Since around 2010 i have been hooked on charcoaled power for topping up my battery’s and powering tools that cut the wood and other household appliances while allowing my Tiny 1 kw solar system to feed the grid for the grand sum of 66 cents a kilowatt at that time i was paying around 25 cents so it made sense to use the charcoal powered electricity 100% for my household needs during the day .and that helped keep my monthly power bills down to around $50 thats including around $1 a day supply charge .
Fast forward to around 2022 and my health was getting pretty shitty i am having problems breathing and so can only do short stints of jobs around my property and on top of that i have to try collect as much charcoal from out of the fire and then crush it to be able to run the gasifier , its hard work living on the side of a mountain with a garden slope of anywhere between 30 or 40 degs luckily i do have a motorized wheel barrow so all heavy lifting is done with that .
Then half way through 2022 while talking to my brother inlaw back in the UK about how hard its getting for me to do small jobs said why dont i just get one of the many diesel engines i have running on used veggi oil , well after messing about for a few months of trying to get these generators to run as easy as turning a key as on Diesel i found the perfect shut down and starting procedure and now it starts with in a few revolutions and makes power within 20 seconds , a little easier than charcoal i had to admit , then in Nov 2024 i was told the Max feed in tariff for our state (Vic) will end and power company’s will now only pay us around 3 cents per KW .
But i still loved the fact i can make power from nothing and i created all that power for free , well sorta free if you dont take into account the regular emptying the charcoal from the fire every time you fill it up with fresh wood and then letting it cool down and then chunking it ect ect .
Then 2 weeks ago i came across a friends post who was showing off his Lifepo4 power packs that run his house and showing on his large screen tv how he was importing power from the grid for 3 hours every day for free ! this is someone i know not just some random stranger on youtube telling me i can get free power ,in fact he never even tried telling us about the company it was me that did the detective work to find and read up about this company , well needless to say that within 3 days i had signed up and changed my electricity supplier this new company is charging me 3 cents a kw peak time and off peak cheaper that what i was on and also 30 cents a day cheaper supply charge and its a win win because the past week and a half every single day i am charging up 3 lots of lithium battery banks to 100% full and running dishwasher air fryer microwave, hell anything that is power hungry i am switching it on between the hours of 11 and 2 and so far its not showing up on my bill all that power i am using everyday is just that FREE , and the next best thing is they only bloody well pay me $120 for each recommendation of my relatives and friends to join up and they will also get $120 now all i have to do is find another half dozen friends and i wont even have to pay for the rest of the hours each and everyday ! what a shame i am such a grumpy old man with now friends other wise i would be quids in .
Dave
Yeah, that lack of “wind” (breathing capacity) caught up with me too in the last decade I figure.
Neighbor called and said our recent rare-rare East Wind had put down a tree accross the fence line scraping up her car driving in and out. PLEASE do something about it. SOON.
Ha! Late afternoon and I’d already done my old-man max four hours a day removing the old garden fence and trundling moving two wheel barrels of rocks. Saved then by light raining beginning.
Anyhow. Lace-up boots back on. The MS260 with the long reach up, 28" bar.
Sigh. Was five shade killed tall skinny trees down across the fence line.
No problem. Until from the second one on; and then out of breath already!? Lots of stops. Rest. Settle down to get my heart rate and gasping rates back down and best of my old family Tisdale-Stevens Brit genes: Carry-On.
And Dave: looking forward; I, 8 foot sectioned them up and tipped back upslope inside to leave an against the fence line pathway for my tracked power “wheelbarrow” toter you inspired me to get. Later lengths loaded, it can power drag my ass back up that slope.
You free-power referral “windfalls” are OK; but only one-offs. More important are on-going sustainable $'s numbers.
Ain’t the English language interesting?
“Windfall” a one-off boon.
“Pickup truck” a go-fer to town, the feed store, the hardware store to fetch-back home. Meant to be a light duty; easy-in; and out-and-about, hauler. Not particularly an H.D. tow vehicle.
“Station Wagon” a purpose made on a small heavy duty chassis; weather enclosed, people mover to fetch-to, or fetch-back people and their luggage from the railroad train station. Later evolved into a whole family everyday hauler.
Yep Joep: vans are so much better for this. The vans we’ve had could accommodate up to 7 people. Haul inside 4 foot be 8 foot sheets of buildings materials. I’ve hauled inside, 12 feet lengths of trim stocks and metals lengths. And they can light duty tow too.
