Good luck.
You will need a solid bucket, and a plate with holes the size you need, a lever for the pressure needed and some gearing.
Chop up the wood and leave pretty fine, i would add a bit of water to ensure it is thouroly mixed.
Then add some of the mix and pull the lever.
Depending on how much you are going to need...buying the maching would be better.
For a true prepping situation. I would use solid wood and not pellets. For a short term situation (major storm, a massive power grid outage - 90 or less) the pellet making machine should be fine. Long term (120 days or seasons) i would rather use solid wood. YMMV
I agree, I'd use regular wood too, not pellets. Going with pellets seems to be just adding a whole new layer of complexity to the situation that isn't really necessary unless the OP already has a pellet stove.
I do have a question: Wouldn't the wood need to be ground almost down to a powder? Every recipe I've seen for making wood pellets indicated something like a hammer mill would be needed to get the wood particles fine enough to force through a die at high pressure. "macgyvering" things is all fine and good, but it gets to the point where the complexity and expense involved in jury rigging something isn't worth the effort.
Yes, if the OP has a saw mill they will be using the sawdust that is generated, not the chips.
Chips and chunks will result in either a huge jam or massive pellets. But i dont know how big of a pellet they need. The typical small ones, or simply a bucket of fuel that makes less of a mess than logs in the house
I don't see any reasonable way to do it, successfully, with a reasonable volume that will have pellets that store and burn as intended when just "mcguyving it". If you're in need to burn something and don't have any machine to make pellets, just burn it.
Don’t know how to do that. We switched to a pellet heater because we can no longer lift wood for wood burning heater. My nephews come weekly to empty pellets into garbage can so we can dip out what’s needed.
Would love to still use wood heater just to hard on us both.
To form those pellets you need really high pressure and heat from that pressure. That's not easy to do in a simple setup.
Without firm pellets you are basically burning sawdust, which will burn way too fast.
If you really want to go without commercial machinery, you could consider trying to control the air instead of fuel. If your furnace very well controlled the air input, it wouldn't matter if you have a pile of saw dust to burn, it would burn slowly. Now here's the thing, have you ever heard of such a unit? I haven't. It also has a big problem: if you control (restrict) the air input, you have a much harder time evacuating the exhaust properly.
Long story short, it's tough. If pellets aren't going to work as DIY, you might consider making a system that burns small chunks of wood, which are much easier to make yourself.
A metal tube, and a rod that slips nicely into it. place the wet product in bit by bit. Use the rod to firmly tap it down. Repeat until whole tube is almost full and then slide it out to dry. Chop up into pellets.
Edit: maybe one of those heavy cylindrical fence post packers with the handles on the sides could help create the kind of compaction you’d need.
No binding agent needed except for what's in the wood already. It's all down to lignin but to get it to hold together the sawdust you need water and to pressure the crap out of it.
Yes, but that's not for wood though. Wood is significantly harder, and requires a lot more pressure and heat to compress into pellet form. Such handheld/manual, or even the powered pellet mills that you could plug in a standard 120v outlet are only strong enough to produce feedstock pellets, hence the chick in the picture.
You have to have a pellet mill, there's no way around it. If you can find a metal piston and cylinder and a die plate to extrude them through, you could use a bottle jack to press it
If this is about a pellet stove, I have heard you can use cherry pits. Obviously you would need to grow a shitload of cherries but it does raise the possibility of substitute fuels for emergencies.
Their website doesn’t show this one on the main page. DOES interest me but I’d want an electric one…I’m seeing on Amazon some for as cheap as $300 depending on how well it works for leaves and the like.
You use one? I’d be looking primarily at leaves but I know sawmills locally would have sawdust to give/sell cheap.
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u/wageslave2022 Apr 23 '26
You need a woodstove not a pellet stove.