Chris Franklin MD at Ranheat Engineering Ltd. a leading UK manufacturer of wood combustion equipment-continues his series of articles for Panel and Joinery Production.
This issue he looks at the first year of operation of the plant installed in January 2023 at Paneltech, located close to the M5, south of Bristol.
The location of a wood fired industrial heating system is often dictated by the location of the dust extraction system. Generally, if installing an integrated dust extraction and industrial wood fired heating system you don’t want it at the front of your premises.
Often dust extraction systems are installed at the rear and sometimes access to this area is none-vehicular, particularly with a bag-based dust extraction system. Individual bags can be carried through standard doors and put into a skip.
As companies expand and with the introduction of high speed CNC machines the changing of bags becomes a regular and messy operation. So, the solution to getting rid of the bags is to install the existing filter onto a new storage silo.
Ranheat modify the base of the filter and supply a new storage silo that the existing filter can sit on connected by a purpose made flanged upstand.
The silo is fitted with accredited burst panels on the dirty side of the filter. By using this method no expensive to run transfer fan is needed.
The automatically fed system was to replace an existing hand loaded system and Ranheat modified the existing 8 bag filter system.
Ross Larner, Operations Director of Paneltech, indicates below the differences the new system has made to the company and to the staff.
“Firstly the staff hated changing the bags on the old system and to change the bags meant that the extraction had to be turned off so no machines needing extraction could be used at this time. It was a dirty task and PPE was needed. Also the bags had to be carried through the building to be put in a skip at the front of the building.
The hand loaded heater it replaced meant we came in to a cold factory each morning. The loading of the hand loaded heater was labour intensive. To get the unit to operate smokeless meant the heater had to be loaded every 10-15 minutes so it was labour intensive. As part of the project, we also installed a woodchipper to deal with the off-cuts. Now all of our waste is automatically transferred to the storage silo both as chips and extracted dust. Not having to load the heater and change the dust extraction bags has eliminated two labour intensive jobs that were also unpopular with the workforce”.
The chosen wood-chipper was a 800 mm wide cutter with 22kW drive motor with an 18mm screen 40 cutters and a capacity up to 800kgs/hr. The extraction is fitted with a humpback magnet to collect any soft metal fixings that may be present.
For further information on all types and sizes of Industrial Woodburning equipment from 75 kW upwards contact Ranheat on 01604 750005 [email protected] www.ranheat.com Ranheat also make spares and service and repair other makes of woodburning boilers and heaters.
PRW Machinery can be contacted on 02086510928 or [email protected] They supply and service a wide range of wood-chippers.
