How To Make Wood Pellets

In colder climes, heat is a luxury that even the sun is reluctant to give, which makes staying warm a job in itself. While you can wrap layers of clothing to protect your body while going out, when inside, this becomes quite burdensome. The problem is that the house does not shield one from the bitter cold waves and freezing temperature. The cold in such climes has the unusual knack of sweeping through the walls and freezing every inch of warmth inside the house. No wonder the house feels like a tomb with the only difference being that the body inside is alive and breathing! In order to avert the house from being a perfect tomb with a lifeless body, people, in the yesteryears, indulged in the task of burning wood to keep the house warm. However, soon, burning wood too become a luxury due to its scarcity. Next came on line natural gas and heating oil, but like wood, due to overuse, these two also became scarce and expensive. In this scenario, wood pellets came in as a boon from heaven. Not only are they cheap and environment friendly, these pellets can be made from any biomass available at home. Wood pellets are also one of the best ways to recycle biomass. Thus, nowadays, an increasing number of people are using wood pellets not only to keep the house warm, but also for many other things that require heat. Read below to know how you can make wood pellets at home. 

• Softwood or hardwood or switch grass or grain or corn cobs or corn stalks or paper or sawdust or distiller grain or any biomass that can be reduced to granular form.
• Small Scale Pellet Mill
• Hammer Mill
• Dryer
• Any Binding Agent, like vegetable oil, clay, starch, cooking oil, or wax if using material other than wood

• The process depends upon the type of raw materials that you use. The first task is to gather all the raw materials that you will be using. If the materials are more than ¼ inch in length, then they must be grounded to smaller particles.
• The best way to grind the materials is to hammer them manually. For best results it is better to use a hammer mill. Make sure that whichever way you grind, the final raw material should be granular and uniform.
• Next, you should remove all the moisture from the raw materials. Put the raw materials in the dryer at a temperature of about 600 degree F. You can also leave the materials in the sun, but this process will take a lot of time for the materials to dry out completely.
• In case you are using wood as a raw material, then you don’t have to use any binding agent, because wood contains a natural substance called lignin that acts as glue. The binding agent or the lignin will hold the pellets together. However, if the wood doesn’t bind properly, then you can add some binding agent during the heating process.
• Now put the dried raw material into the pellet mill. The raw materials pass through an array of rollers in the mill, before emerging out in tubular shape. Make sure that the process is carried out at a high pressure, so that the adhesive binds the materials and doesn’t soften them.
• The pellets that come out of the pellet mill must cooled. You can do this by putting the hardened and complete pellets in the mill at a temperature of 5 degree F.
• Now, store the cooled pellets in a container at very high pressure. The final pellets should have an ideal moisture content of 15%.