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Burning wood is not ‘renewable energy,’ so why do policymakers pretend it is?
(news.mongabay.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I am curious: Have you considered making your own fuel pellets? I have seen a few DIY projects to compress sawdust and am wondering if it would be cost effective for you build/buy a machine for it, s'all.
If you do start a formal business, paying a highschool kid to run the machine and do simple sales tasks might be feasible. (It's not always financially viable, I get it. It would be interesting to do the math on it though....)
(I have no skin in the related discussion. I just smelled a business opportunity and was curious.)
Edit: If you happen to be in the US and near Colorado, I would be willing to try and put a machine together myself, actually. At least, do a preliminary CAD sketch up and see what the raw, underlying cost would be. Can you be a hair more accurate about the volume of sawdust you generate?
I didnt know there was such a thing!
It looks like a reverse coffee grinder, turning ground back into whole bits! It isn't what I'd call cheap, but it could be interesting for the right person to do as a side hustle.
They can be cheap if you can source scrap metal and can weld. The mechanics aren't that difficult. The biggest drawback is time and efficiency as these kinds of operations need to happen at large scales to be profitable. (Machines in this class may be more prone to weird failures, I speculate.)
But yeah, even though we humans have a tendency to waste more than we should, we can be remarkably efficient when profits are involved. Converting trash to treasure has probably minted thousands of millionaires, now that I think about it.
I admire the welders so much. I've done a little welding, but I wouldn't call any of it much better than passable. It really unlocks a whole new level of diy though.
I get a kick about watching some of these people turning various waste products and such into building materials or textiles and that is the stuff that gives me hope for the future. Lots of those operations seem to be those down on their luck in these odd places where these waste materials get pawned off, so I'm glad to see them eventually turned into something useful.
Never underestimate human ingenuity!
I have briefly looked into doing it myself, and it's just not there near-term.
Not only do you need a pellet press, you need a hammer mill to make sure the sawdust is the correct consistency, and then there's apparently also an ideal moisture content. I use kiln dried lumber so there may need to be some adjustment there...it's a few thousand dollars of equipment, I have no personal need for wood pellets, so it would just be easier to find someone who is already in that line of work to sell or even give my grit to. Starting a business and
I smelled a business opportunity as well; because when I make a trip to the dump to haul out sawdust and offcuts and things like that, I pay about $10. If I could sell the same amount of sawdust for $10, I'm $20 up. It would be a way to turn an expense into an income.
I can't be that accurate about the sawdust I generate for a few reasons: 1. I'm still working as a hobbyist for the moment, sometimes I go weeks without building anything, sometimes I build two tables at once. 2. Sometimes I build a bookcase out of plywood and it generates very little dust, sometimes I mill my own rough sawn oak and a single table makes a garbage bin full of shavings. 3. Some of my equipment gets used outdoors and I don't bother gathering the chips (yet). It ends up blown into the woods behind my property. Last year I hauled 2 mostly full 200 gallon garbage cans of dust, chips, shavings and small scrap to the landfill.
Yeah, I get it. Sometimes the juice ain't worth the squeeze and it's much easier to outsource some things.
Still though, just a preliminary search of the youtubes yielded a ton of sketchy pellet rigs just using some scrap metal and a repurposed electric motor. It would be an interesting side project, but a bit risky when it comes to time and profitablity.
(For others watching this conversation at home, pellet stoves can be extremely efficient. They burn hot and tend not to smoke as most of the soot is burned off. They average between 70-83% efficiency, which is excellent.)