Conversations about wood, with Ben.

Ernie..." I saw some nice tanoak board floors when Wild Iris Forest Products was making it in Briceland. I did buy flooring for a place in Salmon Creek tho someone else laid the floor. It looks great today. The best looking one I have seen is out at the Wilson's in Briceland."


Ben
It's a shame that the women in our lives, that seem to appreciate beauty more than us guys, just don't seem to appreciate technology, so this post will be for the guys and the more technologically minded women.

Jan Iris (Pronounced Yon, and he was a guy, for those that didn’t know him) used a refrigerated lumber dryer, so I was familiar with his operation. I really believe that if Jan still with us we would have a viable Tan Oak industry. He was a remarkable person that didn’t know the word “fail”.

The flooring product that Jan produced, was not produced by the Coombs operation, because they deemed it to be an inferior product. It was deemed inferior because of the high rate of expansion and contraction that it had in comparison to Red Oak. Red Oak is the oak that standard oak flooring is made from.

What Coombs failed to consider, or was maybe reluctant to risk, was the fact that Tan Oak is drop dead beautiful, and people would tolerate cracked edges on their flooring for the beauty. The other factor nowadays, is that our houses are tighter, better insulated, and sealed, than the houses in the sixties and seventies, The humidity and temperature stays much the same, and the fluctuations are moderated, so the joints don’t crack as bad as they thought that they would.

Now, to get to the really fascinating part of Jan’s lumber dryer. It was a plain old, off the shelf, heat pump. Some of you are aware of my love for machinery, so you will have to forgive me while I ramble. The dryer was so simple that I’m amazed that it wasn’t thought of, or used more by small lumber operations years ago. Jan’s lumber dryer was a highly insulated room that was heated slowly from room temperature to 160-180 degrees. That is the temperature required to dry lumber and kill wood bugs. The air was heated by the heat pump, and the electric heat strips that are standard equipment in heat pumps.

I’ll try to describe it in simple terms, so the non-refrigerator types can follow. A normal heat pump works by refrigerating outside air, and returning the greatly chilled air back outside, while taking the heat gained in that process and running the inside air through a radiator, and blowing the much heated air back inside. When it is real cold outside the heat pump will kick-in regular resistance electric heat strips for supplemental heat.

With Jan’s lumber dryer, it ran the room air into the cooling coil first, then ran the cooled air through the heating coil to reheat the air, then through the electric heat strips to increase the temperature up to 180 degrees, then back into the room. By running the room air through the cooling coils first, it condensed the wood vapors and moisture from the wood, and drained the condensed water outside. Then the air was reheated by the heating coils back up to the original room temperature. Then heat was added to the room by the electric heat strips to raise the temperature to the dying and bug killing temperature. The temperature, humidity and the rate of heat and final temperature is all controlled by a computer that tells the machine what to do.
The only problem being, that a standard heat pump won’t work in those high temperature extremes, due the fact that the pressure gets too high at that high temperature and simply overloads the heat pump.

Okay, now here’s where the “Genius Factor” kicks in. Voila! Eureka! And Ain’t life wonderful stuff; By simply changing the refrigerant from the standard heat pump refrigerant, to another off the shelf refrigerant, the heat pump runs at much reduced pressures, and it is exactly like shifting your truck into a lower gear to climb a hill that it wouldn’t normally climb! Dang, I love machinery! The best part is, that it is all affordable stuff for the small lumber mill operator.