Did you know wood chips can catch on fire by themselves???

[Fern Field Farms]

Found a way to get free wood chips to put around our chicken coop and garden and learned that big piles will heat up and cause problems! Did anyone else know they could get hot in just a few days?? Crazy!! Has anyone else had this happen to them?

 

[Supervisor42]

Found a way to get free wood chips to put around our chicken coop and garden and learned that big piles will heat up and cause problems! Did anyone else know they could get hot in just a few days?? Crazy!! Has anyone else had this happen to them?

Wet haybales stacked in a barn can burn a barn down too.
You never think of water being a catalyst for a fire, but it can be.

 

[Peanut]

Yep, I've seen hay in a round baler ignite and catch fire... to much moisture in the hay. Take a close look at small sawmills. Most have a big pile of chips that have been smoldering for years. They opened a mill down the road a couple years ago. I smell the smoke every time I drive by it.

Hard to imagine water causing fire but it does. Water is hydrogen and oxygen, the fuel used to send rockets to space.

 

[Nadx]

i had heard that, and had driven by some places where stuff was smoking in both aforementioned, science is crazy on that

once drone by an ol boy who was hauling hay, , something happened along those lines and his entire trailer full of hay was on fire plus about 5 spots up the road where hay had fell off....it was crazy

 

[Caribou]

The sawdust, bark, and other wood that are byproducts from a sawmill is termed hog fuel, some of these hog fuel piles are enormous. They all eventually fall to spontaneous combustion. Some of these hog fuel fires have been known to burn for decades.

 

[angie_nrs]

Ask a local sawmill how much they pay for insurance. I know one personally. It's not pretty. The by-products including sawdust and woodchips are a huge fire hazzard. Add a spark from a processor or other piece of equipment and it's game over. Sawmills have to find specialty insurance companies to cover them and even then, they have lots of hoops to jump through to qualify.....even then, it's a high premium and it's b/c of the self-combustion and easy spark issue.

That's why many small sawmills don't have insurance.

 

[viking]

I've mentioned this before, when I was young my neighbor friends dad bought a pile of alder sawdust and covered it with chicken manure, I'm pretty sure it caught on fire because the sawdust turned all black. One of the jobs I had in the Seattle area was mowing lawns and we'd put all the clippings in the bed of the pickup as we mowed, at the end of the day we couldn't put our hand in the clippings because they go so hot from the natural enzymes doing their work in breaking down the grass.

 

[Peanut]

Ya'll remember me posting these? A roll of cotton inside a picker caught on fire just up the road. I knew the family. They got it dumped and saved the picker. That roll burned for 2 days, 1000lbs+. It wasn't wraped yet, it'd have burned for a week then. Wasn't very big either.

This is random example... not the same picker.

 

[Cabin Fever]

Grain in a commercial elevator can also self combust.

 

[Biggkidd]

Don't forget spontaneous combustion can come in many ways from many actions some subtle and some not so subtle. Like coal fires in rail cars where the action of the coal vibrating can cause it to ignite.

 

[angie_nrs]

Don't forget spontaneous combustion can come in many ways from many actions some subtle and some not so subtle. Like coal fires in rail cars where the action of the coal vibrating can cause it to ignite.

That reminds me......have you ever seen campers pulled over to the side of the road on fire? Hubby figured out why b/c it almost happened to us once. Although, I'm sure there could be other reasons.

We have a short weber grill which is perfect for just the two of us camping. It fits nicely in the storage area under the 5th wheel. Hubby usually just closes off the vents if there is charcoal left so that he can re-use the coal if there is some left over. One time he packed it up like that because it had been a couple of days since it was last used. The grill was cold b/c it had actually rained on it a bit the night before. So, we packed everything up and started coming home. We stopped for lunch and hubby could smell something hot when he walked by the camper. He opened the storage door and the grill had re-lit while we were on the road. During transport, the coals got shuffled around and one the air vents got knocked open slightly along with the lid. It was enough to get that sucker started again.

