Justin Catanoso is no stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near four of them in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has several facilities. While that company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, it remains the single largest producer of wood pellets globally. This firm is one of […]
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.)