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| You can sell the high moisture corn and pay the shrink and drying charge.
You can experiment and if it doesn't work, pay the shrink, drying charge, and dock for mold.
You can pay for a good dryer fan AND burner and dry it to the optimum point on your schedule. Your 18" fan won't move nearly enough air for decent drying, day or night.
The last dryer I worked with burned about 900 gallons of LP a day. That's 37 gallons an hour, at 98,000 BTU per gallon, almost 3.7 million BTU per hour. Your Knipco is maybe 150,000 BTU or less, not going to cause much heat in an adequate air flow, though 18" blower isn't enough air flow for drying rapidly enough to prevent mold.
A neighbor's dryer that I wired, 30' bin holding 8000 bushels IIRC, I suggested he set the thermostat each afternoon to the afternoon high while running 24/7. Took a month to dry the bin of corn, it was beautiful golden, not scorched, and only one 1000 gallon tank of LP. Had a big electric bill though.
Whether you dry it or they dry it, you will loose weight expressed as shrink because of the moisture that left. They will charge more for shrink because to dry they have to handle it more and some will be lost due to auger grinding and spills.
I don't buy the argument that night time air has less moisture unless its cooled enough to have condensed some as dew, and it takes a lot of cooling energy to condense water. I don't buy weather reports from automated AWOS weather stations that show a diurnal variation in dew point when there's NO significant air mass motion, and no plants to raise the local air moisture content by evapotranspiration. The dew point instruments are faulty in the AWOS stations and excessively affected by the ambient dry bulb temperature. And the NWS knows it but won't own up to in public.
Intermittent blowing air, would seem to me to create condensed moisture drying fronts in the bin and when the fans were off to let the corn experiencing that condensed moisture begin to mold. Most references say keep the air on all the time to move that moisture on out of the bin to prevent such condensation.
The Midwest Plans Service has a very good manual on grain drying for about $20 that will answer nearly all questions about proper methods of grain drying and the effects of alternatives. You need a copy.
Gerald J. | |
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Unconventional Grain drying question
