Case Studies
BET Number 12, 90kw
Heating Firewood Kiln
Easily and efficiently powering a Kiln Services double kiln. 18-20 tons of firewood dried in 5 days from freshly cut wet timber. We use approximately 2 tons of sawdust from both our Posch 350 and Jappa 305 firewood processors with the scraps of lump waste wood, shredded by a Dragon shredder. Occasionally topped up by arb chip if required. Our 90kw BET Number 12 replaced a broken 130kw Eco Angus boiler (we don’t miss the manual fills of a batch boiler!).
The kiln now benefits from automatic filling and reduced drying time, even though the new boiler is a lower kw output! Profits are up due to not having to dry 3 cages of waste for the old gasification boiler, we now add value to each cycle by drying 100% firewood through the kiln. We do not have to cut up any decent timber to run the boiler or pay to get rid of any ‘waste’ wood at all now. With all the savings, utilising all our true ‘waste’ and extra productivity through the kiln we are on course to save/make an extra £30,000 each year over the gasification boiler.
Each cage is worth £280 to us retail. But three cages of logs for boiler fuel wood had to be cut up, to then dry in the kiln, to then hand feed in the old batch boiler. Fills at 9:00, 1:00, 5:30, 10:00 before bed and sometimes 2:00 if the batch went in late every day including Christmas. With the sawdust boiler system automatically feeding, I get my life back and more time in the day. Plus the three cages of boiler wood are now firewood! So,
£280 X 3 cages = £840, £840 X 4.5 kiln cycles (batches) per month = £4200, £4200 extra per month X 8 months = £33,600 extra ££££ per year. If you then add all that time saved, say (on the low side) 15 mins each fill = 1 hour per day @ £12 per hour = £12, £12 X 248 days (roughly in 8 months) = £2976. So, (bear with me), £33,600 + £2976 = £36,576 without including any costs for removing the sawdust waste. At a purchace cost of around £40,000, This system has a payback of time of less than 2 years and is saving us £35,000 every year.
BET Number 12
High efficiency near Liverpool…
This is a 90kw sawdust boiler running currently three forty foot, ultra efficient container kilns with plans to soon increase to five kilns giving a total drying space for 160ibc firewood cages. These efficient kilns with heat recovery, matched with our boiler system running only some of the sawdust and chipped waste produced gives a seriously impressive energy efficiency.
BET Number 14
A boost of heat in Wales…
An over worked 200kw chip boiler needed more power to increase the heat in the three kilns to increase the air temperature to dry the firewood quicker. A number 14, 150kw sawdust boiler was added with extra heat exchangers to bring the kiln cycles from 2-3 weeks to less than one, greatly increasing the production utilising the same kilns.