For a number of reasons I have decided to pursue wood chips as a medium for my dry was system. I discovered after spending a few hours on the phone that hard wood chips are harder to come by than I thought. Many custom furniture makers use MDF as well as solid wood with all the chips/dust going into the same bin - no good - and the few I found that only used solid wood had there chips promised to equestrians to use as bedding.

So, after reading about some testing done with commercial bedding (Aspen chips) I thought I would do some testing as well. The commercial chips are easy to come by and pretty cheap.

I took a liter of 5% prewashed, settled, demethed (heat and bubbles) BD and mixed it with enough chips to fill the container but completely submerged in the BD. I let it set for 45 min then filtered through a paper towel.

Initial soap test showed 820.9ppm of soap.

Soap after chips, 273.6ppm, shakem up test was still cloudy

I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome so I remixed the same BD sample back into the initial batch of chips and let set for another 45min.

Soap after second filtering, 139.8ppm with a clear shaken up test.

I usually get 85 – 95ppm with water washing so while this is a pretty good result it is a little less than I’d hope for. If I can get my hands on some oak or other hard wood chips I will repeat this experiment and see if it works any better. It’s also worth noting that the BD did not come out crystal clear after the last filtering, still a bit of haze.

I noted a post discussing a test with kiln dried pine chips, interesting. I thought the resins in pine wood are problematic?

Thoughts?

Dana,

Perhaps you need to give it more time and agitation. I have never used aspen, but it should be a good choice.