Even with the above in mind if you don't mind a little work to break up the pallets, that wood burner could be used as a pre heat saving money on the cost of kerosineWhat your looking for is a commercial insinuator, can be pretty much built to order. Remember though that the calorific value of pallet wood is not great to say the least, I doubt its even worth it. Incinerator systems were very much the predecessor of many batch burn boilers and biomass but as the pallets are not your waste even though they are free I doubt its very worthwhile because of plant cost to purchase and the low CV of the timber used.
If you found a way of chipping pallets you could feed a chip boiler but again the cost of running a chipper will outstrip what you gain I bet.
With fuel oil prices as they are I should crack on and tag that kero boiler into the store
What your looking for is a commercial insinuator
What does calorific value etc. matter if the fuel is free, and its just a case of loading a couple of pallets in to a hopper once a day?
Go look at incinerators and copy one, very basic inefficient things meant to burn anything with or without heat exchange. A friend who is a bench joiner uses one in the factory / workshop and I once got one for a farm and he burns his dead chickens and all sorts of stuff with it (they are essentially waste disposers with benefits). Honestly though besides an interesting project as its not your waste its not the best move your doing nothing for global warming making things from steel that aint worthwhile and pallet wood will just not give you the heat / burn time. if you were getting free oak or ash offcuts from a furniture manufacturer say then a very different story and a modern batch burn log / wood boiler might be just the ticket for home heating
I worked it out once, but id have to look up the figures...
I was burning biodiesel in a really basic boiler from, i think, 1971. I did a rough calculation on the volume of fuel used per day (i used to fill it up from jerry cans - it was when we first moved in, and nothing was sorted) vs the estimated efficiency of the boiler on kerosene, normalized for biodiesel - or somting like that.
From memory, i think it was about 60kw, but that's really just from memory - it may have been 30, but it wasnt more than 60.
Pallets come in different weights etc. but i did the sums for a pallet also, using an average weight, again, with all the numbers, and i think it worked out that we would need to do a couple of pallets a day.
Which ties in pretty much with what we are doing. Maybe one on a normal winter day. Two or, i guess, at most three, if its very cold and we have guests round etc.
I have a cast heat exchanger from an old baxi bermuda fire that's been knocking about here for ages. Indeed, i tihnk i even have 2-off them.
One of these things -
Thats one on its side - the gas passes up between the fins. Theyre probably about 15" wide.
So, i could use them, if i were wanting to extract from the exhaust gas, rather than from the radiation. Which would make the 'envelope' build simpler.
Ive got a load of ex-kerosene tank 2mm mild, but i think that would fail quickly.
What does calorific value etc. matter if the fuel is free, and its just a case of loading a couple of pallets in to a hopper once a day?