Where I Buy IBC Totes For Cheap

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back so one of the questions that i get asked most frequently in the comments section is where do i buy my ibc totes and how much do they cost if you follow along with us today i'm going to answer both those questions i'll tell you where i buy them how much i buy them for and if you don't live in my immediate area i'll tell you where you can look to buy them in your area stick around so currently i have 10 ibc totes already stacked and ready to go for next winter six of them are northern red oak the last four on the end here are a mix between hard and soft maple they each hold about a third of a cord these are the 330 gallon ibc totes these are the 275 so you can see the only difference between the two is this one has an extra rung on top here these ones here a little less than a third of a quarter but i try to kind of give them a heaping top there i still have a few more i need to put in this one but they work really really well for doing firewood if you know where to look you can find them for cheap they're easy to transform into firewood baskets all you have to do is pull out the white bladder and then take an angle grinder and grind out this little section here so that you can reach down into the bottom and stack the wood nicely in or if you don't feel like stacking you can easily just toss them in too but anyway we're gonna hit the road and i will show you where i buy mine from [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so we're here with matt of firewood guy of pa and keystone tree cycling he's the owner and operator matt and i actually have a lot in common we are both accountants while matt used to be an accountant i interned at the same firm that matt used to work at um so we actually have known each other for a little over a decade uh but matt go ahead and tell me about your operation here and how you were able to turn it into a full-time job and a career yeah i uh i started at the age of 14. a neighbor was clearing some property for pasture for cows i went over and i asked them i said hey do you mind if i clear the property for you so that i can sell the firewood it helps you it helps me i don't have to put money in firewood and so i started with my dad's 1981 echo chainsaw a ford 9n tractor with a little dump trailer and i was selling dump trailer loads of wood locally for 45 dollars cut split thrown on a wagon and uh it was funny because i i could only deliver to people that i could ride the tractor to so they were all within like a two mile radius and there was people buying firewood from me that didn't have any intention of ever burning firewood but they just saw a young industrious kid and they wanted to help them out little entrepreneur right so i just kind of kept doing firewood cutting and splitting it and then when i got my driver's license i bought a ford pickup i i kept splitting it by hand kept cutting it by hand and was doing pick up loads delivered that way and then i was going to give it up when i went to college and my dad's like no keep it going you got a good thing going and there was a dump truck for sale i bought that for cheap like 1500 bucks and i redid it and i started delivering firewood to to the city and then it just kind of ran out of the paper and i didn't realize how low my price was and i was just kind of like inundated with all these orders i couldn't handle and so then i started like employing the neighbor kids to help cut and split firewood for me and i'd come up on the weekends to deliver and i'd schedule my my college classes so that i had tuesday thursdays or monday wednesday friday so that i could dedicate my free time to cutting and splitting firewood so that's how i spent my college days with studying going to class and cutting and splitting firewood and i kept doing that through college and uh came to the real world and i wasn't making enough money part-time to like justify doing it full-time so i got a full-time accounting job the same place that you interned and i was there for four years uh studied for the cpa exam past that yep and i just got to a point where i was looking out the window from my desk every day and just watching people outside working and i'm like i gotta get out there and do something i can't do this forever i can't sit inside it's hard sitting behind a desk it is there's days that's nice yeah it's zero the wind's blowing yada yada but um and then an opportunity came up for us to start the waste recycling part of the business in 2012 and i just kind of decided it was now in that or now or never and i i just went and jumped all in so aside from obviously firewood what other i mean keystone tree cycling your slogan is you know where wood is a terrible thing to weigh yeah where wood is a terrible thing to waste so what are all the byproducts that you make here um we make wood chips um sawdust um mulch colored mulch we make the firewood we sell cut slab wood for firewood basically anything that comes in is processed and shipped out and something's done with it whether whether it ends up in a piece of furniture it ends up being burned for heat or it ends up in flower beds in front of somebody's house so matt how long have you been to the scale that you're at now like to the point you can make a career out