Thanks Wayne, I’ll have to go check that out
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Welcome to the DOW KennethZ.
I’m linking this back up to your intro post so other reading now will realize your rural location (climate), that you do have “woods”.
Later down you say your own well, and assume septic system.
I have caught up reading your answering post to hear your work would be suppling the 2x4 kiln dried pine cutoffs.
You say your end project goal is an electrical generator, " . . to power my home so I can be energy independent."
A couple of your homes current energy category usages questions please:
How do you heat this home? With wood? Does you family expect hot weather air-conditioning?
How do you make your domestic hot water? What is your cooking heat source? Cloths dring heat in the winter?
The reason I ask these is some of us are using wood to power these needs. Unusually directly by stoves/furnaces direct burning of the wood. Not by wood to gas → fuel gas to electricity → then to electric heating. Too many steps. Each step requiring complications. Each step eating 10-30% of the energy efficiency. Real easy to stack-up 10% losses bury yourself.
Now on the wood to electricity, not make heat needs; it has become relatively easy to set up a 4-6 hour batch producing system fueled by dimensional wood cut offs. Softwoods or hardwoods.
Ben Petersons “Woodgas Builders Bible” was specifically written for this. His years experiences makes him to recommend engines of at least 3 cylinders and 500-1000cc. With very durable electric starting. And he does promote and personally use PV solar, and a battery bank as first up. Then his woodgas batch system is supplemental suppling and like for 240VAC boosting that.
Now taking those conifer cut-offs and fuel chipping them with the hope for an automated self-feeding system that can and has been done too.
Lots and lots of need extra energy input steps and chip feeding augers; motors power supplies; and controls/timer systems to make that Auto-work.
Not on the DOW but I can point out youtube links to those insisting on this way.
You Ohio woods makes for hardwoods, yes? Hardwoods makes the best wood charcoal fuels.
For your current small 4375/3500 electrical generator (very hard to raw wood, woodgas systems this small) do consider making up a much simpler charcoal gasification system for it.
Get your feet wet on gasification powering.
The best way to bring you wife around is to show results, as quickly as possible and least intimidating.
Info on these is here on the DOW looking under the upper tool bar stacked papers Icon for Small engines charcoal gasification.
Regards
Steve unruh
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Man Steve you raised a lot of good questions, I’ll try to answer them all. Currently we heat with propane, same goes for water heater and cooking stove. I do plan on installing a wood stove to heat the house and i was going to run my hot water set up with the wood stove. I would be interested in trying to figure out how to run a propane stove off of wood gas. Eventually I’d like to have a truck set up to run on wood gas too, but one thing at a time. Along with your question about the auger system, i probably won’t put it on a timer system because I’d want to keep an eye on the system when it’s running, I’d try to have it set up on manual switches to feed into the power house and feed it myself. One thing someone brought up was using wood chunks instead of wood chips, so i need to do more research on what works best
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Good answers, all K.Z.
Here is a system
The shiny SS components (mine) that has chunked and screened chipped fueled 5500 watt single cylinder through three cylinder water-cooled 1000cc electrical generators.
A downdraft; with the woodfuel chunks self-settling on downwards.
Sized for 2-6 hours batch cycles.
Use the magnifying glass Icon tool above to search by builders name; system types; key words, etc.
Another system size chunk wood system for an electrical generator: Dean Lasko’s
You want to shorten the reading down use the end of his first post tool “Read As a Summery”
S.U.
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You need to know your maximum instantaneous power draw as well as your kwh usage. For instance, well pumps can draw some decent amps for startup. You need to have enough power to start that up.
LOOK AT THE IRA tax rebates, they include battery storage, electrical panel stuff, etc. GM is going to have a product for battery storage that couples with it’s trucks and back to the home/grid. I am optimistic about GM because they said there were sitting close to the $100/kwh for a pack cost which means 10k may get 60 kwh for a home system.
Don’t exclude solar, that stuff actually pays for itself in 7-12 years or much less if you install it yourself and it is very little work compared to woodgas. I personally, would use woodgas to fill in the gaps, because it takes time but recharging the battery pack to keep going on a rainy couple of days is a good idea. UNLESS you can’t afford solar, that is understandable, and acceptable, but I think it is something worth planning for. Life happens. You get busy, your supply dries up, etc.
