Within the confines of your home, you may already know how to make your wood pellets for personal use. All you need is a simple press pellet machine, mixer, roller, and the wood itself. It may take a lot of time and patience from your end, but in the end, it’s always worth it because you get more than enough wood pellets easily.
It’s one thing to know how to make wood pellets for yourself, and it’s a different thing entirely when you want to start a business of making wood pellets. In this case, you’ll need more hands, machines, processes, more wood, and more of everything. This time around, you’ll be spending much more money to buy equipment, employ labor, purchase raw materials, and other miscellaneous expenses.
It’s a huge investment to start making wood pellets commercially as you’ll need to buy many machines. However, this investment is a long-term one, as long as you know how to maintain the devices and run your business optimally. Irrespective of the cost of running a wood pellet business, it’s always worth the investment. Pellets are increasingly growing in popularity, and as such, your small wood pellet business may grow into a large company in no time. Let’s take a look at what you need to start a wood pellet business.
Materials
There’s no way you’re going to make a wood pellet without having the raw materials. Because it’s wood pellets, you can get your raw materials from forest reserves, farms, and other agricultural-related products. If you have a friend who works as a furniture broker, they may have access to a factory you can source these raw materials from. No part of the wood is useless, including the sawdust -which makes the pelletization process easy.
Workspace
Making wood pellets requires you to use many machines and labor. To make the production process a convenient one, you need a lot of space. It should also have a good design for an easy production process. Essentially, your wood pellet workspace should be spacious enough to hold your raw materials. Likewise, it should have a good design that allows you to move from one stage of production to the next easily.
Machines
This is the most important and expensive part of starting a wood pellet business – the machinery. There’s a number of machines you’ll need to produce wood pellets commercially. These machines include;
- An industrial crusher to crush all wood materials into smaller sizes.
- A screw conveyor to move the raw materials after being crushed to the next production line.
- An industrial dryer to dry the wood off all moisture till it remains between 10 and 20%.
- The large scale pellet machine makes the dry wood into pellets. There are two types of pellet machines you can use on a flat scale – the flat die pellet machine and the ring die pellet machine. The flat die machine is a smaller option that costs less but produces less. The ring die machine has more, but it’s more extensive and more expensive. For a start, you’re free to start your wood pellet business with the flat die machine.
Conclusion
Wood pellet is a good business to start, although it will cost you a lot of money. However, the profits you can make in the long term are more than the initial investment you will need.
