Why buy a Eko or Tarm over a Greenwood or Seton?

[tigermaple]

Sweetheart,
Europe doesn't have anywhere near the timber resources of the USA. Their hand was forced much sooner. But I still say complexity does not equal better. I just learned GW has qualified for the EPA green label program. The results should be announced shortly.

 

[sweetheat]

I find the tarm , eko and other european products no more complex than the econoburn and several usa manf. gassifiers. Europe's hand was forced by the dirty air. Do we have to get to the same point before we change? Their timber resources are limited but they have all that wood waste that they use. We have just seen the recent start up of a pellet mill in central maine, another in NH I beleive. If a product burns cleaner and produces more efficient heat, it is a better machine hands down. Does not matter were it's built. The competition forced GW to change. sweetheat

 

[tigermaple]

Greenwood just improved on Fred Seton's ideas and hopefully there is much more improvement to come. I'm a treecutter/hugger. We owe it to the tree to get the best use out of it. The econo burn is closer to a EKO than a GW. It takes a lot of energy make pellets from stump to stove. As a waste product they are great but if we are cutting down trees to make pellets I'm not sure how much you come out ahead in the emissions end. The less one can run a saw, splitter, tractor, truck, etc, the better for earth and efficiency

 

[sweetheat]

I'm a tree hugger cutter also, The forest products industry produces a lot of waste. The pellet mills use only waste. Logs are to valuable to turn into pellets, but their saw dust is'nt. I generate a 12 yard dumpster full of wood waste from the work in my shops. I hope to send it to the pellet mill close to here. I've spoken to the mill owner, he sounds optimistic. sweetheat

 

[Ncountry]

I'm a tree hugger cutter also, The forest products industry produces a lot of waste. The pellet mills use only waste. Logs are to valuable to turn into pellets, but their saw dust is'nt. I generate a 12 yard dumpster full of wood waste from the work in my shops. I hope to send it to the pellet mill close to here. I've spoken to the mill owner, he sounds optimistic. sweetheat

I do not know if this the norm. A local logging company has plans to build a pellet mill. 100000 tons of pellets/year. The predominate source of raw material being low grade timber. I am curious if this is the norm for most large pellet plants?

 

[tigermaple]

I was a pellet stove owner b4 gw. I loved it, but 2005 the pellets ran dry in NY. One of the causes was lack of waste for pellets. The price went wild and people were lined up when shipments came in. I was a lot colder that winter. Most of the big sawmills use there own waste products to heat the mill or kilns. Lots goes other places. If more people burn pellets we will be using sawlogs sooner or later. Think of the energy it will take to move 12yds of waste to the plant, process and bag it and move it back to you shop for heat. You better be close. As the cost of oil goes up we will have to start thinking as a people again.

 

[sweetheat]

The 12 yard dumpster now goes to the landfill. Would'nt it be better to send it 50 miles up river and turn it into pellets? You wont see a saw log going to a pellet mill up here.

 

[Nofossil]

Nofossil - Your graph showing all the temps in your system over time is awesome. I especially appreciate looking at it to get a feel for your heat exchanger performance. I noticed that you need to cycle the storage zone and that during the periods where the zone is on the boiler ouptut temp goes down very quickly. This indicates to me that your heat exchangers are certainly good enough, if not better than they need to be, during that stage of the heating process. However, I would guess that the most demanding part of the process for the HX is at the end when the tank is getting near the boiler output temp, due to the smaller heat delta available to drive the heat transfer. I can see on your graph that the tank temp starts to rise less rapidly near the end as expected, but that it still gets up to temp pretty darn quickly. It looks like there is no need for better heat transfer, which means that your HX should server as a good example for the one i am designing. Granted, you have a different boiler that I will be getting, but I can scale the HX based on boiler BTU. I checked your web site, but you didn't indicate the size tubing for the boiler HX. What size tubing and what total length do you have?

This is a bit OT for this thread - sorry...

For the main HX, I have a 50' coil of 3/4" copper with an additional horizontal grid of 5 (or six?) parallel 60" long x 1/2" copper tubes top and bottom. It's really not enough to get the whole tank anywhere near 180. Performance drops off badly as tank temps start getting higher.