The Solar Kiln | why Every Woodworker Should Have One! | Making $$$ and Saving the Planet

[Music] what's up y'all Logan Parker heirloom builders welcome back today we're gonna be talking about this solar kiln [Music] and how every woodworker should have one so on today's show we're gonna get up close talk about how it works and how it saves thousands of dollars every year let's do it since we build a lot of cabinetry and custom furniture and our shop right down the road and we mill our own lumber with a wood miser lt15 portable sawmill we still needed a way to get lumbered bone-dry without having to transport it to and pay for a whole separate kiln drying operation this is my own little solar kiln that I built six years ago here's how it works this solar kiln this little solar kiln is a passive energy workhorse in the last six years we've dried thousands of board feet of the most beautiful lumber right here for free it saves a tremendous amount of fossil fuel energy by using the Sun to evaporate moisture from wood all the while making it even a higher quality and more stable and reliable than standard kiln dried lumber see the solar kiln collects and intensifies heat from the Sun to dry lumber it's basically a greenhouse with fans placer tiga CLE to move hot air throughout the stack of lumber and remove that moist air as it evaporates from the wood solar kiln drying is a much more gentle process that releases moisture slowly drastically reducing the lumber defects and case hardening in other words the solar kiln takes longer but it yields a much higher quality product and a lot more usable lumber it takes about 400 hours of sunlight to fully dry load lumber in this kiln and that's gonna amount to about 25 days in the summer or about two months in the cold winter months the more Sun that you get the faster it's going to dry this is probably one of the most important things the quality of lumber coming out of this thing is BarNone way higher than anything that you're going to get on the shelf and here's why solar kiln drying is a much more gentle drying process that releases moisture slowly drastically reducing lumber defects and case hardening in other words the solar kiln takes longer but it yields much higher quality and quantity of usable lumber what happens is this ink dries lumber really well during the day and in night it kind of has a chance to absorb some of that moisture back and kind of settle back in so it's not just all the sudden it stressed out and super dry on the outside and case hardened to where when you rip it in half on a table saw it splits open from all that tension the cost to operate the solar kiln is zero dollars the Sun does all the work The Sun heats up the lumber to make it dry the fans are direct solar-powered fans and we don't even need a timer or a thermostat or anything like that when the Sun shot and these fans are running it's a set it and forget it kind of situation this is super easy I love this design [Music] these clear twin wall polycarbonate roof panels collect the radiant heat from the Sun and trap it inside to help dry that lumber you can see this polycarbonate is and this roof frame is built on a really steep pitch this is a 45 degree pitch a 12 and 12 pitch and you want to maximize your solar gain so what you want to do is take your latitude above the equator and in our case in North Carolina where 35 degrees latitude you want to add 10 degrees to that to maximize your Sun for those short winter days now when you design one of these things on your own it's really important that that your roof collection area the square footage of that polycarbonate clear handling is about one square foot to ten board for you to lumber that you're going to dry this kiln right here can dry between twelve and fifteen hundred board feet of lumber so that means we need about a hundred and fifty square feet of roof collection area we've got about a hundred and eighty we're a little bit on the high side we used this scrap rigid foam from an abandoned chicken house to insulate the walls and doors of the solar kiln all the way around to retain heat it works really well blue metal panels in here absorb heat from the Sun and radiate it into the space better than any other color metal believe it or not in fact it's the only roof metal color that's not Energy Star rated because it absorbs so much heat which we don't want in your house but in this solar kill it's perfect now we also use a scrap piece of metal cover the lumber on top so that doesn't get a whole lot of direct solar which is going to overheat and stress that lumber that's sitting on top I mean it also acts as another thermal mass in thermal collector in order to circulate the hot air that's generated by this greenhouse effect and forced moisture out of the wood we use two solar powered fans they're direct wire to these little solar panels that you can see on each corner of the building so that when the sun is shining it's spinning those fans and moving that hot air down and through the lumber and out those bottom vents when it's cloudy and cool those fans don't blow it just slowly builds heat but it's still convinced just it doesn't need to push that air through I design the kilns with fans positioned in a baffle wall that hangs down from the peak for structural shear strength since there's no other lateral bracing and especially with these doors being seven feet