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West Chazy, New York | Not in a Harvestore, but many years in a poured concrete silo. There are some companies that do good conversions, and I have heard that they work quite well. Everyone plugs the hole; you will too. On the old style, where there was just a small passage for the conveyor to fit through the bottom, unplugging was a bad job that took all day. Lots of extensions for the drill auger, tools lost in the loose silage, and the worst part was if you dropped the auger and couldn't pull it back up. It would usually break a few slats on the conveyor if it didn't stall it entirely. The new style, where a tunnel is built large enough for a man to get in and open the hole from underneath makes it a much better system. I have even seen them with a tunnel big enough for a silage cart to fit in, and a few farms had tunnel bases that the mixer wagon could be backed in under the silo (that's getting a little extreme in my opinion).
They work best with fairly moist feed. In fact, if the silage is too dry it tends to flake off of the hole sides and can plug up from just the lose material falling in. Maintenance wise they are pretty simple. Just grease at the top and the bottom, and replace the suspension cables about every eight or ten years. Check the chipper adjustment every year and make sure the wheels that run on the silo wall turn freely. They do such a good job distributing that they will allow you to put about 15 to 20 percent more feed in the silo compared to using a spout distributor. | |
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Silo Unloaders
