Stirling Elevator - Seed Cleaning Rooms

Seed Cleaning Rooms

Located on the east side of the elevator, the seed cleaner take up three floors. In one hour, 100 tonnes of wheat can be cleaned, at such a rate it takes the cleaner only 46 hours (4 days) to clean seed for 50 train cars. The seed cleaner doesn’t just separate all foreign matter from the grain; it also sorts the foreign matter into six different groupings. The seed cleaner has six refuse bins holding wild oats, salvage wheat, mixed grains, salvage canola, cracked kernels and a small dust bin. Of the 55 tonnes of chaff sold annually, 2/3 of it is chaff and 1/3 of it is small seeds and cracked kernels. The materials separated out of the grain have a certain amount of revenue and are sold to the animal feed industry

The seed cleaner is a complicated piece of equipment completing a multiplicity of tasks. The material that is removed during the seed cleaning process is placed in the bins below the seed cleaner or is sucked up to the top of the elevator through the silver tubes. The clean grain is elevated back to the top of the elevator by a small leg. At the top of the elevator it is placed onto a paddle drag that deposits it into bins 2, 4, 12, 13, 27 or bin 28. The dust separator deposits the dust it collects into the chaff holding bin on the north side of the elevator. All the silver tubes in the three photos below are part of this scavenging system; removing the dust and chaff from the different parts of the seed cleaner. Altogether, the seed cleaner stretches over a height of 70 feet.