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Alton, Ia | There's been a lot of good points, I'll try not to rehash them.
Clay brought up a good point about dumping hot in a wet fall, but I don't know if it is a huge concern. It depends how fast you are trying to harvest. In a wet fall, with lower drier capacity, it would take us close to a week to fill our cooling bin. Nobody should have any trouble cooling grain down at that fill rate. The bigger issue in a cold wet fall is when you transfer hot wet corn through cold steel pipes, stuff condenses and makes a mess. Not an insurmountable problem either.
Dumping hot and allowing it to steep gives awesome grain quality and reduces your drying costs greatly. An ideal setup is a dryer discharging into multiple storage bins, jump around filling them, letting each day's drying steep for awhile, then turn the fans on while you are filling it's neighbor.
Something not mentioned is wet bin capacity. It's like the old joke of you can't be too thin, you can't have too much. We theoretically can go about 36 hours with the combine parked, in the future may bump this to 72 or so. You can get by with a cheaper dryer by keeping it working through rain, chores, downtime, family events, etc. By the time late fall comes, field moisture is low enough the wet bins now become storage and blending sources into spring.
I think I would auction off the family pet, if it took that, to come up with the dough to avoid stirrators.
Our Superb does it's rated capacity, plus some. If the screens are clean, which is easy most years. I have thought about putting a static pressure gauge on the dryer to indicate how much air resistance we have, and wash by that, instead of just guessing that they are getting dirty. | |
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Grain Drying Efficiency
