So I have been burning harder because of the weather and last night I went to take the billet out after it cooled, it was stuck I had to chisel around the edges to break it up, never had it do that before.
1 month in burning corn lessons learned
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I did try the pliers moisture test on the reject corn and the corn I am currently burning and it is true crumble vs pops apart.
The pink fines are part of what's called red wings. My stove burns them and any dust no problem with the auger jamming. Some stoves are finicky about them though.
I believe your stove is a top feed? If so you and anyone that hasn't done it, even if just burning pellets should put a couple or rare earth magnets near the bottom of the hopper to catch any magnetic metal shards that can get into corn from harvesting, moving and drying. Also pellet bags have been found to have metal in them. It is cheap insurance against those shards getting into the auger and causing damage.
Pete I screen all the corn I burn 3 times to make sure the dust and fines are out of the corn.
I do mine twice with a corn-vac system. Once out of the pickup bed and then again out of the IBC totes into a 55 gallon drum.
Well a few things to consider. Right now the take up hose is about 12' long including the wand, I'm using a 6.25hp shop vac, 16 gallon with regular dust bag. So the smaller the shop vac the longer it will take and the longer the take hose the longer it will take.
When I first started I had pvc pipe running out to the truck and it took about 7 hours to unload. Now I just remove the front (right) tote and back the truck up to the other tote saving a lot of length of take up hose/pipe, much faster.
Then there is the fine line of efficient take up vs how clean the corn gets. The corn I get is pretty clean to begin with but I still like to get as much dust, fines and redwings out as possible. To do that you have to add take up air. I just drill some holes in the wand and when I unload from the truck to the secondary tank I have most of those holes open so that the shopvac can suck up the dust better. Not enough air and it doesn't clean as good.
So the first phase it takes about 10 minutes to fill the secondary tank on top. It's rated for 25 gallons but you never get it that full as the corn pyramids.
The second phase of getting into the 55 gallon drum is faster at about 8 minutes but then I have taped over 3/4 of the take up air holes as the corn has been cleaned pretty good by that time.
As the dust bag in the shopvac fills I like to empty it every 6-7 tank full of corn. If you are careful you can empty a bag and use it for at least a year. When empty the shopvac draws faster and cleans better.
All told right now, stopping to empty the 25 gallon tank into the totes, taking time to empty the dust bag every 6-7 tanks it takes me about 4 hours with pee and coffee breaks to unload the truck. And I get about 2600lbs each load.
The orange tape on the wand is my mark where the takeup holes start. That way I'm not burying the wand so deep as to block those holes. There are several more holes than what you can see here.
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