2006 - Volume #30, Issue #1, Page #43
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First-Of-Its-Kind Outdoor Corn Boiler
We recently spotted the above ad from M-D Grain in a farm magazine.
Mike DeBeau, an owner of M-D Grain says the ad's claim is true. "There's a few inside boilers made to burn corn and some of the outside wood boilers have conversions made to burn corn, but this is the first outside one that's built from the ground up to burn corn."
The Universal Corn Boiler came on the market last summer and has been selling well. "You can burn any feed grain you want in it but corn is the best bang for your buck right now."
DeBeau says people are using it to heat shops and houses. "It'll heat anything you can run a pair of water lines to."
Maximum output is 225,000 btu's with 10 1/2 bu., of corn, in a 24 hr. time frame. Minimum output is 20,700 btu's with 2 1/2 bu. within 24 hours.
The steel boiler is 24 in. wide, 59 in. high and 65 in. long and weighs 770 lbs. It has a 5/8-in. rolled steel burn pot and water channels through a 36-gal. boiler vessel for heat transfer.
It's a bottom-fed design where corn comes in from a wagon or bin and an auger pushes it to the bottom of the pot where the corn comes up. Burning takes place at the top and corn residue (called clinkers) falls off to the sides.
The boiler is controlled through an aquastat and timers. "If you want the water at 170 degrees, you program that number in and when the water temp reaches that setting, it goes into a pilot mode where it shuts the air down and the augers keep feeding enough corn in to keep the fire going," he says. "When the water temp drops to your setting, the unit feeds corn and opens the damper."
You use wood pellets and isopropyl alcohol to start it and let it go. You never have to shut the boiler down for cleaning.
There's very little ash but you need to clean out clinkers about once a day to once a week, depending on how much corn you're using. "You rake the clinkers into a metal bucket and put them on a field or garden. It's good fertilizer." You also need to scrape off the heat exchangers every once in a while; this is done from the outside with pull handles.
Sells for $5,595.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, M-D Grain, 30726 850th Ave., Blooming Prairie, Minn. 55917 (ph 507 583-5088; mdgrain@hotmail.com).
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