Perhaps you know this but as I am told from people working with insulation, when superwool has been exposed to several hundred degrees C the small fibres in the dust, if you touch it, is almost like asbestos. I guess the fibres break off in microscopic parts.
But the properties are impressive, we tried once to put a one inch thick piece on a 500c superheated steampipe and then we measured the temperature after 20min on top of the insulation and it was just over 70c.
I can’t vouch for that the dust is dangerous as asbestos, I have not done the research but it was enough for me to take a step back and not use it where ever I please, ffp3 filter neccessary.
In my retort the insulation is protected with a sheetmetal cover so i dont know how it behaves. According to the manufacturer superwool is not harmful.
I can vouch for that it becomes very dusty so a breathing filter is recommended if you ever take it apart but to me it seems very unlikely that they are allowed to sell anything that would behave like asbestos.
I believe you are right and that insulationworker I talked to probably likes to exaggerate…
Hi - do you want to make money with charcoal? Look into making energy with biomass for electrical utilities. Germany allows for this and USA utilities do too. USA is $.05 per kilowatt plus $.04 IRS per kilowatt and $.13 for IRA 45v money. Germany pays E.13 per kilowatt The USA catch is that the pay is too low for for over the counter ethanol and biodiesel so you have to dig much lower for profitable fuels
Biomass has its hat handed to them by solar. .Pacific Gas and Electric has 60 solar plants and one biomass plant. All of the biomass plants are classic wood boiler- turbine ,- generator plants. These are always big and dont make much electricity.
I have the opinion that charcoal and distillates would work better. Water Gas Shift Reactors make Hydrogen for Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Acetic Acid makes Methane, a drop in fuel and Methanol is another drop in fuel. Syngas engines can charge batteries but they cant parallel. They can charge batteries however.
I recommend a Co-op model for obtaining charcoal. A central generator plant makes electricity and charcoal producers sell product to the plant.
Why not? You may need controls to sync them, but you need that with any AC generator (with the exception of inverter-generators, which can often do it themselves on a small scale). Induction generators will also sync themselves.
I do like to make money as the next guy but not at any cost. This idea could probably work however it also involves commitments, contracts and paperwork (also puts me under a little spotlight as this won’t go unnoticed and I don’t want that), and since it is not in place here it also needs to be built and funded.
Someone also needs to run and oversee that facility even at a small scale when it is built and with our electricity prices that can swing heavily over 24hrs (we have a change every 15min), even winter nights can sometimes have a minus price if it is windy and someone needs to keep a constant eye on that.
I do like to turn every stone and make an informed decision so thank you for the idea but this is too time consuming and complicated for me, if I sell charcoal direct to customers and I run out it just means that they can’t buy any at that moment until I have time to make another batch, no real commitment at all.
Thanks Tone, I forgot about that charcoal making thread. Now that these charcoal making thoughts has bubbled up to the surface this thread needs revisiting, when I read that thread I didn’t really think I would make any charcoal except perhaps a small tlud for own use.
Hi Johan, about insulation, i use rockwool for stove-pipes, 1100kr for a roll, 1×10meter.
I need to line it with some sheet metal to save it from the birds, picking it for nest material.
Only health issues i’ve noticed is some spontaneous nose bleed (flooding) when breathing the dust.
I think you don’t need a shut-off valve for the gasses if you pipe them from the chamber to the fireplace, it would act as lock itself.
If you only have holes in the bottom there could be draft enough to keep smouldering.
I have a youtube on my retort, a link here somewhere.
Oh yes, I saw your video when you linked to it a year ago or something like that, thanks for reminding me of that. I watched it again and a question came up.
Do you catch much tar in your tar trap? I guess what I am wondering is should I bother putting one on there. The gasses alone is enough for the process so the tars are not necessary to keep the fire going so removing tar is probably a good thing to keep the metal a little cooler.
Plus it’s nice to harvest as much stuff as possible.
As for protecting the insulation my plan is to use tp20 roofing metal or some old galvanized sinus roofing metal if I can wrestle them enough to roughly resemble the shape they once were
It would be good to finally get a use for them again.
hey JohanM.
This sounds pretty much exactly how selling off excessive home chicken eggs is done here Rural in my state.
We are supposed to register with both my states Department of Revenue AND the Department of Agriculture. Buying a sheet of adhesive tax stamps to affix to each carton of eggs sold.
This and the requirements for only using a new carton package and the safe handling/storing and cooking instructions. And labeled with you the suppliers name address and phone number drive up the cost to sell by ~$1.00 per carton. The tax collected used to fund the AG Inspector to come to your location to inspect your chickens; chicken raising facilities and eggs handling.
Nope. Nope. All mostly just put out a pop-up sign alongside the road and sell directly.
Much safer to sell person to person at any participating closed group meetings.
At least with charcoal or firewood direct selling no one could ever claim food poisoning against you.
Yes. It that does happen.
Another human nature factor here where I live firewood and probably the same with charcoal the buyer more willing to accept that you can buy the quantity you can see. Then gone, you must wait.
