Dry Your Corn With Corn Fuel

by bobbi 15. September 2009 21:51
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Dry Corn With Corn Heat

At the Beck Family Farm in Danville, IA this year they are going to try something new.  They’ve installed transmission coolers for CAT engines and will use them to dry corn in the bins using heat from their EZBurn Outdoor Corn Boiler.

Drying corn using last year’s corn crop as fuel has cost advantages over propane and electricity (tax advantages, too). It's going to provide a way to dispose of the bottom of the bin corn which may be moldy or not fit for sale. And it allows the Becks to GROW THEIR OWN FUEL.

The Beck’s corn drying setup will be a good test of the output of this corn boiler they’ve owned for three years.  This is the first year they’ll be using the furnace to dry their corn.

Making a few adjustments to the stove settings in preparation for the first test after installation of this new dryer.

The CAT transmission coolers are visible here to the left of the dryer.

This view from the other side shows just how big and heavy this installation is.

The hot water input lines are clearly visible in this picture.

Detail of water connection.

Closeup of the transmission cooler

Yep, that's Mr. Beck.  He's  little shy...

Here's a view with a little more perspective

And another, in case you need more.

This is the control panel here

Another long view of the  dryer

Load From The Top

by bobbi 21. December 2007 11:06
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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.

Adding Corn

by bobbi 18. September 2007 16:52
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Sometimes you have to get creative

to save yourself some work.  Waiting for the auger to arrive, means hand bucketing the corn into the stove.  Unless you have some good farm equipment handy, that is.

 

 

EZBurn Manufacturing
4902 86th Circle
Glencoe , MN , 55336 USA
(952) 232-6079