Sawdust briquets

[Nick S]

Have just built a workshop and am learning to wood turn and am accumulating a fair bit sawdust and chips .
Has anyone tried to make briquets to burn on open fire with this material and if so what press is best and method Thanks Nick

 

[gregmcateer]

I haven't pressed them into briquets, but i put shavings into e.g. flour bags or sugar bags, twist the top closed and use them as fire starters - bulkier than your aim, but work well.
I would imagine you need either a LOT of pressure, or pressure plus glue of some sort.
Maybe you tube is your friend?

 

[JimB]

I do the same as Greg. My throughput just wouldn't warrant doing much more.

 

[Richard_C]

Yes, grab any old paper bags, flour, bread, big envelopes, stuff tight and tape or tie. Back in the 70s I remember all sorts of small ads for brickette makers to turn old newspapers into magic free logs. None worked. Soak, compress, leave to dry for a few months.... Might work in a hot climate.

 

[Cabinetman]

I looked into this and there are two problems the first one is, to do it as they do commercially you need huge and I really do mean huge pressure which uses the lignin in the wood to bond the blocks together. The other way to do it is to use a wallpaper paste type glue but that means getting your nice dry wood wet, and then you have to wait and dry it. Ian

 

[Phil Pascoe]

If a system relies on wetting the paper, shavings or whatever, forget it. You'd need to make all your briquettes in the hottest week or two of the year and have somewhere to put them to dry. I save small cardboard boxes (frozen food, cereals etc.), fill them tightly and hot melt glue them closed.

 

[Avery]

The workshop accross the road from me had an amazing machine. You poured your sawdust into huge vats and once full it squashed the dust/shavings and squirted it out like those playdough machines which your sister had and chopped it into wood sausages which burnt really well. The machine cost about 10,000 second hand and was the size of a small room.

 

[Inspector]

Look on Alibaba for Briquetting machines or Pelleting machines. The former start at about a grand US and the latter a third of that.

Pete

 

[dzj]

Even the smaller units consume a lot of energy. I've seen one with a 10 KW motor and additional 5 KW heaters.

 

[Robbo3]

Never found sawdust on its own to be very successful. Mixed it 25% to 33% with shredded newspaper. Any more & the bricks wouldn't hold together.
Collect & shred 12 black sacks of newspaper. Mix shredded paper, sawdust & water in a bucket with a mixing paddle in an electric drill. Compress mixture & leave to dry - time varies depending on moisture content & weather- several days to several weeks. Seemed like a full time job for a couple of months in the spring.
I had a press mounted on an outside wall & used a bottle jack for compression. In the end it lifted the bricks so ended up having to reinforce the wall.
The amount of heat given out by the briquettes was nowhere near that given out by wood especially when the weather was really cold, so gave up on that & now use Phil's idea of ramming the shavings into cardboard boxes & sellotaping them shut (5 x 50m rolls £1 from Poundland).

 

[Orraloon]

There are sawdust stoves.

Regards
John

 

[niemeyjt]

Rojek used to produce briquetting machines - IIRC sold by Axminster - small one was about 25Kg/hr. Not sure if still available.

 

[Jameshow]

Mixing planing shaving with parraffin wax and you have good fire lighters.

I few tenon scraps too gives them a bit more endurance!

Cheers James

 

[Wood&StuffLtd]

Look up briquette presses on Alibaba.com. It says the smallest machine is around £1600. You would need to produce a lot of shavings to make it worth while and space to accommodate the machine. I dispose of mine in the green bin any treated wood turned shavings in the black bin. The dustman has asked me to bag them as they can fly about when the bin is emptied into the dustcart.

 

[julianf]

The pellet makers rely on a lot of pressure to get the pellets to bind. So thing to do with lignin I think.

Realistically expensive.

Another option that works is to get old carpet fitters card tubes, mix the sawdust with a *little* vegetable oil and pack onto those.

Or don't bother with the tubes and just shovel it on the fire.


We have a Rayburn here. The dust from my (domestic) dust extractor goes on there. It's mainly chippings rather than dust and burns fine, just quickly. Ok as a disposal pathway but it would be labor intensive to try and heat your home from it.

 

[Doug71]

My old workshop had one of those stoves designed to burn wood shavings and sawdust, it was really good, you just filled it up on a morning and it happily smouldered away all day.

I wish there was a way to burn wood shavings efficiently on my wood burner at home. I have often thought about one of the cheap briquette makers, it would be great to just fill it up and leave it to do it's stuff although I never thought about how much electric they used I do know someone who got one and it kept breaking down, I think the ram that compacted the shavings had more pressure than the build of the machine could handle.

My shavings go off for horses and chickens which always seems a waste when they could be heating my house.

 

[Cabinetman]

There are sawdust stoves.

Regards
John

I was quite impressed by this. Would it work with the slightly larger chips from my planer?
I suppose it would be possible to coil a water pipe around it and connect it to the central heating system.

 

[MorrisWoodman12]

Off on a tangent I know but I just bag mine and offer them free for collection as pet bedding.

 

[Neil Lawton]

I burn some by stuffing them into kitchen or bog roll tubes with pound shop masking tape on the ends.

 

[Boatfixer]

Spent a lot of time making a press tool to make bricks using a 50 ton bearing press. The amount of effort and time to produce a few feebly burning logs meant we abandoned it after a few months.