Absolutely right, Soundguy. I don't want to spend any money. I'm willing to make some investment if I can get to a point where I'll spend the same amount of time managing sawdust that I am now spending managing pellets. I was hoping that a powerful shop vac could help somehow. I am looking for ideas on storage and movement so that I can see what it takes in time and money to implement whatever level of solution we come up with.
Right now we have bags of pellets upstairs, delivered and stacked by the deliverer, that I'll throw down the trap door into a smaller pile next to the hay bales (same thing - large hay storage above, smaller pile below. The smaller pile has to be replenished about twice a week). Throwing down hay and pellets twice a week takes about 30 minutes total a week. For daily stall work, I just walk over to the pellet bag pile, grab a bag and take it back to the stall, or about 1 minute.
Keeping in mind that I don't want to build another building, or keep the sawdust outside, I now have to use a wheel barrow to move the sawdust from the dumpsite to the storage site. If we get, say a 10 cy truck load, and I've got a 6 cf wheel barrow, thats a lot of trips. Its kind of early to do the math, but where I'm spending 0 minutes now on storing the pellet bedding, the sawdust will see me pushing 50 wheelbarrow loads at about 45 to 60 seconds each, or pushing close to an hour, not to mention somehow lifting it up into a hopper, which if done manually could another another 15 seconds, so thats definately an hour and some effort. I guess moving the sawdust to each stall is not so bad, time-wise - at least I won't have to throw down bags of pellets twice a week. We will have to worry about windgusts through the barn as we move sawdust around.
I know that adding another hour to my weekend is not such a big deal, considering that we should cut our bedding costs in half, but I am protective of my 'free' time (which I'd rather devote to projects around the barn).
I guess that now that I've put done some figures and estimates for the time it will take to use sawdust, I can weigh the options better. Maybe an hour is not so bad.. especially if I can get paid what we saved!
