by Bill Kleiman, Nachusa Grassland Project Director

At Nachusa we hand harvest with scissors and buckets several thousand pounds of seed from a few hundred species of plants.  When we bring in our seed it typically needs some time to dry so it does not mold.  We have found that blowing in a small amount of air into a barrel of damp seed will dry it out quickly.  We have 51 drier tubes to dry 51 barrels of seed at one time!

This system is on its second year and we like it so I made a document if you want to build your own.  We placed this document on NachusaGrasslands.org in the Stewardship tab at https://www.nachusagrasslands.org/seed-drier.html

The fan I ended up using on this system has the motor inside the squirrel cage fan which helps keep the motor cool

These are special order pvc adaptors that my plumber got. I cut them in half. One flared end held the tube up in the ductwork. The other half the flared end fit right in the other 1.25″ pvc tube and the skinny end happens to fit tight within the black central vacum pipe.