Tiny wood fired kiln?

Dear Sarah,

In addition to Wayne's excellent suggestion; Please go to Small, manageable, fuel kilns are my chief interest. I am currently putting together an E-book giving much more detail on my explorations in fire, which will be sold for a reasonable sum off my website. At this stage though I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have.

Best regards

Steve Mills Bath UK

In article , Sarah Hembree writes

Thank you everyone for the feedback, it has been very helpful. If we get results, we'll post a note back here.

Best of regards, Sarah

Sarah Hembree wrote:

I'm not sure that is correct if you take all things into consideration. For instance, a bourry box kiln doesn't pollute at the level of a fast fire or an anagama kiln because the bourry box gives almost total combustion of the wood. Also, you have to take into consideration not just the fuel that it takes to make the electricity but all the human pollution and energy used to build those plants, heat and cool them, get the workers to work and the gas that uses, etc.etc. One can grow their own trees, age them on site and burn them in a pretty clean burning bourry box kiln. If you compare the pollution from one commercial flight to all the wood kiln burning on any given day, you would probably find the the kilns are a drop of water in that bucket. By the way, Medford and area haven't outright banned wood stoves. I lived there for several years, until two years ago and I burned wood in my house as well as electric heat which I added after I was there a few months. If one only burns with wood, it is not banned. For the rest, they have days where you can burn and others when you can't.

Regards, June

Actually the pollution associated with electricity depends on the source and not all electricity is generated by coal. For those of you in the US the EPA provides a "Power Profiler" website so you can check based on zipcode the "cleanliness" of your power.

- Kobey

andavall%pacbell.net wrote:

Thank you for posting this. I had no idea such a thing existed and will now be able to buy energy from a non-oil source. I'm thrilled!

Thank you for bringing this up, it is a great question...and...It lends itself to another question that has been bugging us for a long long time that we've yet to find an answer to: How about corn to fuel a kiln, eh? There is an *ocean* of issues around the concept (like storage for drying etc....) But, in theory, would/could/might it work ? Anyone have any ideas?

Best of regards, Sarah

andavall%pacbell.net wrote:

Almost any properly designed wood kiln, fired intelligently, i.e. avoiding over-stoking which wastes fuel and produces a pall of black smoke, makes less impact than a garden rubbish burning Bonfire. Another good fuel source is blown sawdust; a waste material which again gives great heat and not a lot of pollution. Professor Lowell Baker has done much work in this area, and Manny Hernandes working for Potters For Peace has built several of these Kilns burning waste material in the third world.

Steve Bath UK

In article , Sarah Hembree writes

Depends what your electricity is made of, here in Austria we use mostly hydroelectric power, which should be pretty clean AND is renewable.

Monika

my neighbor potter up the street has a hybrid kiln for excelent wood fire affects.

it's a propane kiln, arched kiln. he fires mainly with propane. at 06 he blows in ash he collects from his fireplace or bar-b-q. he also adds maybe 20 long thin boards to the kiln at this time. he blasts the ash around with a compresed air hose. then continues with propane to cone 10.

not a bad comprimise between full on wood fire & efficeint propane firing.

steve

steve graber