Sawdust fueled evaporator

[das fisch]

Getting my wood together for this upcoming season and have acquired a source for large quantities of hardwood sawdust from a cabinet shop. Has anyone built an boiler which can burn sawdust as the main combustible? Either manual or auger fed

[maple flats]

Manual feed it seems would be too demanding on the one fueling. I do think you could somehow design an auger feed, just not sure how. Since the BTU's go by the weight of the dry fuel, you'd sure need a huge supply. I have a sawmill, but hardwood or soft, the sawdust is quite light indeed.

[das fisch]

Manual feed it seems would be too demanding on the one fueling. I do think you could somehow design an auger feed, just not sure how. Since the BTU's go by the weight of the dry fuel, you'd sure need a huge supply. I have a sawmill, but hardwood or soft, the sawdust is quite light indeed.

Good point about the weight. I get the large dust collection bags full of hardwood dust (mainly mahogany, hickory, oak etc). These bags weigh quite a bit to be honest. Probably start looking at auger designs

[nymapleguy607]

You would almost need to first start a fire with regular wood and then transition to the sawdust. I think your best bet would be to auger the sawdust into and airstream and blow it into the firebox. It would be similar to the flame of an oil gun

[markct]

Personaly i would look at making a way to compress it into like pucks or big pellets sorta. That way you could feed it without modifying your arch and storage would take up less space than loose sawdust.

[Scribner's Mountain Maple]

I would agree with MarkCT. I think if you could compress it into small blocks it would be better for burning. One thought that came to mind was if you used blowers in your combustion chamber, with loose sawdust, I would think a lot of that material would be blown right out of the stack before completely burning.

If you made small 2" by 2" blocks with the sawdust, you could auger feed them like wood chips.

[gmcooper]

I found online a couple of homemade rigs that were made to compress sawdust into blocks to burn. I can't find the link tonight but they were simple. The idea was that sawdust could be made into blocks or logs at home and burned in a wood stove with out modifying it. I saw no info on how much time it takes to make enough blocks to burn for a day.

[das fisch]

Snows flying and between plow trips I'll be making a press to form bricks to burn. I'll post some pics when I get into it!