It is a YES. And the blank, blank, blank is hidden inside. You just can’t hide the hopper tubes that for sure.
Bob
1 Like
As far as I understand, membership is no problem, the book is the problem. Import rules, and they are different for every country. Understandable that it is to complicated. Mr Wayne gave me a refund, thanks but not really nessecary. And really curious about the book. Real book, not digital.
3 Likes
Chris ,Is there a problem sending the book to Australia ? i wouldn’t mind premium having sat in the dark for so long now it would be good to see what you wood gas guys are talking about .
let me know if i can join /buy it through paypal or whatever
Dave
3 Likes
Hello All,
Reread the home page Premium membership guidelines.
It does not say no international orders will be processed.
Only those to EU signatory countries due to a new VAT taxing law effective 2015.
This is much more that just money. The seller must register. Set up accounts in each individual EU country. Collect the VAT money at each sent to countries rates. Then send on the collected up moneys. Records. Auditing. So either all subsidize support this extra handling expensed - distasteful. Or a surcharge - equally distasteful.
So again not just about money. How do you pay back a single fellow trying to grow a farm, raise a family, and do a work out job? You simply cannot.
So as I read it Dave you are fine in Australia.
The Ukrainian members OK too.
Russia not and EU member. Our Russian members OK too.
And what a few of us here have offered is personally sponsoring Premium membership to one EU locked out.
We buy the membership and book. Membership a “gift” personally us to you in your name. Book sent to us individually here USofA. Re-sent as a personal used-book “gift” then from us to you.
I have already committed for this years “gift” “exchange”. Part of how I pay my Lifetime.
S.U.
5 Likes
Hi Bob,
For me this is a “no brainer” since i had the honnor to meet quite a few of you people and Wayne, Chris,…
I don’t share anything what i build with WK knowledge or products derived from what i learned from you or others on the premium side.
Might be that i have many other idea’s on how to do it or how i could “improve” someone else’s idea’s and try to claim credit for it, but i just can’t.
In premium i would share detailed knowledge, but still carefull selected, in general i give general info…
But as every premium member know’s, i haven’t build a WK yet, nothing shared on premium side…
I learned most by what others achieved that " it can be done" and i show to others that “it can be done”
Less on how did i do it… more on what did i learn from others…
IMO, if it is a WK build, it will always be a WK , be it with improvements, to stay on premium
If it is a “imbert” built, it will stay an imbert unless you ad some WK style improvements…
If your improvements are WK specific invented, not previous used in other designs, then i would keep them on the premium.
Overall, it is a great question, from a great person, asked to a great group of persons…
1 Like
Hi folks,
Excellent question and I’ll try to clear up any ambiguity, along with some backstory.
For some reason, woodgas folks have a tendency to guard jealously their million-dollar ideas. When I got into this around 2010, you couldn’t talk about certain systems openly, there was a lot of bad blood and secrets, accusations of copying, etc. I know of a half-dozen systems like this. (I’ve since learned most of the secrets and laughed.) The only one actually driving around however was Wayne Keith.
When I first went to visit Wayne in 2011, he let me crawl all over his truck, looking at his control systems, plumbing, condensate tanks, valves, etc. I watched him light it, and looked in the hopper. He showed me exactly how he drove the truck, and even let me drive it. At that time, he hadn’t released any info about the internals of the gasifier, which to be fair, are pretty well hidden from external view. I was actually planning to take the lessons learned and apply them to my own gasifier, which wasn’t nearly as well built or reliable… Then I got a call from Wayne in January 2012, and this site was born.
Wayne had the only system worth “stealing”, and he decided to let everyone in on it.
We’ve always followed that same guideline for what is and isn’t kept hidden about the Wayne Keith system (WK for short). Anything you can see, is free. External systems like cooling tubes etc, are not specific to Wayne’s systems, even though he’s done a better job designing them than previous builders. But without the special hearth or “firetube” system you haven’t got a WK gasifier.
I think I can speak for both myself and Wayne here. We don’t consider the gasifier design intellectual property. Nor is it patented. The point of keeping it hidden and pay-for-access is to help support Wayne and myself, and this website. People buy in looking for the “secret sauce”, and the serious ones tend to stay as members of the community.
We printed a book too, because people like books. The website has way more information, it’s more up-to-date, detailed, and interactive (it’s hard to ask a book questions). But if you’re going to charge $50, people want something to hold in their hand. Real handy to take to the garage or fab shop. It’s a good book, we put about a year of effort into writing it. A second edition is probably overdue, but there’s no budget for that.
Do I think the cat is out of the bag? Probably. Somewhere, someone has re-posted our videos, digitized our book, and probably pirate-shared the whole thing. But they can’t steal the community of users, access to a community of actual DOers. That’s our true value as a website, the 150+ on call problem-solving thinkers, who can help you with your project. And, ironically, most of this is available for free. People receive help all the time on the public side, we only restrict discussions of Wayne’s gasifier internals.
Now, we have a lot of people like @Bobmac building new systems, improving designs, and keeping the process going. Is it still a “Wayne Keith” gasifier? Do we own all the improvements “you” made?
It’s the wrong way to look at it. You own your design. We’re not charging people for your improvements, just to have a look at Wayne’s internals. So, if you expose the WK internals, or your improved iteration of those internals, we keep that discussion on the Premium side. If you’re building a shiny cooling rack, or a new hopper design, that’s fine to show off publicly. Again, nobody’s going to take your external systems and wind up with a true WK gasifier, they need the hearth design.
If there’s enough interest, we could open things up completely. We just have to figure out how to pay for the site, perhaps donations, etc. The system as-is, does pay the light bill.
