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Alton, Ia | Do you now what is the bottleneck in your current system? One of the problems with in-bin dryers is overfilling them. (The people selling them will tell you no problem, that's a benefit of in-bin, but overdoing it will cause you problems.) The ideal situation is to have a layer of grain just deep enough to make sure the air is at 100% humidity when it leaves. This gives you the maximum bang for the buck of propane and electricity. I monitored ours closely this fall, and it seems to depend on several factors, such as plenum air temp, corn moisture, incoming relative humidity, and fan output, but in our system I'd be safe saying 18"deep with 120 F air, 18-20% MC, 1 28" fan in a 24' bin. When we go deeper, it's okay for a little while, until we build up high static pressure, (like 5' deep grain) and then the drying really sloooooooows down. The solution for us is to add a holding bin and more tightly control grain depth. We will be looking into a continuous flow dryer, but I guess my thoughts are with either system I would be benefited by a wet holding bin, so I'll add it this year and see how it goes next fall.
On the other hand, if your bottle neck is the augering capacity, then can you boost that? Our system has one sweep auger, we can add a second and double capacity. We would have to upsize our transfer auger over to the storage bin, but that's pretty cheap compared to a new system.
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Grain Dryers
