Has anyone done this? I work in conservation and we remove lots of invasive trees that would be perfect for wood pellets, but I've only seen a few DIY tips online. Has anyone done it? What is needed? How much of a pain is it?
Any advice is welcome.
Hi there and welcome!
Lets talk about machinery. Here is a site to a little personal pellet mill you can buy for less than $1k but the volume it works on is small:
Start making your own wood pellets with GEMCO small pellet mill and large pellet plant according to the steps: chipping / drying / pelletizing / cooling / packaging / storage. Buy GEMCO pelletizer, cheap and reliable.
www.biofuelmachines.com
The site also does a good job explaining the whole process.
So the manufacturing process has a number of steps and with any manufacturing the various steps have different machines (as is usually the case). Here is an image of the pellet making process if you are doing anything other than your own home pellets which is small volume:
In short you have steps of reducing wood to size for pellet making, drying, filtering to only have wood, pelletizing, sifting, bagging, storing.
Look at that site and the steps and the machines you would need.
If the cost of machines + installation + rent for manufacturing + maintenance + wages for people to man the operations + sales mechanisms + cost of shipping shipping all make sense, then you have a viable business option.
That should give you good info on pelletizing at some sort of scale for the amount of trees you may be dealing with.
I have a feeling that a pellet mill business model is more about giving places the opportunity to pelletize their wood and that is where the profit is made as the whole sourcing and selling end is just too much to tack on. Just my thoughts though.
So in all you can weigh this vs other options like the suggest one of just sending your wood to a pellet mill. Better yet if you can find a company like Lumberjack Pellets and just source wood for them you can get paid for the wood and hop out of the rest of the production and business process. Then you just buy their pellets lol.
Other options that are less expensive would be to produce wood chips by chipping all of the wood. There is a local tree trimming and removal company here in Dallas that has a big box truck that hauls a giant chipper behind it. They cut down whole trees and chip it in to the box truck. I imagine they then sell the chips to some place that wants any kind of wood that works for their products (mulch, non-smoke fuel pellets, particle board plants, etc.).
I dont know or didnt look up the process for making dust but I guess you could go from chips to dust more easily but not sure.
Anyhow I hope this gives some food for thought on if/how you want to go about your tree removal and pelletizing or any other approach that makes you the most money :)
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