Special Feature
Hybrid harvesting HIGHLIGHTS
Story: Richard Stringfellow, Toroawhi/Worker Champion, Safetree
T
HE PAINTWORK ON NEW ZEALAND’S first diesel-electric harvester is still shiny after nearly a year of hard work from this machine that’s been in the country since December. (NZ Logger first took a look at this Logset 8H GTE diesel-electric hybrid wheeled harvester from Finland when we took it for a run on an Iron Test earlier this year.) Josh Hurring, from Mike Hurring Logging & Contracting in Balclutha says that good looks aren’t the only attractive feature of this new hybrid. “On the whole, we’ve found it’s a lot more economic to run. It’s a lot better for the environment and it has features that add to the safety of the operator,” Josh says. There’s a battery in the back and when the machine travels along, that charges the battery. When the machine is harvesting it uses electricity from the battery to power the hydraulics that run the feed rollers and
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saws. The diesel can kick in when needed, but it’s majority electric while harvesting. Josh says the company has discovered that being a hybrid makes the machine far more economical to run: “The hybrid feature saves a lot of fuel. The machine burns about 10 litres of diesel an hour, compared with the normal diesel machines that are running about 18 litres to 20 litres sometimes.” With diesel prices where they are today, that saving is very helpful, he adds. Another environmental benefit is that the machine is eight-wheel drive, compared to Hurring’s other wheeled-harvesters, which are six-wheeled. “Being eight-wheeled gives it more traction, so it’s more stable. It allows the machine to go further and cause less ground disturbance. It’s a lot less messy and a lot tidier,” says Josh. The company has put the machine into
a production thinning crew, paired up with another harvester and two forwarders. “These production thinning machines allow us to recover all the wood felled during thinning, compared with thinning to waste manually where the trees sit on the floor and rot away. “They go through the blocks, pick out the trees, fell them and then cut them into log grades. Then the forwarders come through and sort them and offload them at the skid where they’re sorted again and put onto the truck. So, essentially, they go through three lots of quality control before they get to the port or sawmill.” As a result, wood that would have been left to waste on the ground (and possibly cause environmental issues later on) brings in a financial return. “We had one customer, a farmer, who was quoted about $10,000-$20,000 to
