Our Extensive Research Making Pellets

Back in 2006 we started to look into making pellets to heat our home due to the cost of heating oil. We tried to find out what we could from the internet in terms of making pellets, however most of the information we found was very vague and lacked details. Generally we knew we needed a pellet mill, a hammer mill and a material that was fairly dry. At that time the only real option was to purchase a small pellet press from China. It was driven by a small single cylinder diesel engine as was the hammer mill. The first thing we realised was that to start a manual diesel engine is very difficult, and actually quite dangerous. You have to lower the compression valve on the engine and then turn the fly wheel over. If your lucky the engine will start, however if the weather is anything but mild you can be trying for quite a while. However sometimes the crank handle gets stuck and spins round before it comes flying out. Sometimes the engine back fired and started to run in the opposite direction, with exhaust fumes coming out of the air filter. Presuming we got the engines going we then came across various other issues. The hammer mill did reduce particles to size, however the cyclone created a lot of blow back. Also the material has to be dry before you can even use it in the hammer mill or you will simply block the screen. However to dry material you need to reduce its particle size, so its a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Once we got the material particle size right and what we thought was the right moisture content we approached the pellet mill. This is where all the previous issues were put into perspective. The die would constantly block, pellets were a poor quality and the productivity was not even close to what we were told. At the time this was obviously very frustrating, however it was the reason we began to research the finer details of making pellets and what a quality pellet mill requires to make quality pellets. Through this experience we try to help visitors to our website such as your self from making the same mistakes with poor quality presses.

 The Wood Pellet Mill Production Guide © PelHeat Ltd - Our Extensive Research Making Pellets