the bin. (There's always a gotcha......) The unit operates like so: if the corn is out of the tube, and the thermostat in the house calls for heat then it will start filling because the switch turns on.

When the level of the corn gets up to the level of the tube, the tube is filled and then the switch shuts off the auger. Here is a picture of the stove storage bin with the tube that fills it.

 

Here is a picture of the auger coming off the storage bin

Here is a picture of the motor and everything hooked up to that tube.

The switch that controls if the auger is on or off, is in the white box with red label.