Lumber moisture content and temperature as a basis for control of kiln conditions

Lumber drying is an enormous industry in this country. Last year about 50 BILLION board feet of lumber were produced. Of that about 25 BILLION were kiln dried. I know that most of you are already doing a good job drying lumber. But I imagine many of you would like to do better. You'd probably like to increase the quality and quantity of lumber coming out of your kilns. What I'm going to talk about is how you might be able to do just that. I'm going to describe how you can monitor drying and control your kilns better by having direct knowledge of the lumbers' moisture content (MC) and temperature. Why use lumber MC and temperature for kiln control? Because control of drying is ideally based on adjusting kiln conditions to the MC of part or all of the lumber. The methods I'll describe do just that. Some of what I say won't be news to all of you. Some of you already use kiln controllers that monitor and control kiln conditions based on lumbers' MC and temperature. I'm going talk about the principles on which those machines work, when they're effective, and when not.