It may have been a relatively easy harvest
this year, but grain kit manufacturers had plenty of ideas for boosting throughput at the recent UK Grain event in Peterborough.

GlassGuard SB Luminaire unbreakable lamps

Broken glass from a shattered bulb can be bad news when it’s a grainstore that’s underneath. But firms like GlassGuard stop that happening by using a coating on the bulbs that stops them shattering.

Its latest model is the SB Luminaires that consists of four energy-saving 55W tubes combined into a usefully-bright 220W unit that won’t shatter. The light can also be fitted with a movement sensor or daylight sensor to ensure that it’s only on when necessary. There’s also a slightly brighter 320W unit.

Cost of the unit is between £200 and £400, depending on the wattage and number of sensors.

Clean sweep for Master Driers mobile vacuum system

Dust and grain are unavoidable bedfellows, but Colchester-based dryer maker Master Driers is now offering a vacuum cleaning system on its mobile dryers.

Called the Mastervac, it can be used to suck up spilt grain on the store floor as well as dust on and around the dryer itself.

A 10m suction hose with a handle and rigid end-section does the work and then discharges into the machine’s dust collection system and collected away from the dryer. Cost is £575 when supplied with the dryer.

Master has also shifted from a twin-burner system to a three-nozzle one. This means that there’s no longer any need to change jets when moving from wheat to rape nor any danger of knocking the electrode.

BDC Grain Butler sweeps up

Built-in grain stirrers may be the ideal set-up in new stores, but for many people they are hard to fit or too expensive. BDC’s clever Grain Butler is one way to do the job more cheaply and gets an upgrade for next year.

The basic principle stays the same: an electric motor powers a vertical auger from 1.5m to 4m in length and with flight diameters of 50mm to 90mm. But a new rudder is now fitted to keep it straight and the angle of the auger has changed.

A wireless actuator is also available to allow it to be operated from 25-30m away. Cost is £3,750 with the manual rudder.

Lishman floors the competition

Putting in a new grainstore will never be a cheap process, but Lincolnshire company Martin Lishman reckons that its latest Floorvent system could give a simpler (and cheaper) alternative to the usual metal floor-vents.

It’s based on the firm’s Pile-Dry Pedestals, which use on-board 3hp fans to provide a flexible way to vent grain in storage bins up to a depth of 12m. The difference here is that the FloorVents are installed at the same time as the concrete floor is laid.

Each is 1m high, 300mm in diameter and placed 10m apart, with a 200mm diameter drainage pipe running below ground from the pedestal and venting outside the building. The company says that one of the first stores to use the system in the 2013 harvest was able to cool grain coming in a 28C down to 10C by the second week in October.

The vents can be unscrewed when the store needs to be emptied and a drain cover keeps grain out. Cost of each unit (including Floorvent and motor) is about £880.

Life’s a batch for Opico dryer

Opico’s £54,472 gas-fired GT 8000 automatic recirculating mobile batch dryer holds 21t, 3t more than the next biggest dryer in the GT range. It’s a multiple-motor, three-phase powered model that uses liquid propane gas to deliver heat for drying.

It’s fully automatic and uses Opico’s Grain Guard, a digital controller that allows the machine to be programmed for round-the-clock drying. The company was also showing the £59,866 Magna 2000 Auto, a 20t diesel-powered mobile recirculating batch dryer.

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