of this i left the accounting world in 2013 okay and i've been full-time employed here since then so seven little little over seven years almost eight years now and how many quarts of firewood do you sell a year honestly i have no idea um because we it's separated into several different product streams i don't really quantify it as a total i just kind of pay attention to some key areas that i want to grow in yeah and i i have been so busy i haven't had time to really count up the number per year so you said you've got seasoned wood you've got kiln dried wood and then you've got kiln dried heat treated wood or well we sell we sell bulk firewood as well as the pre-stacked on a pallet and there's we kiln dry slab wood so we'll bring in cut firewood from the sawmills waste slab wood we'll kill and drive that sell it that way we sell it bulk and dumpster loads for like people that want to stock up and advance and drive themselves and then we sell regular air dried seasoned firewood that's been cut and split and then we sell kiln dried cut and split firewood in bulk that's delivered all right well anyway let's take a walk around the place here i want to see all the equipment you run and uh i'm really looking forward to seeing how big some of the equipment is to handle the volume of firewood you're doing so let's take a walk [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so matt these are your kilns here right yeah so for myself i only do 15 to 20 cords a year do they make anything smaller that you know i could only dry like a cord at a time instead of how many how many to fit in here we can fit six chords in here at a time and this is the smallest kiln that i know that's commercially produced and it's called a mini quick and it does have six full cords and for us it's all about speed being able to to put turns through there and this will dry six cords of wood in about three days two and a half to three days wow in the winter time when the wood's cold going in it takes longer to get it up to temperature until it'll actually start drying so so sometimes it'll take four days so the kiln drying process you were saying that you have to get the wood up to 140 well it it's a factor of temperature related to the moisture so there's probes inside the kiln that we drill into the wood measures the internal temperature of the wood and in the winter time the wood will go in at zero or below zero and then it just takes time for the kiln to be able to bring the wood up to temp once it hits what we call heat treat which is 160 degrees 160 side of the wood okay it takes us about 30 to 40 hours of treat time to actually dry the firewood so there's a big difference between heat treated firewood and kiln dried firewood okay and there's a lot of people that sell kiln kiln-dried firewood because it goes in the kiln they run it for a day they pull it out technically it's kiln-dried because it was in the kiln and it did dry some but here we heat treat and kiln dry and when you watch the temperatures on the kiln when they climb and the wood temperature climbs together the internal wood temperature here will go over boiling okay we know the batch is done now what is your moisture content of your kiln-dried heat-treated wood i advertise that it's 16 to 18 percent but it is below that it's less that that's your cover right right and you can't like the moisture meter probe system doesn't work on kiln-dried wood straight out of the kiln because it doesn't factor the heat yeah so you split a piece and you put it in there the moisture meter reads all over the place because it's not it's designed to read ambient temperature wood not 200 degree wood so how do you load this this is the door here yeah the door the front door opens and then we drive in and out with a skid steer and those steel baskets are what so those steel not not these baskets these steel baskets are the ones that go in they're a half a cord each half court each okay they're actually a hundred cubic feet a loose piled like that um they dry they shrink they come out less than 100 cubic feet okay and then these are what you have coming right off of the conveyor over there let's take a quick walk over there real quick [Music] so these are the steel baskets here that hold half a cord and you said you load these with a forklift right in the kiln if you can fit six chords in there in the half court you can fit a dozen of these in the kiln at one either time and then there's about a foot on the bottom and maybe 10 inches on the top and that's to force the air to move through the baskets as opposed to just go around them okay and they say it makes no difference whether you stack them loose like that or you stack them in rows to dry them in the kiln so the safe labor yeah all right matt so explain to me what this is here this is the bin conveyor system that we load that it fires the kiln so there's a wood waste kiln it burns the waste wood that we can't use in the process to actually heat up the kiln and fire the kiln instead of propane or natural gas so you're making use of every part of the wood here so this is these are your off cuts from the sawmill this is the conveyor that then feeds into the furnace which fires the kiln correct so really what's what's your cost on running the kiln you might have a little electricity yeah electric