How to Make Your Own Wood Pellets for home heating

If you want to know how to make your own wood pellets you are going to need to have the right skills and equipment. That are the pellet mills for home use.  Making wood pellets for home heating is a little more of a sophisticated process than making traditional firewood. There are now small portable machines that you can purchase to make your own wood pellets but without the right skills the pellets you produce may not be of very high quality. Some may crumble back into sawdust before you ever get to use them.

The first step is to get your raw material, which can be wood or many other forms of biomass such as straw, corn stalks, grass and even cardboard. You will need to reduce the size of your raw material to a size small enough to fit into your pellet mill's die holes. This can be done with a chipper or a hammer mill.

Now the material will need to be dried to about 10-20% moisture content. For the best quality pellets your material should be about 15% moisture content.

Once the material is dried you may have to mix in a binding agent such as vegetable oil. This will depend on what type of material you are using. Some materials like softwoods typically have enough binding agents in them naturally.

Now the material can go into the mill where a roller will roll across the material and press it through a die. The die is a hole with a tapered top like a funnel. Pressing the material through the die not only compresses the material but also creates heat which melts the lignins in the material which will act as a glue which will bind the pellet together after it cools.

Now that the pellets are formed they will still be hot so they will now need to be cooled. The most simple way is to spread them out and let them cool at room temperature.

Learning how to make your own pellets is a simple process and there are now small scale pellet machines that will make them for you. All of these machines will make pellets but if you want pellets that are of a high enough quality to be useful you will need to have the right knowledge. There are also different types of pellet mills so before you purchase one, knowing how the process works will help you in selecting a mill that will best suit your needs.