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Need input on building a pneumatic mulch blower
EW, we looked at doing sort of the same thing, but as a franchise that wholesales mulches of various kinds, delivered and installed, mostly to other landscapers.
They had very carefully looked at the various means for delivering and installing the product and had settled on a large bulk truck with a PTO-powered blower system.
It was not cheap.
I know from experience, 250 yards of mulch is a lot to move. The trucks we were looking at held 60 yards and took quite a while to unload even with monstrous blowers, the discharge hose is only 4" in diameter, bigger than that you can't push it far enough. I'm not even sure how well it would push it 300' in the first place. The blower was getting about 200hp off the transmission too.
I would think for what you want, vacuuming it from a pile, and blowing it, you are going to need a lot more than 8hp, several hundred at the minimum.
Personally, I would be talking to someone who has a sawdust delivery truck.
Best of luck.
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Need input on building a pneumatic mulch blower
EW, any places that has horses (and a lot of cattle operations like dairy farms), race track, pleasure riding, competition, etc., will have a need for a great amount of sawdust as bedding material.
It is delivered by truck, usually a large straight truck, equipped with a high velocity PTO-powered sucker/blower unit.
It can load light stuff like sawdust at the rate of several yards a minute depending on the distance and height involved. The sawdust bins are usually elevated so it can be gravity loaded into wheelbarrows or carts below.
In theory you could build a trailer mounted stand-alone unit but it wouldn't be a cheap experiment. Mulch is heavy dense stuff to move around by air.
In your first post you said most sites would be inaccessible by even a wheelbarrow, so what good would a conveyor be? It would be so heavy you would need a loader to move into place. If you could get a loader in there in the first place why would you need a conveyor?
I believe the units Frank is talking about are basically big septic pumpers, like the ones so popular now for excavating by vacuum, Badger is a big franchise for that stuff now.
Best of luck.
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Need input on building a pneumatic mulch blower
Do you mean fire it 200' out of a hose, or blow it through a 200' long hose?
There's a big difference between the two.
As mentioned above, either way it's going to take a lot of horsepower, likely more than the entire output of the dump truck's engine.
Best of luck.
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Need input on building a pneumatic mulch blower
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Blow it through 200' of hose.
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If you do the math, a 4" hose (about the smallest you could push material that size through) 200' long has a volume of (4" x 4" X 3.1415926) 50.26" x 2,400"(200' x 12" or 120,624 cubic inches. A cubic yard (36"x36"x36" is 46,656 cubic inches, so the hose could hold (120,624 / 46,656) 2.58 cubic yards. When using an air propulsion system you only want about a 35% material 65% air blend to prevent blockages.
So, 35% of 2.58 cubic yards means the hose would be carrying just under a cubic yard (0.903) of mulch at any one time. Typical mulch weighs about 750 pound / cubic yard. So the system would have to be able to keep about (0.903 x 750) 677.25 pounds of mulch in motion.
That would require some serious horsepower, and a serious blower hooked to it.
All in all, you could probably hire a large team of people with wheelbarrows and pay them well for quite some time before you got anywhere near the cost of such a blower system.
The truck we were looking at buying in the above posts was a 10 year old unit, but still in very good shape, they were asking (and got) $160,000 for it.
You can buy used trailer mounted units for under $20k. but they're very slow.
Best of luck.
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Need input on building a pneumatic mulch blower
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Whoa...750 lbs is the weight of 1 yard of mulch!?!That sounds a little high to me.
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It also depends on the material the mulch is made from. Cedar versus pine, etc., Cedar is often down around 550 pounds a yard.
Some of the newer stuff, made from recycled car tires is a bunch heavier than the natural sourced stuff.
Good to see you're still around Steve.
Best of luck.
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