In the world of inflation and high costs, everyone wants to find options that they can manage themselves. Wood pellets are a good alternative to electricity or fossil fuel energies. They are a clean source of renewable energy. Let us look into how you can make your own wood pellets using sawdust, pellet stoves, wood leaves, etc.
What are Wood Pellets?
Wood pellets are a type of biomass fuel. Biomass pellets are made from sawdust, shavings, and offcuts, which are waste products of processing wood or from new wood that was cut specifically to make wood pellets. This includes compressed biomass matter, which is generally made by recycling chips, shavings, and sawdust from the milling of lumber, construction, and farming.
Benefits to Make your Own Wood Pellets
Using wood pellets to heat your home has a number of benefits, both economic and environmental.
- Wood pellets don’t add or take away carbon. When they are burned, they give off the same amount of carbon dioxide that plants take in during photosynthesis. For example, about 1.5 tons less CO2 is released for every ton of pellets used instead of oil. This lets you cut down on your carbon output a lot.
- By making use of garbage and by-products, it keeps trash out of landfills, lowers the cost of disposal, and protects landfill resources.
- Pellets don’t release many particles or pollution into the air because they burn efficiently and are dense. These biomass boilers are clean, effective, and simple to modify.
- Pellets can be kept and moved around easily and cleanly in bags. The sourced wood pellets and other materials create jobs and business opportunities in areas like trucking, logging, manufacturing, and more.
Ways to Make Your Own Quality Pellets
Besides cutting waste, old wood, and lots of room, here’s what you need to make your own pellets:
- The chipper, shredders, or chipper
- Mill for pellets
- Wet/dry scale
- Pellet adhesive
- Wear safety gear like earplugs (the tools are very loud), safety glasses, and gloves.
Before you can make your own pellets, the wood needs to be cut into small pieces called chips. The chips are then put back through the machine and ground down until they are 8–10 mm in size.
Chippers, shredders, and bio chippers all do about the same thing, but the blade, hammer, and sieve methods make them work in different ways. To keep the wood that is used to make pellets from giving off dangerous chemicals when it is burned, it should not be treated, glued, or painted.
1- Drying of Wood Pellets
Right now, the chips should be dry. To do this, just put them in the sun for a day. Like wood, pellets that are wet make less heat because they have a lower calorific value. Check the amount of wetness with the hygrometer.
It’s important that the wood chips have about 10–15% water content so that the pellets don’t get too flat. Make sure they are evenly wet before putting them in the pellet mill’s feed if they are too dry. Spray them with water and stir them around in the bucket.
2- Pellet Press
The wood chips can now be turned into pellets at home. For that, the pellet mill (also called a pellet press) is used. It uses rollers and a heated die to squeeze the chips into small spheres about two centimeters long. You can use some sticky wood from conifers like pines and firs to make your homemade pellets more compact.
3- Pellet Glues
You can also use pellet glues that are sold in stores and add them in the right amounts for the type of wood you are pelletizing. When the pellets come out of the die, they will be hot, so let them cool down and dry out.
Keep your pellets in bags in a dry, cool, and protected area. Humidity makes them less compact and less calorific; the pellets should have about 8–12% water by weight.
Precautions in Waste Wood Pellet Processing
In order to make pellets, you need to crush them and maintain their moisture content. The most important step in the manufacturing of wood pellets is palletizing the biomass. For these, you need a wood pellet machine, ring die pellet machine, or a hammer mill to reduce the size of pellets.
1- Crushing of the Wood Material
First of all, you need to crush the material into small size of pellets. In the case of wood logs, small or large wood pieces, you need to crush the material. You can convert them into smaller blocks of wood. Then, these wood blocks should be added to the wood chipper to use the chippers first.
You will need a wood hammer mill to convert the wood chips into sawdust. The diameter of pellets should be around 6mm or less than that.
2- Controlling the Moisture Content
To produce high-quality wood pellets, extra water must be taken out of the raw material. A wood pellet chiller is used in industrial pellet production to get rid of extra water. Smaller producers, on the other hand, can dry the materials in other ways or leave them out in the sun to dry.
3- Pellet Mill Die or Roller Quality
The pelletizing chamber receives the wood material through a feeder, and there, the die and rollers move quickly. This creates high temperatures and pressing force, which change the intermolecular forces in the wood and make it more flexible. The die’s hole then shapes the materials into pellets, which are then pushed out.
4- Cooling of Pellets
After being made, the wood pellets are hot and wet, so a pellet cooler is used to cool them down and remove some of the water. After that, the pellets are put into plastic bags by a wood pellet packing machine so they can be shipped or sold. Huge amounts of wood pellets are moved to bulk storage bins by trucks, which makes the processing system work better.
Conclusion
In the article above, we have discussed the most important details about producing wood pellets for your personal use using pellet production plants. You need these wood pellets for home heating and other energy uses. To buy specific wood fuel equipment, you can contact Lemonmach and get the best possible deals for your business.