Straw heating

I have the option to buy a heater that can burn straw and wood. Anyone else heat with straw? Also looking at seeing if I could modify it to be a gasifier furnace. Has anyone made a horizontal gasifier? Or even a TLUD that is horizontal? This is an outdoor furnace and is a forced air furnace. I also plan to burn any cardboard I have. So basically a multi biomass fuel heater.

Very cool!

It would be interesting to hear how much heat and/or burn time you get from straw in relation to regular wood.

Out here in western Canada there are boilers for big round bales. My cousin who built this heater built it to burn small square bales of flax. I think it holds 2 bales and took all night to burn. By morning his natural gas furnace would kick in. Since I don’t have a baler probably use bales when I can and wood when I can.

Ahh, I was envisioning a smaller or indoor one where you would put in small flakes - that makes a huge difference!

You could probably pick up a lot of free bales after Halloween when city folks are done with their "decorative" bales each season.

Very common here, small old ones will take 2 small bales and that will burn a day or just over, the bigger ones come in all sizes, the parents in law have one that takes 300kg square bales that burns for over a week before it needs refilling/emptying. They sometimes throw scrap wood in, but since it's not packed it'll only burn for a couple of days on that.

The only issue with these big ones is if the tractor decides to break.. then you have no heating.