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QUESTION:I just thought I'd chime in about my new corn furnace. I searched the
the internet archives and web for a long time doing research on corn/pellet
furnaces and finally decided to buy a Traeger furnace, the GBU70 (70
kBTU model), configured to burn corn and other biomass/grains.
It's great! I have a 2400 sqft house with average insulation and
windows, built in 1990. I could definitely go for better insulation and
windows in the new house! But this 70k unit still puts out enough heat
to keep the house warm this Winter (was 1 F, -17 C last night), and at a
fraction of the cost of natural gas! Woohoo!
I installed the furnace as an auxiliary furnace and tied it into my
existing Bryant gas furnace. I installed an automatic one-way damper
onto the corn unit and just put a block of plywood in place of the air
filter on the gas unit to act as a damper. I installed a switch that
allows my wife to switch between the two furnaces without messing with
wires from the thermostat in case she runs out of corn or has other
issues with the corn furnace while I'm away on business.
One thing I underestimated is how difficult it would be to procure corn
in central Ohio! I'm surrounded by corn and soybean fields, yet all of
the elevators are owned by the big companies that don't want to sell the
corn bagged, or for the dealers that do sell it in 50# bags, they want
$3.15 up to $3.85 per 50#! And when the market price is around $1.80
right now, that's highway robbery!
Luckily my dad called the local small-town elevator/dealer where he
lives (an hour north of Columbus) and they are willing to sell 100#
nylon bags for $2.18/bushel (56#). That's a great price, so I'm buying
two tons which should easily get me through the Winter and maybe even
the Spring. ;o)
I am working on taking photos of my setup, but haven't finished
installing the extra 3-bushel hopper extension I built. ;o) Once I
finish it I'll take some photos and reply to this thread with a link!
If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask. I've had the
furnace for two weeks now and have had plenty of time and practice
playing with the damper settings, draft fan speed settings, starting,
feed rate, etc.
ANSWER: That's actually pretty good opportunity to maintain a huge, inexpensive
food stockpile for disaster insurance to get you through political
chaos, nuclear war, etc. Just one terrorist nuke going off in a major
city would cause the government to clamp down transportation and food
prices would go sky high.
The typical Morman/survivalist food stockpile strategy is to rotate your
stockpile, as in "store what you eat and eat what you store", but this
has you always eating old food. These stockpiles typically consist of
mostly canned and processed foods which have a shelflife of 3 to 5
years. Some people have spent $3000 on a one year supply of food only to
have the shelflife expire before it gets eaten, so to keep from making
themselves sick eating nutritionally deficient foods they just dump it
into the trash. OTOH dried grains like wheat and corn can still be
edible for 15 years. And it doesn't matter how old grain gets, it will
still burn in your furnace.
So you could have a huge food stockpile of grains that stayed fresh, yet
never got eaten because your furnace rotated your stockpile by always
burning the oldest grain. I wouldn't volentarily eat a diet of 100%
corn, but consider what kind of food you'd be happy to have when the
alternative was starvation, and it wouldn't stop you from finding more
food during a crisis, times when the only thing that can buy food is
other food, or save you big time when food prices go sky high during a
major crisis.
So at $2.18 per bushel, that's using some extra storage space and a one
time investment of maybe $100 to have a huge foodstockpile that stayed
fresh forever, and your both investment and storage space can forever be
refunded/reclaimed. No food stockpile ever stayed so fresh and was so
cheap.
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