Almost to the day it’s now 3 years ago since I wrote a small story about my family’s and my arrival in Canada. We’ve experienced so much during that time that I could write a book about it. Fortunately, so far it has been a success story which wasn’t at all clear when our journey started. As you can imagine it was a pretty bold move to relocate from Germany to Canada with my wife and three young kids, especially since in terms of Valutec Continuous Kilns, it was uncharted territory.

Valutec continued to grow last year. During 2018, the group had a total turnover of Euro 43 million, a new record and an increase of 46% from last year's Euro 29.4 million, as the company said in the press release received by Lesprom Network.

The biggest change is about innovative technology. That’s the message from Paul Lingemann, sawmill manager at Egger Brilon, which put Germany’s first TC continuous kiln into operation in 2016 – a facility that is currently drying 100,000 cubic meters (42 MMBF) per year, but has the capacity to increase to more than 120,000 cubic meters (51 MMBF).

Among other things, you’ll get the chance to see a demonstration of our latest control system, Valmatics 4.0. With Valmatics 4.0, you can automate and optimize drying in all types of lumber kilns. High process quality is assured by simulators programmed with data from hundreds of thousands of measurements that enable the calculation of drying processes with unbeatable accuracy from beginning to end. All this to avoid costly running-in time of new programs.