That lunch stop saved our camper that day. Needless to say, we never pack away the grill with any charcoal in it now.

 

[Hooch]

Per osha's regs, were supposed to let sawdust or chips build up beyond a certain depth. I cant recall what that is but it's like around 1/4 inch or something..
I'm kinda surprised the mill I work in hasn't had a worse fire than we just did.
The dust gets everywhere..in between walls and insulation .
It's a never ending battle n more difficult when you cant find a crew that will clean well n stay in the job.

 

[viking]

Don't forget spontaneous combustion can come in many ways from many actions some subtle and some not so subtle. Like coal fires in rail cars where the action of the coal vibrating can cause it to ignite.

Spontaneous combustion is one of the issues the Titanic had to deal with, when the coal bunkers were being filled, coal ignited going down the supply chutes, the burning coal caused rivets to loose their strength in the area where the iceberg broke through the hull plates. My dad told me that when homes used to heat with coal, occasionally people would have fires due to coal igniting from going down the delivery chutes.

 

[joel]

Muck a horse stall & dump it out in the sun & it will smoke a little, no flames, but same thing with interior heat build up.
You should wet down your chips & spread them out to slow the heat build up.

 

[INresponse]

Many years ago my father mentioned many times that rain on a large pile of coal could start a fire and it would be near impossible to put out the fire. I don't know the chemistry but it had something to do with the great pressure on the bottom of the pile and the water causing it to "condense" and create extreme heat which raised the internal temperature to the point of ignition. How do you fight fire? Pour water on it? If water started the fire how much water would be needed to "flood" the fire and stop the flames.

https://www.history.com/news/mine-fire-burning-more-50-years-ghost-town
https://blog.midwestind.com/spontaneous-combustion-coal-pile-maintenance/
I do know that composting wood chips can create heat and process can continue all year long as long as there is enough compost and wood chips to keep the process going. I was researching using a large wood chip compost pile to make heat to warm a pool and keep a walkway from freezing and for other purposes. It can work but my supply of free wood chips ended before I had a chance to make it happen.

 

[Caribou]

I do know that composting wood chips can create heat and process can continue all year long as long as there is enough compost and wood chips to keep the process going. I was researching using a large wood chip compost pile to make heat to warm a pool and keep a walkway from freezing and for other purposes. It can work but my supply of free wood chips ended before I had a chance to make it happen.

Thank your lucky stars that you didn't get enough chips. I fought a hog fuel fire for a few days. The dome of the pile collapsed. I knew better than to think I'd be able to put it out. My goal was to keep the sparks from igniting the woods next to it. A small town, Haines, was just over the hill and it was a dry time. These fires burn for decades.

 

[Hardcalibres]

Many years ago my father mentioned many times that rain on a large pile of coal could start a fire and it would be near impossible to put out the fire. I don't know the chemistry ..........

The ignition chemistry for spontaneous combustion of coal is actually about the presence of pyrite (fools gold).

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40789-015-0085-y
Pyrite is a reducing agent and reacts very exothermically with atmospheric oxygen. The heat produced eventually gets the coal to its autoignition temperature.

The reaction needs a certain amount of moisture to commence........and also a certain pH that also requires some water to convert the created Sulphonic (and eventually Sulphuric) acid from Sulphur Dioxide.

Pyrite is often a trace impurity in coal (because it is formed in the same anaerobic conditions). The presence of pyrite is one of the ways burning of coal can produce acid rain.

 

[FarmOR]

When I worked in food manufacturing, we had a couple of protections for dry ingredient spontaneous combustion. Each silo had a rupture disk on top. We'd have to change a few of those every year. The main pneumatic mixers had sophisticated slam gates on them as well. Once in awhile they got detonated when the sanitation crew got in too much hurry to follow procedures.

A couple of years ago, my dad lost a hay stack, A tractor, and part of a corrale, when his one year old hay stack spontaneously combusted. He had insurance that paid 20k of the estimated 60k of damages.