is a major cost because there's uh there's four circulating fans inside there's the electric motor that runs this conveyor um it adds up to more than you might think to power those fans for 24 hours a day all week long yeah and this system here is totally automated once you program your set temperatures and how hot you want your firebox there's a logic board controller that has limit switches on all the doors and the conveyor system and it airs out if there's a if the door won't go shut because a piece of wood got stuck it idles the kiln stops the fire okay until you come and fix the problem yeah but as far as actual heat you have no expense because you're just burning waste from the sawmill and yeah and when it comes to there's a major difference people make the argument well it doesn't matter burn green wood and it burns so much more green wood to do the same work it's not worth it okay because you're here loading this three times as often right so i'd almost kiln dry wood to burn in the kiln the heat because it's it lasts longer i don't have to handle as much well it's the same as you know heating your house or whatever you know if you've got kiln dried wood it's going to burn longer burn better well i didn't believe i didn't believe a lot of the hypes with kiln-dried firewood until i started commercially drying myself and burned it myself and experienced it myself it's just such a difference because most people don't take the time or the effort to dry wood properly in terms of seasoning they just buy a pickup load of firewood from some guy who says it's dry they bring it in throw it in they never know a difference i have lots of customers they burn this wood they're like i never thought there was a difference in firewood until i burned yours yeah and it just there's a whole lot of benefit to go along with it now what what would you say the biggest difference between killed and dried heat-treated firewood versus somebody who actually does you know either cut split and stack their wood a year in advance or they buy a pickup truck load from some jabroni that says it's dry but it's not and then they stack it themselves for a year and let it sit if they properly season it for a year or more the only difference between kiln dried heat treated firewood and traditional seasoned firewood is going to be the fact that the kiln drying process is going to kill all the bugs and all the molds okay so bugs and mold is the difference between truly seasoned um in this region it is extremely difficult to properly season firewood because we have so many overcast days right the best time to actually drive firewood is in the winter right the moisture difference is greater there's no humidity no humidity as long as you have it covered right so we don't kill and dry ahead guys go why don't you fill your building with kiln-dried firewood in august and july well it'll re-acclimate you know i'll dry it to 12 but it'll re-acclimate to the humid summer suck moisture out of the air it totally kind of defeats the purpose it'll still burn good it'll burn as good as season firewood but technically there is no difference between properly seasoned firewood and kiln dried firewood so the audio here got kind of drowned out so i'll just give you a quick voiceover of what we were talking about basically i was asking matt if this was his slabwood that he uses to process and then sell wholesale dump trailer loads of slabwood to people who heat with and he said no this is his raw material for wood chips and mulch and then another byproduct of that is that they will grind this stuff down and they'll use it to make particle board for furniture this here is the pile of slab woods they process and turn into firewood and there's no amount of pictures or drone footage i can take to do this pile of wood justice you have to see it in person it gets used to heat a school district actually and they actually pull the steam and generate electricity when the when the temperatures get high enough really yeah so a school district uses this to heat with correct what kind of stove do they burn it in it's a uh they measure them in horsepower i'm not checking i can't remember how many horsepower it is but it's a little over a million btu uh hot water steam boiler okay and it's it's a great big it's just like a pellet stove essentially it's a great big pellet stove it's got an auger system oh so it's like a hopper yeah blower fans that blow in and then the water is just contained in a reservoir over the fire yeah and then they have circulation pumps that run to all the buildings to heat all the registers and all the radiators in each building i never would have thought that there would have been a market for something like this there wasn't it's a very narrow market um in this region anyways because gas for natural gas is readily available so there's not a lot of reasons to have biomass except when gas gets really expensive right but the bulk of the material ends up going to the board plant so so this is your chipper down here with a big conveyor and so all of this uh slab wood here i'm assuming gets loaded onto the chipper and then up the conveyor and yeah it goes across the screening system it gets screened out for chips that are too big and then there's acceptables and then there's pins or spines that come off the chipper