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How
Does It Work? Obviously the corn starts out on a field. If you're from any rural state, you've almost certainly seen a field of corn. During the harvesting process the kernels are removed from the cobs and are sent to a mill. The mill may clean or dry the corn. For a corn stove, the moisture content must be 11-14%. Mark Hershey Farms happened to have some nice 13% corn in stock, so we ordered a ton. Actually 2.5 tons.
Note our homebrew corn bin. The tanks were 500 gallon rejects from the local ChemTainer factory, the 9" grain gates came from Tractor Supply. We played with PVC valves briefly. If you build your own bins, skip that step and go right for the grain gate. Each 500 gallon tank holds about 1.5 tons of dry shelled corn. Once filled, we need to remove about 40-70 lbs of corn per day.
We then load the corn into the hopper on the stove...
Our stove will hold about 70 lbs of corn; enough for about a day and a half although we typically refill it when cleaning it in the morning and evening.
While we could burn entirely corn, the manufacturer recommends burning a handful of wood pellets and oyster shells along with the corn to help prevent the unburned starch from bonding together to form clinkers (a rock-like buildup). We'll go through 100-200 lbs of wood pellets in a season and 10-20lbs of oyster shells. After filling, the internal auger takes over, delivering a few kernels to the fire pot every 10-20 seconds.
A unique feature of the Countryside corn stove is the fuel stirrer in the fire pot (not easily visible in this picture). The fuel stirrer prevents clinker buildup (most other corn stoves do not have this feature and the clinker must be removed during the daily cleaning). Countryside provides a much better description of how it works but that's pretty much the gist!
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