Ok let’s take a different tack. Approach from the other end.
This is not “Johnson” grass. We call it “Tala-eib”. Saw grass.
Livestock won’t eat it. Can’t use it for bedding. Once it gets a foot hold it is almost impossible to kill off. You have to dig out and burn the root ball’s.
You do not run through this stuff. You will regret it. If you have to move through a patch … you do it slowly and gingerly. It will cut you to high heaven. And the injuries ITCH!.
So that tells me that there is a lot of Lignin/Celluose in there. And some sort of funky organic juice.
This is what I’ve got to work with. This is just a few days worth of accumulation.
We mow this with a standard 5’ tractor mower. A bush hog with no rear wheel. I’ve modified the deck to have an input “hopper”. This lets us shred to a fairly small length.
Right now we mow, gather, shred, and compost it. But aerobic composting is a SLOW process. Processing for this uses a lot of dino juice.
I could anaerobically compost it in a batch digester, but that is really labor intensive, and nasally offensive.
However at the end of that process I would be left with an empty husk of the Tala-eib which would be ideal for pryolysis.
I think it actually may be easier to make sawdust pellets and process them in a TLUD. Then you wouldn’t need to worry about binders or charcoal slurry clogging your pellet mill.
@KristijanL has played around with carbonized wood pellets. I remember him writing about a friend buying bags of pellets for him and he carbonized them.
Señor Ramos and Bruce made this TLUD. Sort of boosted with a blower for smaller sized feed stock.
I like this method because the air can only come in from one spot, and you can cap it off with a pipe. No more worrying about sand not sealing the TLUD well enough.
Mark, very real hand on work! I gave Dutch John a bag of pellets once. He used it in his Tiny lawnmower. Condens makes the pellets fall apart and block. I must say it was a thiny gasifier and very critical. The reason I abandoned pellets is the energy balance and time. You noticed the high loads too, on the die. If you manage to make pellets they are a super fuel. But the making comes with a price, time and parts. I sold everything last year. Managed to keep the house warm for a few winters, but now looking for another hobby. KISS is always the best path, dont let the pellets fool you. I build a drizzler and had it eat pellets. Worked super, but pellets I have to buy. So it has to eat other fuel. Looking for Laimet too, but first finish the Drizzler.
Another thing, GG documented his charcoal excellent. Everytime I fall back on his tips. The only thing I didnt try yet is the pyramid kiln. That looks good too.
So, if you are able to make pellets, they are superfuel. But the making aint easy. I have a pdf somewhere that I used for making them. Send me a pm if your interested. I have to dig in the dark.
Hi Mark , if you read through Thrive off grid post i think on there Matt R showed one of his new builds was a indoor pellet heater that also made charcoal pellets as a side line to run his generator .
At the moment we are coming up to winter and just to help the firewood along we bought 14 bulk bags of wood briquets very cheap between us to mix in with our not really dry enough fire wood , these briquets are made by compressing sawdust from kiln dried oak boards that are cut into parquet flooring tiles , they measure roughly 3 inches high by the same diameter , they make amazing charcoal when burnt that still sort of hold together and would for sure work in a downdraft gasifier
I will try posting some photo’s of the briquets once they come out of the fire to show you how they hold up , this is what they look like before .
I don’t think that one was pellets. He tried to made charcoal out of pellets a long time ago, but I think that attempt is prior to the thrive thread. I think they fell apart, since the binder chars as well. I think I pointed you to the product page for his charmaker.
Commericial briquettes use clay and some of the tar as a binder which is why they don’t work in gasifiers. However, I wonder if you had some ‘low temp’ char if it would have enough tar in it to bind it without anything else. IE not the high temp nice clinky ringing char.
Looking good Mark! Really good job and thanks I helped you some. Not a hard job making pellets?
And nice looking briquettes Dave, from a 7,5 or 11 kW press in that size. Making briquettes is easier because it can de a discontinuous process, pellets never. Warm and cool the die, feeding etc.
Btw, I spend one evening servicing a briquette press this week. A good brand and a good precise client. So came home 19.00 from work and left 19.30 the help the man. Only because I knew it cant be much wrong with it. And it was, but lost another evening after a long day. Only a few people are allowed to buy a press from me. No press, no problems.
This time I spent 30 minutes setting up. Staged a bucket of soapy water, brushes, and a drill before hand. I adjusted the rollers by shimming up off the flat die with a slice out of a soda can. About 1/10th of a mm, (sorry I forget what that is called).
Dumped Tala-eib charcoal into the hopper a liter at a time. I didn’t let the die get empty. Kept re-feeding the output until it got up to temperature.
Then it took off and started spitting out pellets. They were long-ish pellets because I removed the cutter from the inside. It was catching material and clogging the system.
Whats in the pictures is 4kg, (200L drum full), of raw saw-grass charcoal. That translated into just less than 1/2 of a 20L bucket of pellets.
I could have kept running but I decided to quit and evaluate before I used up all of my source material.
I did not bother weighing it because they are still full of water. I’ll process the last two drums and get FT the measurement he wanted.
Took about 30 minutes to process, and another 30 minutes to clean up.
There are a few companies around our location making these briquets some sell them by the plastic bag full of 20kgs for $5 a lot of others try for 10kg bags for $10 ! luckily we bought 14 bulk bags around 600kg’s each for $22 each , fingers crossed we can get more if not we do have a large hydraulic pack and might be able to find someone to make a sort of home made press , these are so dense and heavy they must have been made by a real good press as you can tell by the markings on the side where they have heated up under pressure , no binding material at all involved in these .
Dave
I don’t have any use for fuel like that but I still think it would be an easy thing to set up my log splitter as a extrusion press. Picture, for example, a three inch pipe mounted to the splitter bed. At the one end cut the pipe with a slot to feed raw material. at the other a welded cap with perhaps a two inch opening and a split in half two inch pipe extended from the cap. The raw material is put into the the slot and the pipe is filled and then every stroke of the ram feeds briquettes out the two inch hole supported by the half two inch pipe with some kind of spring mounted knife to cut them to length.