The open bed pickup trucks are much better for hauling tall must be kept up right refrigerators and freezers. Much better for dirty messy hauls like leaking bags of aggregates; shedding bales of sawdust/bedding; and especially bales of hay feeds and bedding straws.
Hours and hours to clean after, when done in a passenger capable Van.
Beg, barrow, or rent a true open back bed pickup truck after that for Tall, and messy hauling.
I don’t find you grumpy. and if you are avoiding 30c/kwh, by buying at 3c and storing it. Then you are saving money that can be used to either buy beer or expand your system while you can. The question is can you sell it back at 30c?
The 120 dollar finder fee, but even if you had a ton of friends, getting them to sign up is a whole other story anyway as people are naturally afraid of change. You probably aren’t out that much.
I have been rethinking the solar game, I am now storing the solar into lithium batteries so that I can run my AC at night… I love that…
But I have more energy from my solar panels than I can use on sunny days…
This has caused me to buy this →
My line of thinking goes like this… Lithium batteries die/ deteriate after so many cycles…
But what if I started creating fuel → alcohol from the sugar cane I am growing from the extra solar I have. This would create for me a fuel source that would store far far longer than lithium batteries and I could use to cook / heat my home in cold months… Yes firewood does the same, but I am just giving myself another option of storing energy… I am also looking at making essential oil.
I sure like the way you think in saving yourself effort…
In looking at how to make wood alcohol I was noticing that the end product was charcoal… I am now looking for a vessel that I could extract the wood alcohol from the wood while making charcoal…
It is really hard to get the water out with simple single distillation. because water and ethanol are slightly miscible. around 75-80% is probably what you will get on a good day with the stars aligned. You actually probably want a reflux condenser or a packed column to maintain the temperature gradient in the column to get a high enough purity for ethanol for mixing. I believe they use 95% to mix with gasoline. 95% is the maximum you can get without much fancier techniques. That being said, if you do simple single distillation, and then refine it with a reflux or packed column condenser. Cornmeal will selectively absorb water vapor in a column to get it more pure as well.
As far as the condensate from charcoal, look for ‘wood vinegar’. It is basically a pot still like your picture. You don’t get much, 1-5% by weight from oven dry wood. one oven-dry ton (2,000 lbs) of wood can produce roughly 100 gallons of methanol (per google ai summary).
Yield of methanol from dry distillation of wood is not so much promising. Several resources report numbers around 20 kg of methanol from ton of ODW. With loses during whole process, you may get some 100 kwh of usable energy for cooking. And I am sure you would not like to handle such a poison in you kitchen
Ethanol is better for handling and has higher calororific value than methanol. But still for 100 kwh you would need some 20l of pure ethanol which means to distill some 200l of common wash with 12% ABV. With your pot, it means at least three runs to get good flamable ethanol of at least 80% ABV.
The idea you have is good, if you have really a lot of sun energy to waste. If not, try to think it once more.
The cornmeal might be cheaper and more obtainable. It works like putting the silocon dioxide moisture pellet absorbers.
There are also some plastic sieves that do something similar in a process called pervaporation, which I didn’t read the whole thing recently, but it might work under vacuum which would be a great use for excess solar to run a vacuum pump which is otherwise expensive to run.
I was looking at vacuum distilling of alcohol… because it requires a lower temp to boil the water I would believe it would take less energy to run… Thanks for the input… I will store these ideas for later exploration.
The vacuum distillation takes a lot of energy. For commercial operations that energy cost increases the product cost too much. and similar the corn meal or zeolite you have to dry it out to reuse it which also takes energy. However the corn meal and zeolite would be using heat energy which if you are making charcoal, you would have plenty of excess.
The membrane separation has a charge on one side of it and a super tiny hole in it just big enough to let the water molecule through. so the charge breaks the weak bond between the ethanol and water. Then if they do use a vacuum it most likely just pulls the water through the hole. You might be able to distill with a pot still then use a reflux to get it to 95%, then use the zeolite, cornmeal or a membrane to get it higher, but I think 95% is what they use to mix with gasoline because it still start pulling water out of the air anyway.
and if you are avoiding 30c/kwh, by buying at 3c and storing it. Then you are saving money that can be used to either buy beer or expand your system while you can. The question is can you sell it back at 30c? 