Eggs, milk now big producers comoditlized spoiled they now expect and demand a year around, always available supply. And they now expect a year around always the same-same quality.
Here to the general childlike-consumers the only home products safe to sell are hand made crafts and vegetables.
Steve unruh
ALL chicken owners in Sweden, does not matter if you use all eggs yourself, are obliged to be registered with the departement of agriculture here, this controlbehaviour was blamed on the bird flu a few years ago.
We are allowed to sell eggs directly to customer in clean packaging which means you can reuse them until they are dirty. Our customers are pretty good with taking them back to us when they get new eggs but we usually take the packaging out of rotation of cosmetic reasons as well, say 30% in total has to be replaced.
When we had more chickens we only sold 10-packs and 30-flats, strapped a printed note with rubber banding containing our info to it with a hand written best-before date, it is illegal to have the date more than 30 days after laying. Our extra cost for all of this was about $0.20 per pack / flat, upping the cost of eggs of course, customerpaid.
A greyzone if it was all needed but we wanted no flags plus a bit of commercial for us.
Only clean non-washed eggs can be sold without permits which are ridiculously expensive plus calls for heavy regulations, inspections and stamping every egg with a producer code.
I also agree on the non-understanding customers too, many expected us to be at their service 24/7 not realizing that we are not a supermarket and cannot squeeze eggs out of chickens when they wanted them, we have none of them left as customers now.
Johan, where can I find this video?
I’m very interested in your project and can’t wait to see how you manage to recover the heat lost through wood pyrolysis!
Thierry (Québec)
first all chickens must be registered, than all chicken must get a mrna genetic manipulated vaccine every year, than we eat eggs and chicken, and in this way also the no -vaxxer get their shot…
i wonder wether in slovenia paradise chicken must be also vaccinated…???
in germany i heard from friends it is obligatory
here again a typical topic title mislead again…
only argument for topic title is that coalers and gasifier users need eggs for calories…have seen a lot of chickens at mr waynes paradise property…
There is no mandatory vaccination of chickens here, the poultry stables vaccinate for cocciodosis but that is to keep it profitable. No chicken vaccinations at our farm.
No worries about the topic for my sake, it’s ok for me with a bit of drifting social interaction and something interesting usually comes out of it.
On this forum it seems we are all a bit alike anyway and interested in roughly the same things
Be of good faith my friends. The upside of the economic crash that will be affecting us all, is that there will be no money to pay inspectors. As far as dealing with the public in any way ever again I’d rather drink hemlock. Also our governments will be so busy dealing with rioting Migrants in urban areas who are no longer getting free subsidies that rural types will be largely ignored. To quote Bob Dylan from about 60 years ago. “A lot of people don’t have much food on their tables, but they’ve got a lot of forks and knives and they’ve got to cut something.”
Yes JohanM. your topic although asking for ways to make sellable wood charcoal is about Rural Living incomes supplementing.
Like BillS. and his wife do now with their maple and birch syrups. Takes live/living trees to make the saps. Takes harvested tree woods to cook it down reduced.
Each area; each country will have thier own set of regulatory hurdles.
I am with you JohanM. don’t jump the hurdles you can avoid by just walking around.
And sometimes just do not play a contrived hurdles race. With them always able to add more; raise the heights; declare the complient achievers.
My degreed, state licensed Nursing wife just told me this morning her by law mandatory annual required $1,000,000. personal liability insurance cost will jump from $660. annually to over $1,000. annually.
Of course she could join the nurses union and get “free” insurance coverage. The monthly union fee is over $100. a month. And then she will have another layer in the union able to dictate to her when and where she will work.
Many nurses here have early retired to avoid these dictates.
At 69 now I say Retire, Retire, Retire. Nope. She will not.
Says no husband/man will dictate to her! Stubborn, stubborn?? Some. But mostly independent and mostly self-sufficient. A good share of why I married her and we are still together. I wanted a Life-partner.
S.U.
I before starting the topic already looked into the regulations surrounding charcoalmaking in Sweden so I already know how that is affecting me.
Or more correctly how it is NOT affecting me
It sounds to me like we both married a woman carved out of the same block. Not regretting that, not even when both our stubbornness clashes, luckily we both see it and can laugh about it and decide on another route going around it
Yes you use a lot of apples. I think it was seven 55 gallon barrels last fall. The hard part is cutting all the rotten parts out. People were trying to give me more, but I was sick of it.
I like to use green apples because I like the sour flavor. You make juice, and then you evaporate out 85% of the water. You have to be careful not to heat it too much or it will taste like molasses. Here I live about a mile above sea level so it is easier to evaporate at lower temperature. I think a commercial operation would use vacuum. I don’t add any spices, but some people add things like anise and cinnamon. I want to make a solar evaporator so my gas bill doesn’t go up.
Rindert
Also our governments will be so busy dealing with rioting Migrants in urban areas who are no longer getting free subsidies that rural types will be largely ignored. To quote Bob Dylan from about 60 years ago. “A lot of people don’t have much food on their tables, but they’ve got a lot of forks and knives and they’ve got to cut something.”