The SPL team soon ruled out traditional CDKs without door closures, fearing they would lose efficiency. 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.
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.
“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.
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 TC kiln 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.