Coal-Fired Grain Dryer

Coal-Fired Grain Dryer GRAIN DRYERS Grain Dryers (29E) 27-2-25 Normal grain-drying fuels, like fuel oil, LP or natural gas, have been a little pricey lately. Laurence Zook has a solution: coal. Zook found an old stoker and cast iron furnace and refurbished both. Then he added an insulated sheet metal jacket around the furnace and fitted it with a 12-in. pipe air inlet and exhaust. To dry grain, he turns his bin aeration fan around - so it blows into the bin - and runs a 12-in. pipe from the furnace jacket to the inlet side of the fan. "I set the thermostat on the furnace so air going into the fan is a steady 100 degrees. At this temperature, it will dry about 140 bu. of small grain 5 or 6 points in about an hour," Zook says. "Coal is easy to buy around here and it's cheap compared to other fuels, so the drying cost is only about a cent a bushel." After neighbors saw what Zook had, he got requests for more. He's made and sold half a dozen of his coal-fired dryers. All are mounted on two-wheel trailers so they can easily be moved from bin to bin or farm to farm. The bin on the stoker, which automatically feeds the furnace, holds about 50 lbs. of coal. "If you're running around the clock, that's not enough coal to keep it going, so you'll need to load it a couple of times a day," Zook says. "I have two of them ready to go right now that I'd like to sell for $3,000 each," he adds. "I've used them on wheat and sunflowers and they work great. They're good for drying seed, too, because they work at temperatures low enough that the germ isn't harmed. I see no reason they wouldn't work on corn or anything else you'd like to dry with low temperatures." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Laurence Zook, 3710 165th Ave. SW, Beach, N. Dak. 58621-9464 (ph 701 872-3976).

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