It cannot be denied that sawdust briquettes are one of the most effective types of solid fuels used for heating a house. They are high-calorie (heat output is about 5 kW per 1 kg when burning), have a low ash content, and are also convenient in storage, since they take up little space. But this fuel cannot be called cheap, of course, not everyone can afford to drown a boiler or stove with Eurodroves during the whole season.
Hence the interest of many homeowners arises - is it possible to somehow make fuel briquettes with your own hands? Especially when there is raw material for this at a meager price. The solution to this issue is precisely the topic of this article. It will consider various technologies for the production of briquettes from sawdust and other types of raw materials in production and at home. As a result, it will become clear under what circumstances it makes sense to take on this matter.
Methods for the production of briquettes
To get an idea of how to make fuel briquettes with your own hands, you must first study how they are produced in the factory. The preparatory stage is the same with any technology and consists in grinding and drying the raw materials. Such, of course, are sawdust and larger waste from the woodworking industry, which are processed to make briquettes. Then the raw material is dried in order to bring its moisture content to an indicator of not more than 8-10%.
For reference. Also, various agricultural wastes (husks, husks of seeds) and even coal dust can serve as the starting material for the production of Eurodrods.
Next, the main operation begins - briquetting, in other words, pressing of sawdust. Today, this is done in two ways:
- Forming from sawdust of briquettes on a hydraulic press.
- Extrusion production.
I must say that with both technologies, the result is achieved due to the strong compression of wood raw materials, as a result of which a natural component, lignin, begins to stand out. It serves as a binder for this friable mass, others are not provided. The difference is only in the method of squeezing, in the first case a hydraulic briquette press is used, which develops a force of 300-600 Bar.
The extrusion method for the production of sawdust briquettes is easy to understand using the example of a conventional home meat grinder or juicer. Raw materials are loaded into the receiving hopper of the unit and moved by a screw into the tapering working channel of a conical shape. There it is compressed, while the screw briquette press develops a monstrous force - up to 1000 bar.
The output is wood from sawdust in the form of a hexagon, which undergo additional heat treatment and are cut into one size with a special knife. The device of the screw press for sawdust in the context shown in the drawing:
Home-made
It is clear that acquiring such powerful equipment to press briquettes at home is an empty idea. Even if you have the means and free raw materials, you will be able to recoup their cost only if you press firewood from sawdust for sale. This means that it will not be possible to withstand the traditional technology with the release of lignin.
Prompt. Winter tree pruning waste will be excellent for briquetting if they are first crushed by a crusher. Read about the assembly process of such a shredder in a separate material.
Instead, home craftsmen adapted to use different binders to form “bricks”, for example:
- wallpaper or other cheapest glue;
- clay;
- paper, corrugated cardboard.
In order not to buy expensive drying and pressing equipment, at home, fuel briquettes are made as follows. Sawdust is soaked in water and thoroughly mixed with clay in a ratio of 1: 10, or soaked cardboard or wallpaper glue is added. The resulting mixture for the manufacture of briquettes is placed in the form of a homemade hand saw press for sawdust and squeezed by hand. Then the "brick" is removed from the mold and put to dry naturally in the street.
For reference. According to this technology, smart owners press briquettes from any available materials that can burn: from straw, paper, cardboard, leaves, husks of seeds and so on.
Equipment for the production of
The simplest DIY briquette press for making fuel briquettes has a manual screw drive. A molding container with perforation is filled with a mixture and installed under the bed; pressure is created by tightening the screw. The design is very simple and it makes no sense to talk about it in detail, just look at the picture.
Such screw machines for pressing briquettes from sawdust are not very popular due to low productivity. It takes too much time to load the tank, tighten the screw and remove the finished product. It is much faster and easier to squeeze “bricks” on a makeshift press with a long lever and a mechanism for pushing briquettes out. To speed up the process, 2 forms can be welded to the bed instead of one.
Some skilled craftsmen boast more advanced mechanized equipment. Indeed, a manual machine can be improved and briquette productivity can be increased by installing a hydraulic jack instead of a manual drive. To assemble such an aggregate, you will have to tinker a lot, but the result will be much better.
Note. Even using a hydraulic jack in a homemade press, it will still fail to create a pressure of at least 300 bar. Therefore, to reproduce the factory technology without adding water and binders still will not work.
Despite the great difficulties with the manufacture of parts, some of the masters managed to assemble a screw press and get briquettes of fairly decent quality. This is evidenced by the reviews of such people on the forums. But all of them note the high costs of manufacturing parts of the screw and the casing of high quality steel. Again, one cannot do without an electric drive; with the most conservative calculation, an engine with a power of at least 7 kW is required.
Homemade briquettes - the pros and cons
The reasons why this type of fuel is very attractive are understandable. When a person has his own wood production or the opportunity to buy sawdust for briquettes cheaply, then thoughts about their manufacture at home are quite natural. The fact is that not all heating equipment is adapted for burning sawdust. As a rule, wood fines in a conventional stove or boiler burn out quickly and give off little heat, and even half will wake up in an ash pan.
To successfully burn wood waste, you need a special boiler of a shaft type or top burning. It is rather difficult to do this, the prospect of pressing sawdust into fuel briquettes is much more rosy.
It turns out that here, too, is not so simple, and here's why:
- Buying factory drying and pressing equipment is an unreasonably expensive undertaking. It’s cheaper to buy ready-made eurowoods.
- You can make a briquette press yourself and make them a makeshift way. But the products will be of poor quality and will give little heat, and take a lot of time.
Point two requires clarification. Due to the inability to adhere to the technology, the “bricks” after drying turn out to be lightweight due to the low density. Their specific calorific value is three times lower than that of wood, which means that they will need three times as much to heat. The whole process will take a lot of time and take a lot of energy.And to store such a volume of fuel so that it does not accumulate moisture is very difficult.
An informative video for enthusiasts who want to push to do manual briquetting of a variety of household waste:
Conclusion
It is possible, in principle, to make fuel briquettes with your own hands on homemade equipment. But for this you need to have enough free time and a place for drying and storing fuel. It is also important that the sawdust does not have to be transported from afar or expensive to buy. In this situation, the event generally loses all meaning, it is better to buy a truck of firewood. The choice is yours, dear homeowners.