Valutec in the media
Continuous wins
At a time when low-cost mass production and solutions are the norm, it’s worth remembering why custom products from specialized companies will always have their place.
When sawmill plant manager Rod Pidskalny and the team at Spruce Products Limited (SPL) in Swan River, Man., went looking to replace two aging batch kilns, they had a few top-of-mind considerations.
First, Pidskalny will tell you, they wanted to address a bottleneck at the dryer. Their 50 mmbf SPF mill was crunched with the two batch kilns handling about 44 mmbf, and the rest sold as rough green lumber.
Second, SPL did not want the expense of replacing or adding to their existing boiler system. The sawmill and dryers are heated exclusively by three biomass boilers running off sawdust from the mill.
Third, the new drying system needed to function efficiently in their central Manitoba climate, where temperatures regularly dip below -35 C in the winters.
Pidskalny’s team were keen to explore continuous dry kiln (CDK) technology.
“We had been doing some research for a while. We knew how CDKs worked and we started doing some background to understand the different kinds,” Pidskalny says.
The SPL team soon ruled out traditional CDKs without door closures, fearing they would lose efficiency in the harsh winters. Shopping around brought them to the team at Valutec – a specialized company that has been a global leader in wood drying solutions for 50 years.
The plant manager and a small SPL team, including their dyer operators, toured Valutec’s continuous kilns at Pleasant River Lumber in Maine in 2020. The kiln checked every box on their wish-list: a single kiln solution that would rise to their climate challenges, work within their existing energy constraints, increase capacity and lumber quality, and decrease defects heading to the planer.
Six months of designing a solution with Valutec landed them with a stainless steel TC continuous kiln with eight drying zones that can handle 60 mmbf annually – well over their mill’s current demands. “We can now dry everything we can produce, plus we’ve got capacity built in with the kilns to dry a little more. We have some future expansion possible,” Pidskalny says.
Installation was a smooth as it gets. Valutec provided a supervisor from Sweden to oversee the project and SPL provided all the local contractors to make it happen. “Having local people, they’re more familiar with what is and isn’t available, and there are a lot of efficiencies with that,” Pidskalny says. Five months after steel went in, the kiln was up and running at the end of January 2024.
“It’s been performing very well,” Pidskalny says. “We were looking for a 2.5 per cent uplift in grade outturn, that was our goal, and we’ve actually met that. We think it’s a little higher than that.”
Beyond grade outturn, Pidskalny says they’ve noticed a significant decrease in drying defects, which has directly benefited their planer operations. They’ve seen fewer planer jams, cross-ups at the lug loader and generally smoother runs, particularly with 2x4s.
“2x4s are kind of a tough product to dry – you can get a lot of twists because you make them out of smaller logs generally. If you’ve got Jack pine for example, there are a lot of natural defects, a lot of crook, twists, sweep. We’ve noticed after drying through the Valutec kiln, it’s a lot straighter lumber,” Pidskalny says.
CDKs use the initial moisture of the incoming lumber to equalize the outgoing lumber, reducing defects. Valutec’s kilns also have load restraints that are pressure frames on the top of the bundle holding it straight as it goes through the drying process.
Pidskalny says the kiln operators are more hands-on initially to build to charges, but hands-off after the charge goes in. The software operating the CDK is well designed to ensure even temperatures and moisture content. The Valmatics 4.0 control system is simple to understand and provides the kiln operators with the right data where they need to see it in order to optimize the process.
Johan Oja, a wood science researcher at Luleå Technical University in Sweden where they operate a sawmill, explains that, when compared to batch kilns, continuous kilns like Valutec’s with different zones allow you to optimize for different products. Oja says CDKs are ideal for high-capacity dimension mills that run mainly 2x4s and 2x6s, since they run as fast as the slowest product to dry.
“You have a higher variation in the depth of a batch kiln – at least the kilns we have in Sweden. [By comparison], the TC kiln we have has eight zones so you have a lot of wood in the kiln but you run the air transverse. It’s only three packages deep. You will get a much smaller difference between the climate in the different packages. It’s a more even climate for the wood in the kiln,” he says.
Measuring moisture content is notoriously difficult, so drying based on those numbers comes with many challenges, Oja says. For many years, Scandinavia has focused on model-based drying rather than moisture content drying, and Valutec has been a driving force behind that, he says.
“The accuracy of the result of model based drying is high compared to the methods you have of measuring the moisture content,” Oja says.
Boiled down
Beyond the numbers, customer service is pivotal to Valutec’s success as a specialized kiln company.
Thomas Wamming, head of development at Valutec, says the company has a unique depth of experience in lumber drying that stems from its valued people. “The company is all about the people that work here. We are interested and dedicated in what we are doing, and we have build up our customers trust with a reliable drying machine and support,” he says.
Pidskalny would concur. “I’ve done a lot of projects with different vendors and working with Valutec was a really good experience,” he says. “Bottom line is that they know their stuff. This is one of the first times we did a start-up and we have had no problems. It just works.
“This is what they do and they do it well,” he says.