========================
The VAT tax implemented in 2015 is here:
Basically we cannot have a customer in the EU without crippling requirements for filing taxes in those countries. Our market there has (until recently) been pretty small, so I just excluded it.
What I usually tell EU folks… get someone stateside to pay for it, we’ll mail your book direct to you if you like - but it has to be a gift. You cannot be our customer.
It’s been a few years, and we do have some folks there now. I should revisit the situation and see if there’s a better solution.
@d100f this only affects EU, we’re glad to sell anywhere else including Australia. Order here.
6 Likes
Chris,
Оh yes, piracy is bad … The bad thing is that it does not take into account mental work and pursues the goal of profit on the author’s work. In my country, this is very common, and I really do not like it. I am familiar with the problem of piracy! I recently posted a drawing of my gasifier (it has no dimensions) and today there is already a pirated version of the internal design …
though it has errors …
6 Likes
Thank you Chris for your administrator comments and actions, and unseen hard work you do for us all.
Thank you Wayne for your vision of DOW and all of hard work you have done and making it happen, and all the members who caught on to the DOW vision and have produce actual working gasification creations with their own hands from this wonderful DOW site. We are a team group, helping one another in gasification and other topics. We have become a family that has reached out into all corners of the world and languages through the web and the DOW site. Congratulations to us all in keeping this vision going.
Bob
7 Likes
Thanks Mr. Bob for the kind words and for all that you do.
Because of folks like you from the west coast and all across the US and east coast , Canada , Mexico , South America , Australia ,The Netherlands, EU, Ukraine, USSR, Thailand, India , South Africa and many others we can say the sun is always shining on the DOW community 
7 Likes
I think it is really cool to have “family” all over the world, and to be able to share ideas so easily.
Regarding the premium vs public, I feel like some of my innovations im willing to share with our little family, but dont neccesarily want to give away to just anybody. I like having the choice of where to post it.
WOW! Wayne, “The Sun Never Sets On DOW”
Has this site gone beyond even your DREAMS?
Bob
2 Likes
The sun is shining here Downunder right now for sure
3 Likes
Thanks a bunch Dave
Rainy , cold and wet here but you have the DOW covered with your sun shine 
1 Like
Don’t worry this is Melbourne Australia we have 4 seasons in one day so i am sure we will get your weather at some point today Wayne . 
1 Like
I was urged to buy the book and get the secret sauce years ago. Mr. Keith has always been polite, helpful, and inspiring. I have always found that my gas producers could be made to work. I got busy with other things and just never bought the book, nor visited the site. For 20 years I have lived off grid in various forms. I have been able to do so because of the readily available information on the internet. I have been a member of the battery desulfator group. I joined biodiesel infopop. I was a member of the Yahoo woodgas group, also Yahoo stationary steam engine group, and an induction generator group. I joined otherpower/ fieldlines, and Microgen/somrad.
These were all free to join. Otherpower and Microgen are still around…the rest are gone!!!
The years of information I aquired and shared on those sites is gone…like a mouldy Lindsey publication about Dave Gingery. Gone! An example…there was a guy who added baking soda to barrels of raw vegetable oil to preneutralize the fatty acids…but how he did it and in what proportion? We will never know now, unless somebody reexperiments and figures it out again.
Soooo, I say charge for the premium membership, pay the bills, make it worth your time so nobody feels like quitting. Keep the allure of the mystery. It’s not about the damn gasproducers, there hasn’t really been any secrets since 1860. If the idea of a secret keeps this site viable then that’s great… because the real secret is in the ART of making gas. The knowledge the people have on this site is priceless. This knowledge is available instantly, because we are all drawn here together. There in lies the true value.
I say do whatever it takes to keep this group together.
Dualfuel
Bruce Jackson
7 Likes
I have stayed quiet on this topic because I will freely admit I haven’t gotten around to building a gasifer yet and might not ever if batteries become cost effective. My background is such that converting my equipment to electric seems much easier to me.
But I do agree 100% with your comment. I choose to join the site a while back because I was curious about how a modern engine with all the sensors could be made to run on an alternative fuel. After seeing what the group here is like I felt it was one of the very few things I would gladly donate money to support.
So all I will say is things being behind the small onetime paywall here doesn’t bother me at all and not because I have access but because I think the value far exceeds the one time payment.
I am glad to see there is a work around for the people who have issues joining based on country of origin.
Anyway that is all I really have for thoughts on the topic.
7 Likes
I’ve been thinking about the electric cars, trucks. To me the perfect scenario is charge your electric vehicle with wood gas fueled generator.
3 Likes
I dont disagree at all. I have a PTO generator because in the future I can power it with anything. If I get an electric tractor it might be inefficient but I can use the pto generator to move electricity from that battery bank to other sources or my pipe dream is to convert one tractor of mine to electric keep my pasquali as diesel and convert my D17 to be dual fuel and run on a gasifer it has enough excess capacity I could easily run that generator off wood even with massive power losses. But at the moment I am crazy busy and struggling to find time to just keep up with everything.
I am once again back to a just in time wood shed for 2020… incase anyone is wondering that system doesn’t work well hard to find enough dry wood to fill it after you start the heating season.
4 Likes
I know what your saying, I started messing with wood gas late 70’s early 80’s but running a full time farm , having a full time job, kids, fire wood etc. time was limited. Looking back should have taken the time for wood gas, would have saved 10’s of thousands of dollars over the passed 40 years.
7 Likes
Al my woodstove has heated my house for a little over 20 years.It payed for a pickup and car that were two years old when I bought them. Love my wood heat.Propane was just to expensive.
3 Likes