After several thousand hours of work in 4 months, a tired soil steam team is ready to start testing with Tor Fuglestein and Knaskerøtter in Kvelde, Norway. Knaskerøtter are famous in Norway for his small snack carrots and have had a large success with this. He has focus on sustainability and therefore a perfect partner for us to test our equipment with. Our goal is to test the machine close to our workshop in Norway for some weeks first and when things goes as planned, to bring the machine to Osterloh in Germany which is a potential first customer. The machine we have built is based on a Hitatchi excavator with a pretty old steam generator to provide us with the steam.
There was not enough money involved to buy new equipment, so we needed to use things that hopefully was good enough. After months of 16 hours days in and outside the workshop it was great to spend some beautiful May and June days out in Fuglestein ranch. When you are testing equipment that never has been built before there are always something that does not work as planned. We had some problems in the begging here also and spent the first days in order to correct this things but after a few days the half-automatic machine were steaming the fields in Kvelde. It was still slow, maybe to slow, but we had to figure out if it did the work we wante,d and to try to make it as effective and fast as possible. The question is if it was good enough?