You can also couple the gasifier with energy recovery to heat water and probably your house, which in your case in a separate shed (which is smart for insurance), it is more like an outdoor boiler, you run the gasifier and take the waste exhaust heat and heat water/antifreeze then you can use a hot water heating system for the house, and you might be able to use that in a heat exchanger for hot water as well.
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Welcome Kenneth. Probably the cheapest storage for your wood chunks would be making some cylinders of of 5 foot high 6X6 reinforcing mesh. I used to pay $89 for a 150 foot roll. Just checked on Home Depot. $239. I nearly swallowed my tongue. Still, for quick and simple, you just cut off 14foot lengths, roll it into a circle and tie the ends. You can get 11 four foot in diameter storage bins out of one roll. I have done the same for composting leaves. Line them up and cover them with plastic tarps.
For the domestic hot water from a wood stove, you will have to be set up so that for every foot of horizontal distance between the stove and the tank you will need a certain amount of height for it to thermosyphon. I don’t have the measurements handy but I"m sure you can look it up on-line. If you expect your water supply to be similar to the one you have now, you are going to have to Get enough batteries to power a 230V inverter so that the pump can cycle to the pressure tank with every usage drop. None of it is automated and it all requires a certain amount of user attention. Either that or build a insulated, elevated water storage tank to gravity feed your fixtures. Sometimes there is a fine line between being committed to a project and just being committed.
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Hey KenZ., Good raining wet cold morning to you.
So far of the respondents here you have at least three who are and do house and shops heat with wood. And two very dedicated woodgas vehicle drivers.
Having to annually wood feed these Beasts we think in terms of chainsaws, woodsplitters, wood chunker makers and already handling multiple cords (128 cubic feet - 2400 to 3500 pounds per cord) of woodfuel already.
45% wet by weight wood live cut or up to 60% moisture on ground laying wood is our common.
Wood stoves or wood furnaces only work efficiently on less that 20% by weight moisture woods.
Raw wood gasifiers are even more picky only working well with 15% and better less that 10% moisture woods.
So . . . too wet of wood is a common beginning for us. True dried down wood is hard worked for . . . then cherished treasured and closely held.
Your kiln dried cut-offs is pure wood gold to us. Get it dry. Keep it dry!
So to be truly energy independent a fellow has to figure on suppling out three different categories:
Transportation energies
Space and water heating
All other power needs like lighting, refrigeration’s, communications/entertainments . . .air-conditioning.
Using wood for ALL of these? . . . nobody I know of yet who is still married and not a Mr Solo hermit’ing does this.
Two out of three now done by some.
Still . . .enduring Wife accusations of having a wood mistress down in the basement, out in the shop. Loving you welders and metals more than her and the kids. Caring more for your “hobbies”, and Internet hobby-buds than for “real” people.
They thought Noah was nuts too.
Win her over one step at a time, man. Keep her and the kids warm. Keep the lights on next, and PV does count for this.
A screaming 3600 RPM generator regardless of its fuel source; hour, after hour leads to divorces. Proven.
Regards
Steve Unruh
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Hi Steve, can you reveal more details about your gasifier, looks like a great product…, maybe a cross section sketch?
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Regardless how you get your power, for off grid there is absolutely no way around getting a battery bank and inverter. Start there, get that set up first. Get an inverter that can run your well pump on battery power alone. Then your losses with the generator running on any woodgas is irrelevant.
You dont need solar but should look at an inverter that is solar compatible or look at the inverters that have built in charge controllers for both solar and generator inputs.
Add the solar later, the more you add the less work you have to do to produce fuel for the gasifier to charge the system.
A practical system most days you wont need to run the generator. Those are the days you make fuel. Regardless of type of gasifier it will be work. However the less you have to produce fuel the more practical going off grid with any system will be.
Running a gasifier for primary power without a battery bank and inverter will be the last thing you want to do.
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A few other points. The typical off the shelf generator will have a (typical) 1500 to 2000 hour run life. It dont matter what brand it is. 3 hours a day is 1000 hours per year. So your genny could last 3 to 4 years if you very religiously change the oil. Get tools and rebuild parts and it will last you a lifetime.
