I'm planning a new drying and bin site for next year. Dry storage bin is planned to be a 48x12 currently spec'd with a single 30HP 3-phase low speed centrifugal fan.

I've been drying for 8 years now. Dumping hot into 24x6 and 27x6 bins, steeping, and cooling. The bins get turned over several times at harvest as I bag the dry grain to make space. I have never been happy with the amount of moisture in the bins once temps get blow freezing. The icing becomes a major headache, especially once temps get below zero. Corn stuck to walls, etc. Of course steeping causes a big blast of moisture rich air when the fans are kicked on. I told myself I wouldn't dump hot at the next site.

I'm running a GSI Airstream 112 dryer. It's small, but has become very reliable as I have ironed out issues over the years. It cranked out 65K bushels this fall without a hiccup. It can process through the amount of bushels I need it to do if it can run non-stop for the length of harvest even at 25% moisture off the field. At 18% corn I can;t keep up to it. I know the dryer well and its been good the past few years.

Any dryer upgrade to get dual chamber and cooling at this point would be a stop gap, It wouldn't be my "rest of my career" dryer. I hate doing stop-gap measures. Not changing dryers now would also allow me to go bigger on the wet storage which is really what I need to even out bushel flow with the on-again, off again pace of harvest for a one-man operation.

At 25% corn, the dryer puts out about 250 BPH. Planning on 1% dry down when cooling, it would only be adding 168# of moisture to the bin that needs to be removed per hour. Without figuring the area of the cone surface and just taking a flat 48' circle, 250 bushels is a layer only 2" thick per hour in the bin. At 18% off the field, the dryer does double.

I'm thinking if I cool constantly, the moisture saturation of the air coming out of the bin could be low enough to avoid the issues I have now with steeping and cooling. Adding a second fan is cheap enough to get more air flow and lower the moisture/volume figure. Any experience with a similar situation? I've read several threads of guys successfully cooling in 48' bins, but they are in much more tropical locations and thus most likely are not regularly harvesting after freeze up. Thanks.