For years farmers have wondered what to do — when should they turn the fan on, when should they turn the fan off. Intuitively they knew that there were ambient conditions that were better for drying and there were times when there were terrible conditions for drying; like when it was raining. The experts for years have not really known either, so the recommendation for years has been to just leave the fan on continuously until you thought the grain was dry. For years this has been working, but it does beg the question: Is there a better way. I have now been looking at this for years now, and I have been analyzing the data that we have been collecting for eight years now, and the following is what I think should be done to control your fan. It goes from worst practice to what I think is the ultimate or optimum controller. I will have more details on each of these in subsequent blogs.
- The worst thing to do is nothing. Let that hot grain coming in off the field sit for a while and sweat. This is not good, your crop is starting the process of spoiling. Even if the grain is coming in dry, you still need to cool it down to stop the spoilage process. There are two factors in keeping your grain safe from spoilage, and that is cooling and drying. You can get the grain cool quickly, so get it cooled down quickly. Turn the fan on as soon as the floor or screen is covered — don’t wait.
- Turn the fan on only on hot days.
- Turn the fan on, only during the day.
- Turn the fan on continuously.
- Turn the fan on only at nights.
- Turn the fan on, on cold nights only.
- Turn the fan on if the grain temperature is greater than the outside air temp, and the relative humidity is less than 80%.
- Turn the fan on when the outside relative humidity is less than the threshold relative humidity given by the grain dryer calculator and turn it off when the outside RH > threshold RH from the grain drying calculator. I have done correlations with this strategy comparing it to when the drying actually occurs and it has R correlation values > .75.
- The ultimate would be to have the fan turned on when the conditions are right, and headed for good drying with the grain drying calculator, and then shutting the fan off when there is no drying. This is calculated by watching how much water is going into the bin, and how much is coming out. As long as there is a net amount of water coming out of the bin, we will keep the fan on, but as soon as we see more water going in than coming out. This requires temperature and RH sensors on both the air going in and being discharged. The temperature and relative humidity are plugged into the pyschrometric equation for saturated air and pro rated with the relative humidity to get the absolute humidity. We need a few more sensors with this, but it is the ultimate, the Cadilac, of controllers.