Commercial Land Clearing and Forestry Equipment vs Air Curtain Burner Machines: Which Are Better?

Updated on November 27, 2020. Originally posted on March 18, 2019. 

When you have a piece of land that needs to be cleared of trees and brush, the first thing you will probably think about is what land-clearing equipment you will need to buy or rent.

For example, stumps may need a stump puller and a grinder. Dead trees may need a chainsaw. Ground cover may need a mower deck with cutter heads. And deadfall may need a forest bush hog, forest mower or brush mulcher.

In addition, almost all of this equipment will need accessories and support gear, like a mulching head attachment or a hydraulic thumb attachment. And when parts break or age, they will need to be fixed, replaced or sharpened. While such traditional equipment may get the job done (or, more often, partially done), it requires constant preventative maintenance and upkeep.

Fortunately, you have other options. A highly effective alternative to traditional land-clearing machinery is an air curtain burner, such as those from Air Burners®. These burners efficiently dispose of all kinds of wood waste quickly, thoroughly and without undue pollution.

Read on to learn about the pros and cons of using traditional land-clearing equipment and how using an air curtain burner may be more effective.

Pros and Cons of Traditional Land-Clearing Equipment

Mulchers

When it comes to clearing land, mulchers are usually one of the first options people think of. For starters, they are easy to use: Attach a mulching head to a heavy tractor and drive the tractor towards the trees or brush that needs to be cleared. As the mulching head makes contact with the offending trees and brush, its teeth chew them up into mulch.

While this sounds like an attractive option, mulching can pose a safety hazard. For example, as the mulching attachment does its work, it may spit out rocks that can cause injury to nearby people or damage to nearby structures. The grinding of the mulching head’s teeth against rocks can also spark a fire. And that leads us to the biggest concern for this type of work, wildfires.  Grinding mulch and dropping it on the ground has proven to be very dangerous as fuel to start or support wildfires.

Stump grinders

As their name suggests, stump grinders are specialized tree-clearing equipment for grinding down tree stumps. You can get them together with a carrier or as a separate carrier attachment. Either way, the stump grinder is moved horizontally across the stump to grind it into smaller pieces—even below the soil line.

Stump grinders allow for the thorough grinding of all sizes of stumps (and their associated roots). But before a grinder can tackle a stump, the unwanted tree above it first needs to be felled and sectioned. If there are a lot of stumps on the land that require the same treatment, the process of grinding them up with a stump grinder may prove especially labor-intensive and you have significant capital invested in a machine that only grinds stumps.

Grinders and chippers

Another option for clearing land is to use a wood grinder or chipper. The mechanics are simple. First, trees and vegetation on the land are cut down. They are then fed into a wood grinder or chipper, which grinds them up. The resulting wood chips or mulch are then hauled to a landfill for disposal (or sold, if possible).

A benefit of grinding up wood waste is that the waste is reduced to smaller pieces. The waste’s smaller size then makes it easier to haul and dispose. Contrast this to hauling large whole logs, where the available holding space for the waste may be used less efficiently.

But, grinders and chippers present a significant challenge: Grinding or chipping wood waste is not a waste elimination solution: it’s only an interim step to make the hauling (and disposal) of such waste easier. The process is also very fuel intensive. Chipping or grinding wood uses 40-100 gallons of diesel per hour. 

There’s also only so much cost savings to be gained from optimizing the hauling process, when compared to a land-clearing solution, like an air curtain burner, that doesn’t require hauling at all. Air Curtain Burners are a waste elimination solution. 

Air Curtain Burner Machines: A Simple Setup for Efficient Wood Waste Disposal

Compared to traditional land-clearing equipment, a portable air curtain burner offers a far simpler setup.

You can set up the air curtain burner on-site and start immediately burning wood waste in all forms, including root balls, vegetative waste and whole trees. As long as the waste can fit within the air curtain burner unit (or within an earthen pit if you’re using a pit burner), it can be burned.

The need for handling, sorting and processing the wood waste—such as grinding and hauling the waste off-site to a landfill—is eliminated, saving you money. With the air curtain burner’s air curtain technology, which traps and reburns smoke particles, air pollution is also drastically reduced. And most importantly for your business, jobs are completed much more quickly, allowing you to move on to the next one that much sooner.

In terms of diesel consumption, air curtain burners use only about two gallons per hour. This is considerably less diesel than the amount you would need to keep grinders and heavy trucks running.

The end byproduct from disposing of wood waste using an air curtain burner is a small amount of ash and biochar. These can be turned back into the soil, sold, or transported off-site for disposal. However, this is a small amount of handling with significant cost savings overall, compared to traditional land-clearing machines which require much more labor and diesel consumption.

However, the most important benefit of air curtain burners is simple: They ensure unwanted wood and vegetative waste are 100% eliminated.

Types of Air Curtain Burner Machines

FireBox

This portable and efficient model is fitted with skids for easy dragging and positioning on-site. The proprietary thermal ceramic panels in the FireBox’s burn chamber keep the burn contained and hot.  The FireBoxes are easily transported using the same trailers as are used for bulldozers and other machines onsite. Air curtain technology helps control the pollution from combustion and accelerates the burn. A clean burn is a fast burn, and that means more money in your pocket. The waste is totally eliminated, and the residual can be sold as biochar for a profit.

Roll-Off FireBox

Like the standard FireBox, the Roll-Off FireBox offers a highly efficient way of eliminating large quantities of wood waste. But as it has been designed to be transported by standard roll-off trucks (commonplace for moving dumpsters or “cans”), the Roll-Off FireBox is extremely mobile. This machine can be a good additional money-maker for companies that are in the dumpster-waste hauling business.

BurnBoss^®

The BurnBoss^® is a smaller self-contained FireBox mounted on a dual-axle trailer for ease of mobility. This machine can eliminate up to 10 to 20 cubic yards of forest slash per hour. It is favored not only by foresters and park maintenance crews, but also by farmers and growers in the agriculture industry. 

Trench Burner

This trailer-mounted air curtain burner works just like a FireBox, except that it does not include a burn chamber. The wood waste is burned in an earthen pit with vertical walls that are dug at the land clearing site to achieve the desired pollution control results and a fast, clean burn. Because the Trench Burner is mounted on a dual-axle trailer, it is highly mobile and can be pulled by a pickup truck to the site. However, the pit burner’s requirement for a separate pit means that it is good for use only on job sites that allow one to be safely dug. The Trench Burner cannot be used where the water table is high, or in an area riddled with rocks and stumps. Also, the trench tends to crumble after a while and may have to be periodically rebuilt. The Trench Burner machine is used mostly by smaller land clearing operators for the clearing of single home lots, for example. 

CharBoss

The CharBoss is Air Burner’s newest machine scheduled to be released in 2021. It’s a biomass burner that can replicate the natural process of creating biochar from burning wood waste, and will be previewed later this year.

Superior Land Clearing

When you’re looking for the best equipment for a land clearing job, air curtain burners like those from Air Burners® easily outperform traditional equipment in terms of efficiency, diesel cost, labor cost and, yes, environmental friendliness as well.

Air curtain burners do not release large amounts of carbon dioxide from diesel, as do all other competing land-clearing machinery with their large combustion engines. The significant pollution resulting from the trucks needed to get rid of partially processed land clearing material, such as mulch, is also avoided.

The output of ash and biochar from air curtain burners is a natural byproduct, simple to handle, and the end goal of a neatly cleared area for home, business or road development can quickly be attained.

To talk to a representative about the best Air Burners® machine for your land clearing job, call us at 772-220-7303 or contact us using this online form for further information.