So one big reason you want that battery bank so it can manage your power far more efficiently than letting your rattle box idle away all day, eating away your fuel while it slowly destroys itself over time.
The power limitations, the inverter eliminates that issue. Our inverter outputs battery power plus the generator input. We run a 220 volt welder and our CNC plasma cutter on our system and it can all run on battery power alone.
This system is new for us, in fact I have not even ran it on woodgas yet. However on gasoline with the charger set up to parameters we know our genny can output on woodgas. It can charge our 10 kW/hour battery in three hours. This will run my RV for two days! Thats if we dont run the shop. When we run the shop we run one or two of our 9500 units. This is gives us plenty of power to run our operation while it tops off our battery bank daily. The system can then go on standby after hours and run the RV over night. The next day there is hardly a dent in power consumption from the battery.
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Matt, you care to share what your running for batteries and make model inverter?
Thanks
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Dont go down the battery rabbit hole. There is inly one battery type on current market for off grid and that is Lithium Iron Phosphate (LifePo4). In the end no matter what path you take you will end up here with LifePo4. Save your money and just get them in the first place. They are cheaper not more expensive as they will outlast any other technology by years to decades. They are well over 90% efficient, they are not subject to thermo run away either. That would be Lithium Ion chemistry not lithium iron phosphate.
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Perfect…thanks. thats the kind of advice/ been there done that guidence i was looking for.
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Probably should not have posted. As soon as I did, our latest battery through a fault and is now not functioning.
Im now awaiting email response from Signature Solar. 
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At least they have a warrenty for replacement, right?
Bob
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They better! I just spent over $5k on this system. They have a five year warranty with a year to get your products registered.
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Hmm. I was going to just PM you the info Tone to not distract from Kenneth’s information search. But now two others asking wanting to know now too.
My pictured-up Victory model hearth and hopper were the first of this series. An experimental model type Ben Peterson built up ~2010. Was much modified, changed, evolved over two years into the later production model units. It had been built of set aside scrapped out previous larger Offgrider and other early all-SS model units.
Mines five jets. Production were 20% enlarged with six jets. Mine has the hearth to hopper flange just above the jets line. Production this was moved up 100mm to not then need expensive die cut super heat resistant flange seals. Mine has multiple testing ports and input-output ports piercing through the double walled insulation jackets. Production units not having these heat loss energy bleeds; and potential temperature differential spanning, later welds cracking air leaks.
My on DOW picture are buried now back on previous pre-DruPal format topics. Or on my earlier Apple and Google/Chrome computers failed transferred to memory sticks.
For the actual dimensions and relative picture see on Dean Lasko’s topic:
Internally dimension out of BenP’s later evolved Woodgas Builders Bible book.
One hour searching back on the DOW topic for my old pre-2015 pictures I found these pictures;
A Hottwatt model ~1/3 the size and maximum callability of a standard sized Victory model hearth system. (Ha! Lots in this this picture. See the V-shaped swirl flare? My remote mounted mixer experiment? See its engine exhaust air preheating so the air temp matched the cooled woodgas Temp. And more. My own persoanla Shop-vac electrical generator system loaders. My own back-pac firing up quick NOW! torch set.)
Then the same mini-unit later sold and owned now by Paul O’Brien:
Ha! Ask him for internals pictures.
I am not “perrrr-fect” system chaser. Not in gasifiers, cars, chainsaws, or women. I am very much a can make work kinnda’ guy.
Now for bicycles, hand wood splitting mauls and wedges: I am very very picky. A Perfectionist chaser. Details there makes for significant performance changes.
Steve unruh
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I guess they were just out of balance. How they can detect that without a com cable I dont know. But shut off the battery and let the other one drain down seems to have resolved the issue for now. I do know that it can take some time before the batteries will become fully balanced.
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I was just going to ask for that info but the other guy beat me to it, thank you for all the info. I will definitely be using it all in my project. I will also make sure to document everything so i can share my progress with everyone, hopefully i dont look over anything and if i do, definitely point it out. I really appreciate the support and knowledge I’m getting here from everyone!
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You may have already seen this Matt. I know I posted it a while back when I first saw it. You will probably even know what they are talking about.
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