wide and 8 feet tall that whole thing could just totally topple over in the wind if the doors were open like they are when the doors are shut they resist they kind of hold that whole wall in place but that baffle wall just adds some security as a great place to mount those fans and it also gives us a place to hang these curtains you can see right now you can't see through to the polycarbonate because of that canvas is a baffle to force air in through the top vent on the door through the fans and push that hot air from from inside the collection space in that greenhouse space and down through the lumber because it can't just come straight back out it's got to go down through the lumber and at the bottom we use two 7-foot wide doors on strap hinges so that way we allow that space to be completely opened up so we can take a skid steer and forks a forklift and load a big pack of lumber in there or pull it all the way out that way we're not stacking and unstacking manually too much and it says even if we do manually stack in there it gives you room it's 14 feet wide I made the whole thing outside dimensions 15 feet wide so that you have basically you're really only going to ever dry 12 foot lumber so that gives you what 14 feet inside that gives you a foot on either side of a 12 foot board to move around and stack lumber manually this lumber is ready to go it's already reached its maximum bone-dry six percent moisture content it's not going to get any drier I'm just going to keep it in there so that it doesn't gather more moisture sitting in an open air situation until we finish up the cabinet job that we're working on right now in our shop and that's really it man set and forget it so let's talk about how much it cost to build this thing this little solar wood kiln was built from rough sawn lumber and scrap foam and it cost about $1,500 for me to build it it literally paid for itself within the first load of lumber and right now it's just sitting here like a little money machine helping increase our profit margins like you wouldn't believe [Applause] [Music] for example rough sawn red oak cost about 70 cents a board foot when it's fresh cut green lumber right off the sawmill but once it's kiln dried and graded the market price jumps to 2 dollars and 80 cents a board foot which means that that red oak behind me stacked up in this kiln is worth almost $3,000 that's four times what I paid for it four generations woodworkers all over the world have been using small solar dryers to create furniture grade wood not only can you save yourself tons of money on your personal woodworking projects this solar kiln right here is a money machine you stack rough sawn lumber in it wait a month and you quadruple your money it's amazing the cost to operate this thing is nothing it's literally saving us thousands of dollars every year plus we save a couple barrels of oil for every load of lumber we dry ourselves with the power of the Sun so I did a little research and it kind of blew my mind according to a 1992 u.s. Forest Service survey of large scale would kill hires approximately 30 billion board feet of lumber is processed every year and with conventional fuel burning kilns that equates to about two billion gallons of natural gas and petroleum which also releases an insane amount of co2 and sulfur dioxide into our atmosphere which we don't need in fact we need to be taking it out of our air we can save every bit of that with the solar kiln drying technology which is exactly why we need a full large-scale transition to solar lumber kiln drying operations [Applause] imagine for a second that the cost of fuel inflates like six eight ten bucks a gallon like it's done in the past and like it will again as we start running out of fuel when that happens the cost of lumber goes way up why the slumber is driving kilns that use coal or natural gas to heat air and literally bake the moisture out of wood it takes somewhere between three and six million BTUs of energy to kill and dry a thousand board feet of lumber that's just the lumber in this one kiln three to six million BTUs to give you some perspective that equates to about forty five gallons of propane to kill and drive this little bit of wood that's insane small shops like ours at heirloom builders can make a bunch of money over time buying rough cut lumber drying at our own little home and get the best lumber help reduce our emissions and save the planet one board at a time even if you don't need a constant supply of lumber this kiln can dry your firewood it can dry your kitchen herbs in medicine fruit and so much more so if you got the space build a solar kiln and start turning green wood into dry lumber and cash money as always y'all thanks for watching if you got something out of this video smash that like button and don't forget to subscribe to our channel until next time good luck and peace out [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: HeirloomBuilders

Views: 303,197

Keywords: solar kiln, make money woodworking, drying lumber, make thousands, wood kiln, lumber kiln, solar kiln fans, greenhouse polycarbonate, abandoned chicken house, how to dry wood fast for woodworking, how to dry wet wood fast, wood drying, solar wood kiln, wood mizer sawmill, lt 15 sawmill, rough sawn lumber prices, solar kiln design, kiln design

Id: rXiOJJQubtM

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 22 2020