Granulate from a wood-chipper inside a bunker silo

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Continuing his series of articles exclusively for Furniture and Joinery Production. With the Government announcing that industry will receive help with it’s energy bills there is still a lot of uncertainty, how much and for how long?

Chris Franklin, managing director of Ranheat Engineering, one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of wood-waste burning equipment:

"Here at Ranheat we have seen a large increase in enquiries from both within and outside the woodworking industry. Ranheat systems can burn all types of wood and wood-based products.

"This includes chipboard, OSB, plywood, melamine-faced chipboard as well as hardwood, softwood, pallets, and wood packaging. Outside the wood-working industry lots of goods and components are delivered on single use pallets that are not economical to return. Basically, Ranheat systems can turn this into useful energy.

Purpose made ‘bunker silo’ fed from an internal wood shredder

"Almost all companies in the wood working industry have some form of dust extraction system even if only simple bag extraction systems.

"Companies outside the woodworking industry don’t have extraction. By using an auger feed from a wood granulator, nails and other metal fixings can be dealt with as there is no fire risk.

"Some form of magnetic separator is a good idea and the steel from the nails is in quite a pure form so gets a high value as scrap metal.

"With the end of the Renewable Heat Incentive, which was only applicable to boiler based systems, Ranheat has experienced increased demand for it’s warm air variants.

"They are cheaper to buy and simpler to use and there is no fear of freezing the system during shutdowns such as over Christmas (most customers use them 24/7)

"Warm air variants can be programmed to turn themselves down to run at much lower outputs outside of occupancy and then turn themselves up in time for workers’ occupancy.

"Products manufactured from wood benefit from being kept at stable temperatures overnight and over weekends.

"The warm air variants have a simple summer/winter divertor allowing the heat produced to be released to atmosphere. Still a better way to dispose of the wood-waste than sending to landfill.

01604 750005
sales@ranheat.com
www.ranheat.com