Setting Up Charlie’s Kiln

You've seen my friend Charlie saw Mill on a couple different videos. Now we're gonna talk about your kiln. So how long now have you been cutting wood? Oh, two years and up to now you were air drying stack and an air drying and you made the decision to go to a kiln instead. And so what's that? Why did you want to start killing drying instead of air drying? A couple of reasons? First off, it accelerates the drying time. So you get your material to use much faster. Two years versus air drying versus a kiln your couple of months on the outside and two, it makes the material much more stable. So you're not gonna have the expansion contraction a year, two years, three years down the road when your furniture is done and in your house and it takes on humidity in the air because it'll give you that lower initial moisture content. It does have a more stable chunk of and when you kill them dry, it locks the pores so they can't absorb moisture back in air dried. It, it'll take on whatever ambient moisture is in the air. All right. So what we're going to do is talk about Charlie's experience with. He went through a couple different cycles of how to get a kiln. So just basically give you an overarching look at what he went through to get a kiln set up over there. So let's head to the kiln and we'll talk more over there. All right, here we go. So for you, it made the most sense to put the kiln into this existing building. Right. I had room to do it inside already. I don't have to do a separate building. I had plenty of space. So I built it inside my existing shop and your flow, the sawmills over there, you run the stuff outside. Air dry, come back in and load here. Right. So you want to dry it after it's air dried for a while. So you're not doing a high moisture content. Hi, startling. Let's look at that kill. Open those doors. Get a good look because we're going to close the doors again in a second. We're letting all sorts of heat out right now. Oh, yeah. So let's back up the truck a little to your like, decision making process because first you were going to get like a de humidifier and a heat source and you wanted to make my own my own kill. So what changed your mind on doing the whole diy approach? The more I researched it, there's better systems out there that are already pre programmed and better control of the drying of the material. You have to fluctuate your humidity and heat to balance it out. So there's premade kits and so I went that route. So, and it's important to understand like it's not as simple as just throwing wood in an oven and hoping for the best. It's and different species have different drying schedules. There, there's a lot of science involved with this whole thing. So in the end, what it, what it is the unit you got, I got the wood miser, wood 150 which is a dedicated kiln control system. So that is reading the room like I do with my comedy sometimes. Um it's reading the room and it's controlling right. Stop me where I'm going wrong. It's reading the humidity and the heat that's in there, right? And cycling on and off, depending on the needs of the K and you can set it for the material thickness that's in there and the wood species. But yes, it will adjust the temperature from 95 to 115 118 degrees. And it also has what they call wet bulb. So it's measuring the moisture in the room, uh and the water temperature in the room and the air temperature in the room and adjusting those two accordingly. So the nice thing with that, that's, it's a computer readout on the unit and its brain is doing what you would have had to figure out if, if you were doing a heat source and a dehumidifier, you would have had to figure out all that stuff on your own spec by specie thickness by thickness. Um Now, let's talk about this build. So this was initially this was just the end of a room and then you walled this off, correct? And the, and the building was insulated, but you added spray foam because well, vapor barrier. So you need an airtight chamber to dry your material in. So I spray foam, the inside of the wall ceiling floor, the whole thing is sealed and then gasket all the doors so that it is a as airtight as you can get it. So that's got to be a Ziploc bag that's got to be an envelope to work the most efficiently. And then when it was open, people probably saw you've got fans in there and what are those doing? They're circulating the air, pushing the air through the lumber stack. The stacks are stickered with sticks between them so that the air can flow through each board and the fans circulate the air. And then so it's uniform, right? And then the de humidifier unit on the controller measures the moisture and draws the was a regular Demi fire at that point to take the water outside. And I just got a five gallon bucket outside of the kiln that it drains into. So every day I go out and empty five gallons of water or there about? And what about power supply for this unit? Did you have to run? I mean, it certainly not. Three P. Right. Correct. No, it's just one, uh, it's all 1, 10, one, like just on a 20 amp circuit. So that part was easy peasy. And then what any other mechanics that you had to do just to make this a kiln? Not a room. This kiln is a little bigger than the, than the woods kiln system I purchased. So I added uh electric relay that turns the, the lights of the lights in there. It turns those on. Those are my heat source to help a lot of heat. So when the kiln controller calls for heat because it's cooling off or whatever, it turns the heat around in the unit and then it also automatically turns on those lights. Those lights are just, they're not there for light, they're there for heat and they bring the heat up faster. So it controls itself and balances faster and only because like the cubic footage of this room slightly exceeds the cubic footage capacity of that drying unit. Correct? So you're augmenting the heat a little bit. Um If you did this again tomorrow. So one would you do it again? The two anything different? Like, I don't know, knowing what you know, now, um, maybe a little more vapor berry. I just, I just wanna make sure I have plenty of vapor berry. That's the big thing is getting in an airtight, like I say, a Ziploc bag in there. And what's nice with the spray foam as a, as a conscious choice. You made that decision because you spray it and it's going into all the nooks and crannies because first you talked about foam foam board and tape. Right? And that's a very common system as well as using three quarter inch foam board and Tyvek tape on all seams to make it an airtight chamber. Again. I think the spray foam, I felt it did a better job cost wise. It the same. So intuitively, it seems like it's going to close corners better than the foam will and it has to be a closed cell phone. Oh, that's good to know. Or it'll pick up the moisture, right? And then you'll get mold and gross disgusting things in your, um, so your normal sequence of events now is gonna be air drying for. How long do you want to air? And then, and what, uh, what moisture content will that bring it in here at 20 ish? And then you expect this to drive it down to. Um, so if this goes in dripping wet, is, is it capable of doing that if you take it right off the mill? Yeah, if you take it off the mill, but the humidity in there is incredible and takes a lot more time to get that to come down and drying, drying in a balance. Whereas the stack like that is gonna dry from the ends in. So the center that might be at 30% and the part of the fans to help prevent the outside edge will be at 12%. So we have to, if you air dry it and you're coming in at 20 instead of 50% moisture, it's a lot more balanced and a faster dry got it. So you just got to get ahead of the curve on your lumber pile right now. Your air dry pile outside. Cool. Um, any other advice? Like, I don't know for folks at, what about your utility bill? Have you seen? Like, is it spike in the power use in this building or not? I mean, is it a hair dryer in there? Like, I think it's about $5 a day. So it's not cheap. But, you know, if you're, if you're drying a unit in 30 to 45 days at tops, it's not too bad. Yeah. And you can, I can get, you got a lot of board feet. I got several, I can get several 1000 ft in there. Yeah. So cool. All right. Well, that's Charlie's overview and, uh killing experience. So, if I will have to come back in six months and do this again because I know you're gonna know new stuff by then and, uh, we'll see how it goes right.