Burning grain for heating.

[manhill]

Well why not? Good enough to use grain to make transport fuel greener.

 

[Pieces_of_Eight]

More sense in burning something that is already a by-product, such as soya hulls or olive cake.

 

[milkloss]

Fell out with brother over this. Tw4t was nicking buckets of oats and chucking them on his Rayburn! It's not like we haven't got enough timber knocking around

 

[Still Farming]

Needs to be blown or augered in possibly?

 

[Two Tone]

Shortly after NFU president Ben Gill retired, he was pushing the idea of burning grain as a fuel. Grain prices were sub £100/tonnes and the Oil price was quite high.
Baxi were then manufacturing a boiler that would run on grain. Because its calorific value is quite high, it in effect made the value of wheat exceed £120/tonne. But it only becomes worthwhile when the price of oil is high and the price of grain is low.

 

[Still Farming]

Shortly after NFU president Ben Gill retired, he was pushing the idea of burning grain as a fuel. Grain prices were sub £100/tonnes and the Oil price was quite high.
Baxi were then manufacturing a boiler that would run on grain. Because its calorific value is quite high, it in effect made the value of wheat exceed £120/tonne. But it only becomes worthwhile when the price of oil is high and the price of grain is low.

Or crap grain possibly?

 

[chickens and wheat]

Nasty stuff to burn, makes clinker and acid smoke rots the flue
Ben ended up with a willow burning boiler, I supplied some coppice willow to him

 

[Y Fan Wen]

I remember when grain prices were on the floor hearing about someone who ran his grain dryer on tailings and was claiming it would still have been profitable to fire it with selling grain.

 

[Walton2]

Nasty stuff to burn, makes clinker and acid smoke rots the flue
Ben ended up with a willow burning boiler, I supplied some coppice willow to him

Burns very well,clinker formation easily stopped with a addition of a little lime.That makes the ash even sweeter as a fertiliser .Similar calorific value to wood pellets .

 

[Princess Pooper]

Well why not? Good enough to use grain to make transport fuel greener.

I've seen this done in one of the modern wood pellet burners. Was in the office complex at a feed mill so some 'waste grain' flood sweepings to get rid of.

 

[steveR]

Well why not? Good enough to use grain to make transport fuel greener.

Looked at this a couple of times, the original issue was getting the product to burn cleanly, even with the addition of extra material to prevent clinker. Originally in the late 90s, I envisaged backloads of cleanings from the seed processing plant I was delivering to. I was also interested in using linseed (or OSR) being added to the mix to improve the calorific content of the fuel into the boiler.

I discussed the idea at length again in 2009/10 with 2-3 scandanavian and polish boiler manufacturers when I was exploring heating options for the farmhouse rebuild. They were confident that any form of cereal or similiar sized grain or by-product could be burned by then. One used a moving floor, another needed a forced air system as I recall.

In the end they were discounted as the RHI was not available so I went ground source!!