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Cedar Production Facilities

PowerWood Facilities are located in Agassiz, British Columbia on 12.2 acres with 110,000 square feet of dry space.

PowerWood facilities are located in Agassiz, British Columbia, on 12.2 acres in the beautiful Fraser Valley, on the traditional territory of the Cheam, Sts’ailes, Sq’éwlets and Seabird Island people.

Set up on 110,000 square feet of dry space, the PowerWood facilities in Agassiz can efficiently produce a combination of specialty and commodity products and handle the entire process from raw material to finished product.

With full re-manufacturing capabilities and all offices and operations on site, we have exceptional control over our inventory and production systems.

We keep our facilities clean and tidy, and everything is within arms reach, flexible and available for constant improvement and monitoring. All lumber is catalogued in the computer by its exact location, and inventory is done on a regular basis.

Working primarily with Western Red Cedar and Alaskan Yellow Cedar, PowerWood sources dimensional lumber from major sawmills and small, family-owned mills across B.C. Material comes from woodlots, recovery operations such as blow-down lumber or salvaged logs, open market custom-cutters, publicly traded large companies and elsewhere.

The majority of PowerWood products produced at the Agassiz facility are shipped to the U.S., but that makes up a far lower percentage of the company’s output than earlier in its history. PowerWood customers are now located across Canada, the UK, Europe, China, Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Our hands-on approach at PowerWood ensures that we get the most value out of our wood: we are able to smooth the costs from high recovery runs to low recovery runs, which allows us to keep prices consistent for our valued customers.

PowerWood offers a full range of remanufacturing equipment

Our Process

Our operations are built around flexibility and consistency.

PowerWood offers a wide range of products in Western Red Cedar and Alaskan Yellow Cedar and we have set our production yard up to support quick access of our inventory and fast changeovers from one run to the next. We have systems in place for splitting out pieces and for custom sorting, grading, surfacing and running all kinds of custom patterns.

We stock all of our inventory rough and produce products only once they have been ordered. This keeps our equipment free from lengthy runs and allows us to turn on a dime. We produce products slightly better than the grade rule every time, and our skilled Quality Control people ensure that we maintain this standard.

Once the raw material arrives on-site, quality control staff do an inspection and lumber goes through a rough breakout line on a green chain with double-end trim and sort. Yard equipment includes five Hyster forklifts, and a truck scale.

Lumber then gets sticker-stacked and placed in one of four kilns. Two are dehumidification dry kilns, built for PowerWood in 2016. They have 40 MBF capacity each. Two are newly purchased custom side-load kilns with 80 MBF capacity each, and we will likely add two more.

Dried lumber is stored in a large storage tent until the right order comes in. The manufacturing process doesn’t begin until a customer has called that action. Once an order is received, lumber heads to one of two Weinig moulders, a Pinheiro planer matcher, Baker double band resaw, a Cantek resaw and/or a chop saw, before being packaged and shipped out.

New equipment at PowerWood’s Agassiz facilities includes a fully automated Stetson-Ross 612 planer. This is key for our commodity-focused line of products, helping to keep prices competitive by eliminating processing steps. Our Weinig Hydromat 23 with infeed and outfeed also allows for faster production, while the smaller Weinig and the Pinheiro planer (the latter having a 16 x 34-inch capacity) allow for more custom orders.

The Agassiz facilities also allows us to efficiently supply sauna and hot-tub manufacturing companies, and high-end greenhouse manufacturers with tight specifications, standard cedar products from 4x4s for architectural or landscape use, tongue-and-groove-patterned 1×6 and much more, including additional specialty products. This includes supplying the cedar for the London 2012 Olympics velodrome and louvers for the exterior of a New York University building.

WE KNOW CEDAR!

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Cedar Production Facilities

Pinheiro Planer

Cantek Resaw

Weinig Hydromat 23

Weinig Unimat

Green Chain

Wireless Barcode Scanning

Truck Scale

Dehumidification Kiln

Our Process

WE KNOW CEDAR!