that go out from bedding okay there's a thousand ways to die in this building yeah yeah this looks like a pretty pretty big piece of equipment here uh it feeds based on the knives being sharp enough to pull the material in it's not like your brush chipper stripper you don't have a hydraulic roller no there's no rollers there's no anything there's a vibratory conveyor as soon as the slabs come down and touch the knives they're sucked into the chipper about as fast as you can see them go and they're blowing up the pipe over the screen so then it gets screened deck screen and the overs the chips that are too big stay on top they come back to the chute to be rechipped the acceptables come out the middle chute onto the conveyor belt to go out to the bin and then the fines go to the sawdust blower over to the bin over there wow so here's just one of the knives that goes on that chipper yeah and these are spent ready to be resharpened and reused and then they're babbitted so that they're so those are already dull yeah these are already dull i'm gonna say those look sharp to me i wouldn't have been able to tell they do look sharp but they're not because it relies on that knife edge to pull the material in for the next cut gotcha so here's the shredder that takes the slab wood and runs it through and turns it into mulch you can see it has an oscillating conveyor that can pivot around depending on what bay he's trying to fill up you can see there's four different bays one for black mulch one for red one for brown and then there's a bay there for undyed mulch and this is where the ibc totes come into play because that is how the bark mulch dye is transported in bulk there's 330 gallons of bark mulch dye in each one of those containers you can see right here he has one of the ibc containers hooked up to the pump which then is hooked up to the machine which then is mixing in the die with the mulch as it's going to the conveyor so here's all of matt's ibc totes he gets anywhere between 50 to 75 of these in every year for bark mulch you know right here they produce all their own mulch they dye it and that's what the bark mulch dye comes in he can hold some back for himself for use with the firewood business but he has plenty to sell he's got them listed for 25 bucks a piece which if you've done your own research you know how much people are asking for these things if you're in the market for these and you can haul a little bit of them it's worth making the trip uh for 25 bucks a piece because like me i'm getting eight here if i was buying these for 50 bucks a piece times eight that would be quite a bit more expensive than what i'm paying so like i said it's worth a little bit of a drive if you're in the area all right so i just got back from mats and i realized i haven't even told you guys where he's located uh keystone tree cycling and firewood guy are both located in the same yard there they are in spartansburg pennsylvania so if you're in the area and you've been in the market for these ibc totes but haven't pulled the trigger because they're too expensive it's a good place to get them for 25 a basket any more than that and it's really hard to kind of scale and get a full winter's worth of firewood because you're going to be having hundreds of dollars invested in these ibc baskets i really appreciate matt taking the time to show us around the firewood yard there for me that's just awesome you know all that equipment all those firewood pulls the chippers the mulchers all that stuff it was like a kid in a candy store for me i think the thing i was impressed by the most was the kilns that is one piece of equipment i would love to have when you do firewood that is the most frustrating thing about firewood is how long it takes to dry out anywhere from six months to a year and if you've got red oak up to two years so if i had some kind of kiln here where i could do like a quart at a time that would be ideal but yeah his kiln operation up there is top notch anyway do me a favor in the comments below let me know how much these firewood baskets are going for in your area i really think 25 bucks a piece is about as cheap as you're gonna get them uh if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up click that subscribe button and check out some other videos thanks for watching so i forgot to mention where you can buy these ibc baskets if you don't live near spartansburg pennsylvania so you want to look for anybody that produces and dyes their own mulch like i said these ibc totes it stands for intermediate bulk container and for this purpose they're used to transport bark mulch dye so you want to look for somebody that produces and dies around mulch they should have quite a few of these things laying around and you should be able to pick them up for cheap because it's a waste product for them you're doing them a favor by helping them get rid of it again thanks for watching

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Views: 155,655

Rating: 4.9136167 out of 5

Keywords: Firewood, Baskets, Basket, IBC, Tote, Company, Business, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Kiln, Processor, Chipper, mulcher, Shredder, Mulch, Hometown acres, outdoorgans, Outdoors with the Morgan’s, Container

Id: cfD8ut8tXPw

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020